Excuse me, what does your steak eat?
Published on February 21st, 2010.
Ever since watching food conspira-mentaries like Food, Inc. and King Corn, I’ve been much more conscious of my food intake; easy to spot the healthier stuff at the grocery store, all you have to do is find the word “organic” and try not to flinch when the checker reveals your total. Beef however, is in a class all by itself: beyond organic certification there’s now a clear-cut choice as to what the animal ate before it was slaughtered and delivered to market. Almost bi-partisan in nature, the key choices are grain-fed and grass-fed. Some of these cows do reach across the isle and mix up their diets a bit, but for the most part they fall into those two buckets.
Grass-fed comes at an even higher premium than it’s organic counterpart and if you mix the two, you’re paying the most that you will ever pay for beef (online you can get some deals direct from the ranch at about $16-18/lb. but I’ve seen more than $25/lb. for common cuts of organic grass-fed). For this obvious reason, it makes making the switch a very weighty decision. So, I set to explore with my own taste buds to see if going grass-fed was worth it as well as asked some questions at my local market and to the internet machine.
My first grass-fed experiment was through a pound of ground that I purchased at Whole Foods for $10. “Ouch” I said as I left the store, feeling the sting of that hook and “YUM!” I said as the best pan-fried burger I ever ate went in my mouth. Juicy and flavorful as the cheap 80/20 fatty stuff that you ate as a kid but with no heavy feeling after. I took the rest of it and made meatballs for pasta, mixing in some ground organic pork, which was $4/lb. at Whole Foods.
After talking to the butcher at Whole Foods however, he told me that getting a tasty batch of ground grass-fed is common, because that preparation mixes in all the fat. I asked him if he thought that grass-fed tasted better and he honestly told me no, citing that it was “too lean” and “cooked faster which meant less flavor” than grain-fed. He also informed me with complete confidence that the U.S. has been eating grain-fed beef forever. But like a good salesman, he encouraged me to buy another top sirloin of grass-fed at $13/lb, which I have been cooking and eating while writing this post.
Between my first and last purchases of grass-fed at Whole Foods, I have also purchased more grass-fed ground and Italian sausages at the Atwater Village Farmers Market, both which were cheaper than the store and totally checked out. Both came out to be about $6/lb. and I felt great supporting that local vendor.
In preparation for this article, I read up on the foodie blogs to see if there was a conspiracy in the conspiracy, but as you can imagine, most of the posts were pro-grass-fed. I did however find more reading to support the long life of grain and corn fed beef in the U.S., a tradition about 50 years old which means that my mother’s first steak in the 50s was probably fed corn. Turns out, only freaks and people from South America have been enjoying grass-fed beef in the 50 years before steak-awareness became a hot button and the blogs had plenty of Argentinians who had nothing but bad, bad, bad to say about American beef. You have to wonder if they were feeding on the cows that needed the rainforests cleared out so they can graze (which would cause a real dilemma for the progressive shopper)?
As I mentioned earlier, there is overlap and this might be the best solution for budget eaters who don’t want to break the bank but still have a shot at being healthy. It is true that cows aren’t innate grain and corn eaters and while that diet will fatten them up making their meat more appealing to both palate and eye, it does cause serious health problems that get passed on to people as salmonella and E. coli. There are some butchers out there that will sell good meat that has a grass-fed diet for the first 2/3 of it’s life and then they will get sent to the feedlot for a grain diet to give the flesh that look and taste we’re so familiar with. And the best part: this stuff is priced 25-50% less than the grass-fed stuff. Outside of the 100% grass-fed, Whole Foods sells this type of beef exclusively.
And now the results of the grass-fed top sirloin taste test: excellent. I didn’t experience any rushed cooking times, the meat help onto a lot of the spices I used in prep and I ate about 16 oz without feeling like a big fat fatty-pants. At $13, this was cheaper than most restaurants I would care to eat at, who I can almost guarantee you won’t get grass-fed beef from. If you eat beef as much as I do, maybe once a month, the grass-fed option may be for you. Anything above that, well you have choices to make which hopefully this will help.
-A
Filled under Life.
