Organic, grass-fed beef is not only so much better for you, it also tastes infinitely better than what is considered beef these days. Everyone loves burgers and a sizzling steak, but the quality of our national meat has plummeted in the last forty years as factory farming has taken hold across the continent.
In the past, hamburgers became popular because they tasted so good. Thick and dense with nutrients, they literally melted in your mouth. One burger was so good that on its own it was totally satisfying. Why did they taste so good then? It’s not pure nostalgia. They literally tasted better because the norm forty years ago was organic, grass-fed meat. Did you know that cattle are not made to eat grain and will literally make them sick if given too much? It’s pure biology, but at some point grain and corm farmers discovered that feeding young cattle grain made them grow faster and heavier. It seemed like a good thing.
Today, cattle are routinely transferred from their natural pasture to grain when they are less than 18 months of age. At that age they are already abnormally fat and almost ready for their “grain finish”. Young cattle are saturated with hormones almost from birth. At 45 days of age, the factory-raised young calf is started on steroids and hormones. One particular steroid is called Trenbolone Acetate, an anabolic steroid or tissue building drug. If Barry Bonds uses this drug, he gets kicked out of the league, but all the meat eaters are ingesting this drug second hand.
At 45 days, a pellet containing this or other steroids is implanted in the calf’s ear, which, combined with hormones such as estrogen, can increase a calf’s daily weight gain by up to 20 percent. Instead of absorbing nutrients slowly and naturally over time, as organic grass-fed beef does, factory-raised calves are given grain feed laced with antibiotics, causing them to grow much faster.
If you’ve tried organic, grass-fed beef, you know it’s dense, juicy, and delicious. Factory-fed beef has muscles surrounded by fat, inflated by androgens. The flesh is pale and watery. In fact, the meat from these cattle is often not even safe to eat.
Those pellets, for example, are supposed to be inserted near the back of the ear, which is removed before processing. But, the implant is often accidentally embedded in the cartilage, crushed, bunched, missing, or abscessed. So where do the granules go? If ground into meat, they are even dangerous, capable of creating a host of human diseases and conditions, including low thyroid, enlarged prostate, male pattern baldness, random female hair growth, and many more too hideous to count.
If you love beef, your choice is simple: organic, grass-fed beef. Cattle raised naturally on grassy fields surrounded by their herd and allowed the slower process of natural maturation produce meat that is not only delicious, but packed with good nutrients from the grass.
