The Meat of the Matter

After reading Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma several years ago, I decided to give up meat for Lent. It stuck for two or three years after that, and I never missed a bite; well, maybe I missed a lovely medium-rare steak every now and then. Then I met Anthony and rejoined the meat-eating world. We only ate chicken because we deluded ourselves into believing that organic chicken, free of hormones and antibiotics, was good food.

For the past eight months, we have limited our meat consumption mainly to the 16 pounds we get each month from Randle Farms' meat share with an occasional trip to the meat counter at Earth Fare. We like that the animals on Randle Farms graze on grass-covered hills in a large pasture, that they aren't pumped full of antibiotics and other drugs to make them grow faster, and they aren't fed food that wasn't meant to be eaten by them.

The news this week about bacteria inhabiting the meat we buy at the grocery store--all manner of meat--suggests organic is a little better for you, and local, farm-raised meat is even better.

On April 15, Time posted, "What's Lurking in Your Meat and Poultry? Probably Staph" that reported on a study by Lance Price, a professor at the Translational Genomics Research Institute. Price began the study when he noticed reports of farm workers picking up staph infections from the animals, and he wondered how this affected the meat from those animals once they were slaughtered. The results of the study indicate you're likely to bring home something extra with your beef, pork, and poultry: consumers purchasing meat at the grocery store have a one-in-four chance of bringing home meat contaminated with a strain of staphylococcus aureas resistant to three classes of antibiotics. We can now add staph to the list of bacterial contaminants we've become familiar with in our food: E coli, listeria, and salmonella. Yum.

The Christian Science Monitor posted an article one day later, "Staph in meat. Are US cattle and poultry over drugged?" This article put a precise number on the study: 47 percent of the meat and poultry sampled was contaminated with staphylococcus aureas, half of which was resistant to three classes of bacteria. In this article, Prince clearly states the problem is a result of how antibiotics are used in food-animal production. He continues to say that proper cooking of the meat kills the bacteria, but I like my cow nearly mooing when it reaches the plate. I don't see why I should have to kill the steak twice when contamination occurs in the "production" process. Oh, and guess what? The National Cattlemen's Beef Association questions the study and called it's findings irresponsible. Isn't that a surprise. Again, I point to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to get a glimpse into the conditions factory farmed animals live in and are slaughtered in. Pollan may also address this in his book.

Another survey of chicken in Seattle grocery stores found similar results: 42 percent of the chicken sampled contained staphylococcus aureas, and a host of other bugs. You can read it on the Marler Blog. Bill Marler is a lawyer who began prosecuting cases of foodborne illness in 1993 and runs a blog about food poisoning outbreaks and litigation.

While surfing the net to find these stories and related material, I also came across "Egg recall: DeCoster-linked farm releases contaminated eggs. Again" in The Christian Science Monitor. A "megafarmer" Jack DeCoster, as the Monitor describes him, was involved in a 550 million egg recall from retailers in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. The article is dated Nov. 9, 2010. Don't breath a sigh of relief just yet; DeCoster has been cited at least three other times for problems ranging from how he cares for his animals to how he cares for his workers. Iowa named him a habitual violator, so it's likely he'll strike again. He may not sell his eggs in Alabama, but I'm willing to bet there's another DeCoster out there who does.

So, the moral of the story? We have to care more about the food we eat and how it's raised--I say raised rather than produced because these are animal products, and I still prefer to refer to them as animals rather than products. Americans balk at spending more for food; we'd rather have big screen TV's and drive gas-guzzling SUV's. Okay, a generalization that isn't fair to all, but we do spend less per capita on food than most nations. A report by Rosen and Meade on Askville by Amazon states: "Within each income group, percentages differ considerably (table 1). Residents of Canada, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom, like the United States, spend less than 12 percent of their PCE on food. Among the 24 countries in the high-income group, 5 spend more than 20 percent of their PCE on food, with the highest share held by Israel (22 percent)"(see the figures here and read here). We have to stop believing that big corporations, "megafarmers" and government agencies have our health and welfare as their top priority. They don't.

I feel very fortunate that I can buy my meat and eggs from farmers I know and talk with, whose animals I see in the fields. (The steaks in the photo are from Randle Farms.) I'm also glad Auburn is home to places like Blooming Colors and Dayspring; both businesses sell eggs gathered by local farmers, and Blooming Colors sells a variety of locally grown vegetables. Supporting local farmers and businesses is good them, and it's good for consumers.