Civil Eats

I was having a conversation with a friend the other night, debating the merits of grassfed beef. We talked over the specifics of feeding and finishing (whether the animal eats grain or grass for the last few months of its life), and the superior quality and flavor of meat produced from a grassfed a diet. But this wasn’t the first time I had discussed this information.

Grassfed beef is a “new” product in the marketplace and as with any new product, there is a great degree of variability. While the notion of bovines eating grass is as old as, well, bovines themselves, grassfed and grass-finished meat products are signposts of an emerging sustainable market. Read More

Last Friday, an op-ed hit the pages of the New York Times written by James McWilliams (“Free Range Trichinosis”) purporting that free-range pork was more likely to be contaminated with the deadly parasite trichonosis than its industrially sardined and antibiotic-overdosed cousin. The writer chose to take this information from a single study funded by the National Pork Board, a lobbying group for industrial pork operations, and neglected to mention that the the two free-range pigs (out of 600) had tested positive for antibodies of trichinosis, not specifically the disease itself. Read More

It is necessary to question our movement. Without a cold, hard look at the snags in implementing a sustainable food system, someone ill-informed will crawl out of the woodwork clinging to their credentials and poke holes in our arguments, whether with valid points or not, possibly shilling for Big Ag or just looking to market themselves as a contrarian.

Today, a free-range dissenter ended up in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, seemingly to defend factory farmed pork. Read More