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.

Fifty years ago, most of the beef at the butcher counter was grassfed and maybe grain-finished for a very short period of time. Since then, we have moved to a feedlot-based system for preparing beef cattle for market, which means large-scale producers and processors have had fifty years to perfect their product, and consumers expect consistent results.

As anyone who has ever purchased organic produce or a CSA box knows, more natural production systems tend to mean a greater degree of variability in the final product. As grassfed producers improve upon their production systems, their beef will eventually become more consistent. Consumers will count on enjoying rich flavor without worrying about their meat being tough or dry.

Conventional Cattle Feeding

As we seek to be more informed consumers, how do these feeding and finishing techniques affect us?  How are grassfed cattle different from conventional cattle?  What do labels like “organic,” “natural,” and “free-range” mean?

To begin with, almost all beef cattle in the U.S. start their lives on grass. At about 7-9 months old, the almost 10.9 million cattle in the conventional production system move to a feedlot where they are “grain-finished” for about 6-8 months before slaughter. Most of these feedlots are in the central part of the country, with 71 percent of feedlot cattle residing in Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Texas. At the feedlot, cattle diet consists of grains (like corn) and some roughage (either corn silage or hay). Feed by-products, from the production of food or industrial products, are also part of the diet at many of these feedlots. The by-products category includes things like leftover distiller’s grains from an ethanol plant or brewery, soybean meal from soybean oil production, and even defective cookies and chips from food production.

Grass-fed and Grass-finished Cattle

Grassfed and grass-finished cattle, on the other hand, spend their entire life consuming grass. Their diets and rotational grazing patterns contribute to low caloric intake and high activity, which means that grassfed cattle take a longer time to reach their slaughter weight. They are typically about 18-24 months when slaughtered.

Age is an important criteria in the taste and texture of beef. If the cow is too young, its meat will lack flavor. If the cow is too old, its meat can be tough. Certain breeds of cattle are more suited to grassfed production systems. Forgotten breeds, like Shorthorns and American Devon, fell out of favor during the rise of the feedlot but are now making a comeback.

Marketing Labels

Beef producers who feed their cattle only grass or hay are approved by the USDA to label their meat “grassfed.” This certification is limited in scope: it does not stipulate where hay is fed (it could be in a feedlot) or whether antibiotic or hormone restrictions apply. The Cornucopia Institute has proposed a three-tier label system that would tell consumers how and where the animal was fed and finished. You can view their position paper here.  In addition to the USDA, the American Grassfed Association (AGA) allows AGA members to place the “AGA Grassfed” seal of approval on packages containing beef raised in an unconfined environment on 100 percent grass or hay, without the use of growth hormones.

“Organic” beef shares elements of both the grassfed and the grain-finished model. In order to bear the “USDA Organic” seal, organic cattle must be raised on organic certified pasture and fed organic certified hay or organic certified feed. No antibiotics or growth hormones can be administered to the animal.

Just as the picture of a happy cow in a red barn on your milk carton doesn’t mean that your 2 percent came from such a setting, “natural” and “free-range” labels are purely marketing terms and have no standards or certification requirements. Per the USDA, all fresh meat must be “natural” (free of artificial flavorings, colors or preservatives) regardless of how it was raised or what it was fed.  As far as “free range” is concerned, per USDA standards, this term only applies to poultry (whether the animal had access to the outdoors or not) and is meaningless on a package of beef.

With so many labels, what’s a consumer to do? Ask questions. Ask LOTS of questions. Talk to your rancher, butcher or waiter, and find out what the animal was fed, where it lived, and how old it was when it was slaughtered.  If you are interested in how the animal was treated, find out if the product is American Humane Certified, Certified Humane Raised and Handled or Animal Welfare Approved.

Lastly, pay attention to taste. Be mindful of the quality of food you are putting into your body.

Photo: Mark Baldwin

The food policy wonks leaped, quickly exposing the holes in McWilliams’ alarmist piece.  (My two-cents is here) It seemed that leaving out the important details above left the author without a leg to stand on, yet The Atlantic was quick to give McWilliams a platform. He weakly defended his position, calling the National Pork Board funding matter a distraction, and half-heartedly admitted that he may have been wrong to leave out the details of seropositivity.  His limp-wristed retort included an admission that he was in fact a sustainable food supporter, playing devil’s advocate.

The only problem is, as McWilliams admits, this was a piece for lay readers, who without further information, could stop buying sustainable pork after reading such claims (and they won’t just be going vegetarian, as the author might have hoped).

Its worth congratulating the food writers who gave a retort to this piece, and it speaks to an important fact McWilliams seems not to have gotten: established sustainable food advocates and newbies alike can handle transparency.

This got me thinking about what a more considered and productive devil’s advocate would have done in this situation.  Instead of seeking only to shock the public with misleading information, a more nuanced critique (I’ll admit, it might not have made it into the Times, but thats another matter) could have presented the possibility that free-range pork is not all it’s cracked up to be, and balanced out this one-sided slam.

The root of the story, and the one I’d like to understand better, is the role of antibiotics in pig husbandry, and by extension, whether antibiotics are necessary or positive in any way.  An honest contrarian would have also disclosed the role of other serious pathogens like MRSA, which have been found in industrial pig operations where antibiotics are being used liberally to fatten up pigs. This would have served to give a better picture of hog confinement in general –  otherwise, McWilliams is only hurting the cause he claims to care about.

A well-rounded critique of the work sustainable food advocates are doing in all arenas is valid. However in misleading the general public, and laying the contrarianism on thick, McWilliams didn’t start a conversation, but instead just threw in a rotten tomato.

The issues our food system faces are very serious, and one thing we can safely say is that industrial-scale animal operations have seen their day in the sun. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the treatment of the animals they eat, and from a food safety perspective, we can pretty confidently say that industrially raised meat is less safe. (Fortunately, there is more than one study to back this up). That being said, we have a lot of work to do, and everything we do will not be perfect.

Unfortunately, it seems that McWilliams has fallen prey to the wiles of marketing.  In seeking to market himself as a contrarian, he has even penned a book called Just Food: How Locavores are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.  Now honestly, did he pick out that title to scare the trichonosis out of people, or what? If he were a true sustainable food advocate, perhaps he would have written a book titled, A Closer Look at Locavorism: What’s Not Working and How We Can Fix It.  I might have been more excited to read that.

Today, a free-range dissenter ended up in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, seemingly to defend factory farmed pork. (One wonders if the NYT was attempting to temper the excellent coverage Nicholas Kristof has had of pigs and MRSA of late)

John McWilliams’ argument — that the exposure to disease which brought pigs into the factory farm setting in the first place still exists, and therefore in re-implementing free-range we are no better than we started — has little to base in reality. This is a classic shill, as the study that he cites (Foodborne Pathogens and Disease) was funded by the National Pork Board, a group that defends the interests of industrial pig operations.  If the New York Times had bothered to fact-check, they might have seen that the parasite trichinia found “present” in two of the free-range pigs was actually only antibodies (The Center for a Livable Future goes into more detail), which leaves us uncertain whether they carried the disease or not, and renders McWilliams’ argument moot.

Aside from this, though, McWilliams is missing the point. Locavorism isn’t about free-range, its about getting closer to the source; shaking the hand that feeds you and thereby knowing, even seeing, where your food comes from.  The reason there are no worthy studies cited in McWilliams’ piece is because grass-fed farmers often run size-manageable and responsible operations.  They don’t cut corners precisely because they are held accountable by the community.

I’m thinking about two things here. First, where are the media in this story? And second, can these contrarian attacks help us build the movement, or are they purely a distraction?

In this instance it seems that the New York Times, in its desperation to sell papers, fell into the trap of story building over truth-finding. On Grist, Tom Laskawy wrote a great piece on the counter-productive and even dangerous world of FUD — the corporate tactic of creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the consumer so as to sell the status quo. As Laskawy points out, this Times op-ed falls right in line with the tenets of FUD — a result of the Times’ use of false equivalency. In other words, in the interest of creating drama, many newspapers of note have failed to vet stories properly — creating the false appearance that the arguments on both sides of a story are equal and leaving it up to the reader to make sense of it.  What we get then is always a confused and nihilist public, uttering things like, “but didn’t you see that piece in the New York Times, free-range is not necessarily better.” The question is, then, how do we reclaim the media, and disseminate real information to consumers?

I think its a tough one to answer.  What I do know, is that at the farmer’s market, the answer lies with the beginning and the end of the food chain. Government needs to step in and lead on food issues with a better food policy agenda.  We’ve seen the beginnings of such a plan, with the White House garden and Kathleen Merrigan’s appointment as Under-Secretary of Agriculture — but these could end up being distractions. We must focus on the decentralization and diversification of the food system — starting with rethinking farm subsidies and hospital, school and military procurement — and insist that scientists get public sector funding and freedom to do real scientific studies (For the hell of it, lets start by really testing GMOs). The media also needs to press the reset button (Maybe this will happen on its own with the closure of so many papers) — this is our press, for goodness sake, not the voice box of industry. In the meantime, every eater has a responsibility to ask where their food is coming from, and when confused, to dig deeper and ask more questions.  These changes at the top and bottom are interdependent, and will not occur unless simultaneous.

Finally, I do think it is possible for opposition to make us stronger, and more able to articulate what it is we stand for and why.  In his recent book, Getting Green Done, Auden Schendler writes that we must take a long hard look at the bumpy road to implementing sustainability — and learn from our mistakes — something that at times we are afraid to do for fear of backlash. In the food movement, for example, we’d ignored food justice issues for a long time.  But through criticism that our movement was elitist, and that better food was only for the rich, we have begun to unravel this thinking and work towards building a more inclusive and fair food system.

Of course, we don’t always get a fair debate with our detractors. But it is still my hope that we can emerge from these arguments a more steadfast movement.