Know Your Food Series: Part One, Grass Fed vs. Conventional Meat, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Know Your Food series will begin to look at food in ways that you may not have before, and investigate confusing and not so explored issues within the world of food.  Our first subject is looking at grass fed versus conventional meat production.  Meat is big business, and a huge part of the Standard American Diet.  However, many people don’t think of the consequences of eating meat and the distinctions between grass fed and conventional.  Let’s break it down in the western classic, Clint Eastwood style:

(full disclosure: Eastwood is not a known vegan and may or may not approve this message.  Feel free to forward it to him if you’re in touch.  However, Woody Harrelson is, and he’s been in some westerns right?)

Grass Fed

Good – it has less chemicals and is more natural (ranchers do not feed animals antibiotics and hormones).  Although the slaughtering process is just as inhumane as conventional, the lives the animals lead can be significantly better, although “pasture raised” and “grass fed” are pretty loose terms in the agricultural industry, so it might not be the pleasant, home on the range, as you’re imagining.  There is a wide spectrum of living conditions for the animals.  Additionally, grass fed meat appears to have less overall fat and saturated fat than corn fed.  The way grass fed ranches are set up, rotating fewer livestock around many pastures creates less manure waste and less soil and water pollution since the excrement is dispersed and used as fertilizer and not turned into a concentrated pollutant.         

Bad – The animal proteins that cause inflammation, creating a more acidic environment and are generally harder to digest are still in meats that are grass fed.  Also, did you know most “grass fed” cows are fed corn in the last few weeks of life to fatten them up a bit and get the appropriate “marbling” of fat on their meat?  Just as their conventional brethren, the free roaming variety are generally slaughtered in the same manner—inhumanely. That’s not to say that certain slaughterhouses aren’t taking steps to make the killings less painful and traumatizing, but they are few and far between.  At the end of the day, by consuming any meat, you’re taking the life of a living, breathing, innocent animal.

Ugly – This is when it gets complicated.  While it’s natural to think that grass fed is more sustainable than conventional, we invite you to take a step out of the box and look at this issue from another angle.  Think about this: As grass fed, naturally raised animals aren’t strictly controlled, confined and pumped with drugs and food, they need to eat more and drink more.  It takes them longer to reach their sale weight, so they live longer (4 years vs. 14 months), taking up more resources and more land.  The amount of land required to raise livestock is mind blowing, not to mention the amount of water and grain, which could be fed directly to humans.  The amount of forest that is cut down to graze cattle and grow the corn and soy to feed them is shocking and truly sad.  Grass fed animals take much more land and water than conventional ones, and due to their longer life span they produce far more methane gas. The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane is (28-36); meaning it is 28-36 times worse at increasing climate change than Carbon Dioxide on a 100-year time horizon (US EPA).

Conventional / CAFO (Conventional Animal Feeding Operation)

Good – Factory farms are just that, factories designed to produce animal flesh in the cheapest, most efficient manner possible.  The farms take in massive amounts of corn, water and soy and produce animal protein.  These factory farms, while disastrous for animals and workers, and their local ecosystems are counterintuitively better from a global air quality, environmental perspective.  As the production systems have been engineered to use as little water, grain and land as possible, the animals take up less resources and are on this planet for a shorter period of time, thus making them more efficient.

Bad – Health concerns with conventional meat (aside from the same concerns as grass fed (harder to digest, inflammatory, and acid causing)) come from the nature which the factory farm works.  The growth and size of these animals has been engineered to get them to grow as fast as possible, regardless of consequences.  The amount of antibiotics and hormones fed to animals is truly shocking.  More antibiotics are given to livestock in this country than to humans.  The antibiotics are not always necessary of course, they’re preventative, and only because the operators know the conditions are so horrific the CAFOs are a cesspool for infectious and viral diseases.  This greatly contributes to antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, which affects the human population and our healthcare system.  We are quite literally running out of effective antibiotics, because we’ve cashed in significant scientific progress for cheap meat.    

Ugly – The ugliest part is the cruel nature of the animal’s lives and deaths, all so we can have cheap meat.  Few among us acknowledges that when they consume meat, they are part of the abusive factory farming system.  The horrific nature of CAFO animals lives’ cannot be explained here, but there are many documentaries and books with interviews from former factory farm and slaughterhouse workers detailing the horrific nature of how these animals are treated.  (Eating Animals (Safron-Foer 2010), Earthlings, 2005; Food Inc., 2009)  They are cramped in tight spaces, beaten, dismembered (tails docked declawed and debeaked) in order for easier storage.  All of these crimes against animals are generally unregulated and acceptable practice, as agricultural animals are not subject to the same standards of animal cruelty like our pet cats and dogs.  The entire animal’s lives are filled with pain and suffering, and the animals aren’t as stupid as you may be led to believe (although factory farm practices and inbreeding doesn’t bring out the best intellectually in these poor animals).  Animals feel sadness and pain and discomfort the same as a cat or dog would.  Pigs are arguably more similar to humans than cats or dogs, and are just as intelligent. 

In summary, when eating meat, there are no good options, and the options that do exist are riddled with negative externalities.  While many people proudly hang their hat on eating only “grass fed” meat, they likely don’t fully understand the consequences.  It’s also selfish to eat grass fed due to the quantity of land and resources that goes into those animals.  Although, even worse are people that eat conventional meat while thinking nothing of the suffering of the animals and the devastation of the local ecosystem around factory farms.  We tried to take an unbiased look at the positives and negatives of each method of animal agriculture, and hopefully our discussion will help you make the most informed decision possible about your food.  Understand your food, and take pride in what you eat.

   

 Stay tuned for the next piece in our series: To Juice or Not?