By Lynne Curry
When I started writing a cookbook on grass-fed beef more than two years ago, I never imagined I'd become a spokesperson for carnivorism. Nor did I expect "Pure Beef" to be published during a searing national debate over the ethics of meat eating kicked off by the New York Times in April and promulgated on the Huffington Post and by food writer Michael Ruhlman into the summer.
Naturally, my editor, my agent and my publicist each prodded me to join the fray and stake my claim. I quietly resisted. Admittedly, I was petrified by the vitriol in the opinions (and reader comments) expressed online, but I had a more deep-seated reason: I have long believed that eating is one of the most intimate choices we make in life. What we put into our bodies borders on the sacred, and to eat or not to eat meat is as personal and entrenched as religion.
When two advance reviewers called my book a "case for the responsible carnivore" and "conscience salving" for meat eaters, I could no longer hide behind my fears and philosophical beliefs. By publishing a book on beef I had entered, naively yet tacitly, into one of the great unwinnable debates of our times.
I could not bring myself to reiterate the facts and arguments that Joel Salatin, Nicolette Hahn Niman and others have so remarkably shared. Instead, I challenged myself to reframe the discussion, to find common ground on this issue. What I settled on was ice cream.
The bond between milk and beef
Ice cream -- that most joyful, universally adored and uncontroversial of foods. Throughout my years as a vegetarian, pescatarian and later flexitarian, I never questioned the place of ice cream in my diet. Ice cream has always seemed like a universal right. Who would suggest that everyone everywhere stop eating ice cream?
Only after researching my book did I understand how industrialized agriculture divorced the natural connection between milk and meat. In pre-World War II America, families kept a cow as a provider of both types of life-sustaining foods. Once the cow could not produce another calf and went dry, she was slaughtered to feed the family. Today, milk and meat hardly seem like they come from the same species moving as they do through two distinct food supply chains.
The milk churned into your favorite French vanilla, blackberry or salted caramel ice cream comes from more than 9 million cows on America's dairy farms. Each year each cow bears a calf, and roughly 4 million of them are male bull calves -- misfits of the industry. Nearly all of these Holstein, Jersey and other dairy cross-breeds are raised and finished in feedlots to become retail cuts of beef. Not that you'll ever see them labeled.
Once the mother cows' milk production drops -- conventionally within six to seven years of yields reaching nearly 20,000 pounds a year -- they, too, move into the beef supply. Dairies sell off spent but healthy cows to the commodity market. I learned that 17% of all ground beef sold comes from culled dairy cows, but this simple fact -- that milk cows become meat -- is treated like a dirty secret.
The meat of the debate
The point is that everyone who eats ice cream -- or butter, cheese, yogurt, or any other variety of dairy -- participates in beef production by the inescapable facts of nature. If you are concerned about animal welfare, ethical and ecological implications of how we make meat, what can you do?
First, stop condemning the meat itself. Beef, a nutrient-dense food best consumed in moderation, has become demonized largely because of the highly industrialized production system. Four corporations control 90% of a market whose efficiencies and massive scale maximize profits.
We now apprehend all the ways this model is unjust to animals and workers, detrimental to soils, waterways (and therefore public health thanks to antibiotic resistant diseases) and wildlife. The industry is dependent on cheap feed, fuels and fertilizers. Most people agree that it is unsustainable in more ways than one.
The great debate I wish we were having is not whether or not we should be eating meat, but how we should be producing it.
Second, support the alternative: humane and organic pasture-based production methods ranchers are practicing in every state in the country. These beef producers operate outside the commodity system to raise, process, market and distribute their beef on their own or in collectives for sale at farmers markets and grocers, through buying clubs and on the Internet.
The centralized beef production, processing and distributions systems built over the past 50 years do not accommodate renegades. On top of the financial risk, these independent ranchers struggle to find USDA-certified slaughtering facilities within reach that will accept low volumes so that they can legally retail their beef. (This is the principal reason their prices are higher.) They take the hard way out because they know that there is a better solution -- for their families and communities, their lands and animals, our health and environment.
The Environmental Working Group, the Animal Welfare Approved and the National Resources Defense Council are some of the organizations throwing their weight behind these ranchers through research, fact-based information and advocacy. They are seeking to change the how for the betterment of all.
Even if you never buy or eat a morsel of meat, you can support the work that these groups do to find real, sustainable and achievable solutions to our common -- and very personal -- need to eat. I, for one, am putting my trust in them. If you like ice cream, then you should, too.
Photo: Lynne Curry at a beef cattle ranch in Oregon. Credit: Anna M. Campbell
Zester Daily Soapbox contributor Lynne Curry is the author of "Pure Beef: An Essential Guide to Artisan Meat with Recipes for Every Cut" released in May. She lives with her family in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon.
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In a way I'm glad articles like this are educating people about what should be obvious, but it also makes me sad and embarrassed that this is an indication of how out of touch people are with their food.
I see a lot of comments advising people to read this book or watch this documentary, but I believe the most important thing you can really do is to visit a few local ranches, talk to the people who run them, and form your own opinions. Even better, start taking responsibility for providing yourself with some of your own food. Get some chickens, grow some veggies, a pot of herbs on the windowsill, whatever you can manage. Nothing will better teach you to appreciate what goes into producing food than learning what's involved firsthand.
Everything dies at some point and some deaths are absolutely easier than others.
Animals including humans can have there life ended without pain fear or distress. Whether the act is humane is an ethical conversation.
I can get milk from Strauss Family creamery locally.
My eggs are also local. Not pastured but at least the hens are not in cages.
As soon as I know my assignment and hours I'll be looking into a CSA for poultry, pork, fruits and vegetables.
I am doing my best to avoid CAFOs and large grocery chains. If I can, I'd like to keep my dollars out of the hands of those controlling 90% of the food supply.
http://news.change.org/stories/factory-farms-fail-to-corrupt-organic-dairy-rules
And you did read the comments, right?
"Stephanie,
I work for Straus Family Creamery, the very first certified organic dairy west of the Mississippi. We have a small dairy in West Marin with a herd density of one cow per two acres and our cows are on pasture an average of 240 days a year. Our founder, Albert Straus, pioneered organic dairy farming and has led the fight against GMO's and animal cloning.
During the public comment period for the just-issued pasture rule, Albert expressed concerns about one portion of the rule and suggested alternative ideas that he thought would make more sense. Now, we suddenly find ourselves being labeled a factory farm lobbying for weak standards.
Please come visit our dairy and see firsthand all of our sustainable, organic dairy farming practices.
Rich Martin
Vice President, Sales & Marketing
Straus Family Creamery"
watch. food. inc.
the fantasy of relaxed cows lazing about in the sunshine in a grassy field, munching on tall green fronds, is exactly that - a FANTASY. in fact they are crammed head to tail, are kept hoof-deep in feces, and kept in panic-mode for their time in "the factory". produce, produce, produce so we can consume, consume, consume. sometimes i am really ashamed to be a human.
I know where mine comes from. STAR brand beef from Wyoming. Humanely raised on grass. Treated with respect, dignity and love. Shreve makes sure her cows have a stress-free life and death since they are making the ultimate sacrifice for us.
Independent ranchers still kill innocent, nonviolent, grass-eating beings who should live 20 to 25 years to the most nightmarish, blood soaked chambers to be killed far before their time (6 yrs). Meat is violent and resource-intensive regardless of how you try to frame the debate.Ice cream is also violent, and you failed to mention that milk is produced FOR baby cows. For humans to have it (and the dairy industry to have their profits) cows must be made pregnant (usually forcibly, i.e., on "rape racks"), the cows lactate for their babies but the babies are taken away in order to sell the milk to people. The male calves, and now even many of the females are sold to the veal industry to be tortured by being tethered so they don't move too much lest the flesh (meat) toughen. These babies are then killed any where from birth to six months old. The mother cows cry for their babies. THe babies cry for their mothers. If there's any doubt of this, google dairy industry videos, look for the undercover videos that the dairy industry doesn't want the public to see.
Ice cream is violent.
There is no such thing as a baby cow. To be a Cow, the female bovine has to have a calf. To be a baby cow would be like being a virgin prostitute - Impossible.
They aren't put in rape racks. They are artificially inseminated in a very calm setting. If it was traumatic for the cows, conception rates would decrease.
Demand is stronger for beef today so most aren't slaughtered until around 2 years of age - they don't all go for veal.
Cows and Calves "crying" last at most two days. Even if you leave a calf with it's mother, the cow will start kicking at it if it tries to suck her after about 6 months. They know when it's time to ween.
To find the videos you speak of, just Google Green Propaganda
"Ice cream is violent." And Tasty!!!
Yum Yum
Two great resources for those who will eat meat and dairy, but prefer to find more sustainably minded suppliers, should try http://eatwild.com/ and http://www.localharvest.org/. Actually, the second resource is great for fruit, veggies, etc, as well.
2. http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/html/sb/sb681/
the cultivation of hemp intentionally kills animals.
anyone engaged in buying the food from cultivated hemp fields, by default, kills animals
In that way, you can see that there is a piece of a dead baby mouse, rabbit, or gopher, "in every glass of [hemp] milk".
maybe you meant to imply a 'least harm' argument instead?
here's a fun one on hemp, one you'd agree with even
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1199945475316180479
where in the world are your getting your information?
Click on "How are cattle raised?"
Grass fed has come to mean, to many, that the animal was raised and finished on grass although the term is not really clear.
My point was that I do not believe, as stated in the article, that male offspring of dairy cows are grain raised and finished as all cattle, to my knowledge, are grass raised even if they are finished on grain.
I'll be getting my grass fed and grass finished beef in August.