We have the meats.
"It's not the cow, it's the how."
I’m going to interrupt the November Grateful Tradition and the usual veggie fan-fare to vent a bit. Or process a bit? Or share. Whatever you like to call it, so be it. About raising and eating beef. Feel free to skip if you aren’t up for a winding road of what I learned today.
I was having a lovely chat with an old friend yesterday. Lovely as in - direct, kind, vulnerable, curious, loving, reflective, self-critical, all the things that go deep in a safe and growing way. It talked about the fear-mongering by the media on all sides. It talked about the depths of disgusting that we were grateful to be insulated from on a daily basis.
And today, unrelated to much of the processing fodder going around right now, I stumbled upon a new-to-me fact. (And I fact-checked it.)
Industrial beef production in the US does not only allow, but on some ag extension websites seems to encourage, the feeding of poultry litter to beef cattle.
In non-farmy words: Grocery store beef that isn’t organic might be from a cow raised on lots of chemicals, which you knew, but also might very well have eaten a whole shit-ton of industrially-farmed chicken poop. Double whammy on the chemicals (poultry corporations feed poultry chemicals to poultry + beef corporations feed beef chemicals to beef… + feed corporations (fed to all animals in CAFOs) use grain chemicals for grain…so triple whammy?)
That’s a triple-whammy on chemicals this cow is trying to process before you even get into other ailments and calamities and such that happen in industrial meat production.
But Alli…don’t you eat meat?
<insert record scratch>
I do. A lot, compared to most people probably. We had a family chuckle a few days ago about one of many myths surrounding meat (red meat in particular) that it stayed in your digestive tract for 7 years. The joke was that if that were true, my 130 pounds (59 kg), would be way wrong and I would actually be the size of a cow myself.
But y’all. We budget and save, spend energy and focus on research and driving, and a lot of other things, many of which are privileges, in order to eat meat from animals that lived happy-animal lives and had one bad moment to end those lives.
And with my knew knowledge that meat in the grocery store is even worse than I previously knew, I’ll work my willpower muscles that much harder when I really want something convenient and think I’ll skip the quality of life, quality of input into our animal-bodies, quality of peace of mind - all of it. I’ll skip the convenience instead.
Links to first results I found when digging, don’t come at me with how any of these sites are bought - they’re all bought, y’all, and they love it when we argue with one another about inane garbage:
And if you do go reading yourself…be warned. Plastic pellets are also allowed as “bulk feed” for industrial beef cattle.
So, if you only have access to grocery store industrial beef, I’m agreeing with the vegans - go buy organic beans for your protein. Hopefully grown in this country only so you aren’t paying for the barges’ and trucks’ fuel to transport beans thousands of miles from seed warehouse to monocropped field and thousands more to transport from field to packing facility and tens of thousands of miles more to your grocery store distributor and a few hundred maybe more to your actual grocery store and another few miles in your car to your pantry.
And if you can’t pay attention to where the beans come from because you’re hungry and doing your best and there is a LOT going on, know this: - you are beautiful and doing great things and it’s hard and you’re still here. Some day in the future you will have one more “spoon” and can use it for one more thing that day and you will still be beautiful and doing great things and will still keep going.
But if you usually eat beef four times a week and take that same dollar amount to buy from your local pasture-raising-farmer, you’ll feel better in your gut, your heart, and your muscles and possibly actually get the same general nutrition. Denser nutrition in less volume is a real thing.
And now my rambly incongruous outpouring of WTF ends. If you made it this far, I’d give you a fist bump, but my laptop screen would not appreciate the attempt. (And there are no emojis on this platform that I’ve found.)