Cathy Pomanti, the owner of Sugar Hill Farm, midwifed my calf into the world. Pomanti raises grass-fed organic Scottish highland cows, a shaggy breed yielding meat that's among the tastiest on the planet. On one farm visit, my fiancee saw a highlander, went quiet, and then said, "I don't want to eat them. I want to hug them." But I was hungry for a cow to call my own.
As a pleasure-seeking meat eater, I am increasingly disappointed by grain-fed supermarket beef. Rib eyes require a slick of steak sauce to taste meaty. Ground beef has a tacky, greasy consistency. Tenderloin, even with tender care, always leaves me underwhelmed. So I decided to stop complaining about mass-market beef and find a rancher. I wanted to know my cattle producer. I wanted to know my cow.
My cow never had a name; Pomanti can't bring herself to name cows headed for slaughter. But he did have a good life. My cow spent his first 10 months growing strong on his mother's milk, sticking close by her side. Then Pomanti separated my cow and his mother into different pens. My cow bawled. His mother mooed. It was for the best. Once Mom stopped producing milk, the two were reunited, but my cow now preferred delicious, nutritious grass.
Over the next year and a half, my cow grew an impressive coat of thick, coarse hair. Because he wouldn't be subjected to the diseases and indignities of the industrial feedlot, he didn't need antibiotics or growth hormones. Those substances wouldn't end up in me or my fiancee, either.
Last October, my cow was loaded onto a truck and taken to Rising Spring Meat Company, an organic butcher outside State College, Pennsylvania. There he was held in a pen, calm and comfortable, until he was humanely shot in the head. The carcass was then halved and hung in a cooler to dry-age, a process that helps tenderize the meat, for about 14 days.
Next my cow was cut into pieces, vacuum-sealed, and delivered to Pomanti. She summoned me for the handoff. Out of her massive freezer units she pulled bags bursting with marrow bones, globular ground beef portions, and a tenderloin the size of Popeye's forearm. I drove the box of beef back home that day, dreaming of meals to come, under a sky with clouds that looked like heifers.
The Beef With Beef
As a typical American, you ate a hefty 51 pounds of beef last year, the USDA says. That's roughly the equivalent of 65 T-bones, 204 quarter-pound burger patties, or one Kim Kardashian rump roast.
The National Cattlemen's Beef Association notes that less than 1 percent of beef sold at retail is labeled as grass-fed. During the "finishing," the animal begins to lay down more fat in relation to muscle and bone growth, says Cindy Daley, Ph.D., who studies beef at California State University. Until the 1950s, ranchers finished cattle exclusively on grass. But industrial producers realized that grain feeding improved fat marbling while cutting the days until slaughter. After decades of eating the stuff, we now prefer fattier beef. But at the same time, our rates of diseases linked to inflammation rose.
Could grain-fed cows and inflammation be connected? A 2011 Irish study found that people who replaced their regular red meat with three weekly servings of grass-fed red meat for a month improved their inflammation-fighting omega-3 fatty acid profiles by 37 percent over those of people who ate the same amount of grain-finished red meat.
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Article source: http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/grass-fed-beef
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