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Comment by garply | Hacker News Reader

What good does local sourcing do? Is it freshness? I'm not a meat expert, but I would guess that a big company with an economy of scale would be able to produce higher quality meat for a lower cost. Also, if you're sourcing locally from non-big brand names, don't you have concerns about their cold chain?

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You'd think so. But I have found you get better quality for very little premium. And even the cheap stuff is better than supermarket schmuck.

My aunt rears poultry for several markets. Her supermarket produce is usually additionally processed in a variety of ways by an intermediate to increase it's sale value (with poultry it is usually water plumped).

It might take a while but there is sure to be a local butcher or farm shop nearby where you can buy more directly.

Edit: also I personally don't think meat is a Market that benefits from economy of scale :-) I usually find supermarkets a false economy.

I had no idea about plumping. Do you know what percent of the revenue her supermarkets take?

Not sure but it's a fair whack. She makes a little more on direct & local sales but mostly that is because she also gets some of the retail markup too (which the supermarkets soak up).

EDIT: here is some info on plumping. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/all-we-can-eat/food-politic...

My Aunt's produce isn't modified all that much (because it is marketed as premium and local produce by the supermarket - they buy from numerous small producers in local regions and distribute to that region). However most of the generic chicken you see in stores will be plumped in this way. Im not sure of the exact water content but I recall watching a TV show once about it that suggested 70% water content (including what was already there)

The bakeries here usually blend their cheesecakes (which are sold by weight) with flour to boost their margins. This sounds like exactly the same sort of process. I wonder how frequent this is in the food industry.

It's done with bacon, too. This is why you'll find that cheap bacon, when fried, will expel a lot of water, whereas the more expensive stuff won't. This is probably more noticeable on back bacon ("Canadian" bacon) - I can't imagine the fatty parts hold the water for long enough.

I don't know the situation elsewhere, but something that surprised me here in the UK is the disclosure requirements. We have a lot of rules on describing ingredients and nutrition in food, some statutory, others widely accepted industrial practices. However, even the statutory rules let food suppliers "forget" certain things, like IIRC up to 10% of added water in meat products. In other words, they can legally say "no added water" with anything up to 10% added, or reduce greater actual amounts accordingly. I'm not sure I see any public interest in that kind of rule, unless it really is an essential part of the production process that literally everyone (including the local butcher with a local supplier competing with the supermarkets) is going to have to do.

Locally sourced meat tends to be grass-fed or at least grass finished. It also tends to have WAY better living conditions than any commercial plant. A happy animal is a tasty animal.

I highly suggest you watch Food inc. :-)

What if I live near a "commercial" plant, so it's local to me?

Local is nonsense. If you want grass finished say so. Don't say local. And calling it commercial is misleading too, since grass finished is also commercial.

you wont find the "commercial plant" selling locally.

You could go further afield for your meat (I do myself actually) but a "local producer" is certainly the style your after.

Empirically, Giant Eagle (the crap chain supermarket in PA) beef tastes like crap, and local butcher beef tastes really good. Locality is a good proxy for people caring about food tasting good, and for not going through enormous horrible disease-ridden meat-packing plants. The latter tends to produce meat that tastes bad and periodically makes you sick.

AFAIK, there are only 4 cattle slaughterhouses in PA: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/import_export/downloads/slaughter_...

Only one of the 4 is not owned by Cargill or JBS.

Unless your beef vendor is taking delivery on whole carcasses and then packing it themselves, the beef is probably packed at the slaughterhouse, as well.

Heh. The local butcher whose very happy meat I ate actually was in the Ferry Plaza in SF.

But really, I don't know if the goodness in non-Giant-Eagle meat has anything to do with the meat packing industry. I just was trying to convince ars that food people aren't being totally dumb when they say that local is often better than GEagle equivalents.

The beef we purchased directly from a farmer (all cows are 100% pastured and grass-fed) are processed and packed by Cheplic in Finleyville, PA.

Of course, the farmer isn't processing an obscene amount of cattle each year, either, and he only sells directly to consumers, face-to-face, so a small butcher can actually handle that sort of volume.

I haven't looked into buying local beef (I'm in Chicago and have good sources for high-quality beef), but I have done the legwork on pork, and all of the farms I can order from outsource "processing" and add a couple bucks per pound to the cost of the meat to cover it. I don't think slaughterhouse ownership is any kind of smoking gun.

I live in Chicago. What are your sources of high-quality beef?

Fox & Obel, Paulina - first two that come to mind.

Since I can't actually respond to any of you directly (thanks HN commenting code!)... [ugh. now the reply links are there, my bad?]

It's illegal to resell beef to consumers which wasn't slaughtered at a facility with a USDA inspector. If you buy the whole animal, like bmj does, then it can be slaughtered by anyone who knows what they're doing and packed (cut and wrapped) by any competent butcher. You then cannot resell that meat (and, in fact, all of the packaging should have not for retail stamps on it).

Now, personally, having actually toured a slaughterhouse (the one in Fresno, CA), I've got no problem with them. I definitely take issue with the "enormous horrible disease-ridden" characterization. Most of the food safety problems have been artifacts of the high volume hamburger production process. If you buy steaks, or even hamburgers made by butchers from whole cuts of meat, you should be in the clear.

I was merely trying to point out, somewhat obliquely, that unless you're slaughtering an animal you own and then buying all of the cut and wrapped meat, any beef you buy in the US was slaughtered at a huge slaughterhouse. That's just the reality of the situation, and it's a combination of regulations intended to keep you safe (having a USDA inspector on site is really, really expensive) and the continued consolidation of the packing industry (enabled by the government, NIMBY organizations, environmental groups, etc).

At the same time, as an Nth generation cattle rancher (where N > 4), I don't want to discourage anyone from buying locally raised beef. ;-)

Hah. If you think Giant Eagle is crap, you should step into a Kroger sometime.

I grew up around Pittsburgh, then moved to Atlanta for school ~9 years ago. Talk about a substantial drop in supermarket quality...

Until the whole "USDA Organic" program came along, 'organic' was a reasonable (if inane) proxy for decent-tasting produce. The lack of pesticides never had much to do with the quality, except that it attracted people with graduate degrees to farmwork.

The 'local' thing has been a reasonably successful attempt at taking the place of 'organic' as a proxy marker for non-crap. It has the nice property of still mostly working after being coopted by the big supermarket chains.

It's just as bullshit, if not moreso, but it's useful bullshit.

I like to buy local simply because I like Dwight (my Angus beef farmer), Steve (my lamb guy) and the chicken lady down the street (I forget her name). Seriously, these are interesting people who work hard at their craft and have to perform some serious "hacks" to get their work done (how do you keep coyotes out of the hen house?). I like them, I like them in the neighborhood, and they inspire me for my own work. I'm willing to pay more for that ... but in reality only the chickens are more expensive. Everything else is cheaper ... but you can't just go to Dwight at 6:30pm nad pick up a steak for dinner. You have to plan around the slaughter and freeze stuff.

But what if I am buying locally raised and processed grass-fed beef? Local is hardly nonsense. Every two weeks I meet the guy actually raising the animals to buy our food (beef, chicken, milk, cheese, eggs). I can't think of a more appropriate way to do business with something as important as what I put in my body.

I grew up on a cattle farm. Is 3,000 head a "plant"? Was it evil because there was an "Inc" on the end of the name?

A happy animal is indeed a tasty animal. That's why we raise cattle in dry pens (away from predators) with abundant fresh water and feed them carefully formulated food twice a day. Our cattle get better dietary planning than I do; they don't eat pure corn (as the term "corn-fed" might lead you to believe), they eat a mix including alfalfa, grass hay, corn, barley, silage, cannery surplus apples, oats, molasses, and other ingredients. The fact is, big or small, any cattleman is going to try and keep the conditions as good as possible. If your animals are standing in 2 feet of mud and eating moldy hay, they're not going to produce and you're not going to make money. Also, nobody goes into the livestock business hating the animals--we who grew up on farms probably have a better understanding and empathy for livestock than your average city-dweller, and we want to act kindly toward them.

As for grass feeding, you want to know something? One of the biggest grass-fed beef producers back home only eats corn-fed beef. Corn-fed beef is more extensively marbled and more tender. Like organic produce, grass-fed beef is a niche market for people who think something tastes better because it has a crunchy image and damn the price/scalability/sustainability.

Call it what you want, but it's still a factory farm. Cattle are fattened on a corn-based diet to a point where they have extreme problems like heart disease and obesity that would normally kill an animal if it wasn't destined for the slaughterhouse already. Your beef still has to be treated and bathed in an ammonia solution to kill the E. Cohli that is everywhere due to the cattle living in their own excrement.

Or how do you deal with the problem of manure in the pens? Surely you can't keep an animal confined in a cage it's whole life and expect it to shit somewhere else?

Watch Food Inc. You will never want to eat "corn-fed" beef again.

You deal with the problem of manure in the pens by clearing them out regularly. The pens are large; just bring in a tractor and scrape the pen, then give the manure to some farmer for his fields. We also keep a large "mound" of dirt in the middle of the pens so when it rains, the cattle have a place they can stand out of the mud.

These aren't cages, they're large pens, starting at about the size of a football field and going up.

A grass-fed animal is still going to be walking in, sleeping on, and eating manure; in fact, grazing cattle often look dirtier than ours.

I'm not exactly sure how watching a sensationalist film is going to erase the 18 years of animal husbandry experience I've accumulated. I've assisted in slaughtering cattle, sheep, and pigs, I've shoveled every kind of manure imaginable, I've birthed sheep (starting at about age 5), I've hauled the inevitable dead animals, I've assisted in various basic surgical and veterinary operations. I've been to numerous other feedlots and dairies, and having observed all these things I am quite happy and secure in eating beef and drinking milk.

Would you allow cameras into your whole operation?

Fyi: people eat grass fed beef because cows are naturally meant to eat grass, not corn. Cows that eat grass do not get illnesses that require antibiotics, etc.

> Corn-fed beef is more extensively marbled and more tender.

I don't think there's much debate that corn fed is fattier and more appealing to the average palate. The issue is health and omega-6 to omega-3 ratios. Even a small amount of corn or other seeds in the feed put omega-6 way up.

If you buy local you're much more likely to get beef that is grass fed, and not factory farm raised beef that is fed corn and lives in their own filth. You know in order to kill bacteria in ground beef, they actually use an ammonia bath, and they can only guarantee it will kill 99% of the bacteria? Somehow, the FDA thinks this is safe. What's the harm in 1% E. Cohli, after all?

Watch a documentary called Food, Inc. and become enlightened.

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