The food in stores is pretty much all garbage compared to food raised on small farms. It sickens me to see things go this way, but this is the reality that we have created.
In the 30 years I have cooked meat, nothing can prepare you for real beef that comes straight from the source. If it's USDA approved it ain't right.
It all starts with better nutrition. CAFO cows that end up at the supermarket are fed low-quality grains and feedstocks, rather than grass that they were evolved to eat. The difference between grain and grass fed beef is amazing.
USDA processing is a complete farce. I can only sell locally, because I am not willing to send my animals to such facilities. Instead, I can only sell here in my home state, because that's the only way I can say that my animals were born, raised, and died humanely on my farm. The butcher will drop them where they stand, eating a final meal in the conditions that they were raised.
If I want to go with USDA in order to sell my products out of state, by the cut, or to resellers (e.g. restaurants), then I must load my animals onto a trailer, haul them almost two hours away, and allow them to suffer the trauma of that experience before finally being slaughtered in inhumane conditions. I can tell you right away: that experience severely damages the quality of the meat.
Big ranches can afford their own USDA facilities, but small farms must share the slowly dwindling number of processors that still serve the public. There are less than two dozen in my entire state, so you currently need to book them further out than the entire lifespan of the animals that you plan to raise. Right now, my processor has completely booked 2022; a new farmer cannot get any animals processed there until 2023!
Seriously, fuck the USDA.
Your focus on being less cruel to your cows is pretty admirable, but I don't really see how average consumers could evaluate whether their local farm is:
* Putting in the sort of extra effort that you are
* Following safety protocols more generally
I dunno. I'm not super attached to meat, so I'd probably quit eating it before putting in the effort to eat it ethically. Actually when I put it that way, I should probably quit it...
None of the existing processors are willing to invest in such a venture, when their existing facilities are increasingly being regulated out of existence. No one is building new USDA facilities to serve small farmers.
We had a nice hour long walk & talk with the farmer we went with here in middle TN. He gave us $50 worth of free samples at the end and checked in with us a few times to see if we were able to get a good meal out of the sample meat.
We saw his process, we met the cows and saw first-hand how he cared for them. We also saw that he cared - he cared a lot.
When you think about it, this is the stuff you're going to feed your family. We put in a lot of effort when buying a car but not when buying our food. It's amazing what a little effort and thought can get you out here though, in "the sticks."
0. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/mar/23/nitrites-ham-ba...
Kidding. Really though if it was you could taste it. In some cases I prefer grain fed cows cause they just taste better. However the fat ratio of healthy to unhealthy fat, omega 3 to omega 6, is a major reason to go grass-fed.
So maybe the grass was just ...
To the other poster asking about mobile kill operations - it's less stress on the animals, and that ultimately does yield a better product. So whether you view it through the lens of tasty meat or animal welfare, in both cases it's a win.
During 2020 summer, we raised 4 peking ducks in our backyard. We gifted some of the processed meat to extended family members. And to this day, they still can't stop talking about how good the meat were.
That said, real-free-range chicken makes the most unbelievably godly soup. They have this amazing yellow fat and their skin is thick with it, so they make a really thick broth. Just add a few vegetables, a bit of celery, some carrots, potatoes, and you don't even need rice or anything else to thicken it. I suspect it's that kind of chicken that people mean when they say that chicken soup is good for you when you're sick. It's the kind of soup that could raise the dead.
Edit - I forgot about the bones. Real free range chicken bones are hard. You can't just snap them between your fingers. Well I can't anyway. They're like real bones. Amaze!
This is like the difference between veal and beef. The younger animal has softer meat and a different kind of fat.
Growth hormomes.
As an example, I've seen some US chickens as large as Canadian turkeys...
So free range, may not be getting growth hormones in the feed...
See, eg, https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Are-hormones-used-for-livesto...: “No steroid hormones are approved for use in poultry”
It’s certainly true that today’s meat birds are MUCH bigger than heritage breeds, but that’s a result of selective breeding, not hormones.
The size difference is stark, so I still wonder re: selective breeding.
“ Most broilers find walking painful, as indicated by studies using analgesic and anti-inflammatory drugs. In one experiment, healthy birds took 11 seconds to negotiate an obstacle course, whereas lame birds took 34 seconds. After the birds had been treated with carprofen, there was no effect on the speed of the healthy birds, however, the lame birds now took only 18 seconds to negotiate the course, indicating that the pain of lameness is relieved by the drug.”
Honestly? I don't exactly understand why but the intuitive explanation is that animals that are allowed to roam and browse free are ... more healthy?
Comparing free range animals with cage grown ones, the most obvious difference is going to be muscle development: animals that grow up in cages will never have much muscle mass, since they simply have no way to exercise - they will have weaker muscles, and this will be detectable as a different taste and texture. Similarly, fat deposits will often be in different places and of slightly different kinds for animals that can exercise vs those that can't.
Additionally, cage grown animals are typically also fed a cheaper diet, and the diet will always have an impact on the taste of the meat.
And yes, the cage grown animals will likely also have different health issues because of the lack of exercise and poor diet, that free range animals won't develop. But I believe the other factors will have a much bigger impact, especially since these animals are typically harvested while they are pretty young, and may not have developed too serious conditions.
White striping is a lot more prominent in factory farmed chicken.
The largest difference at first with beef was that it was grass fed and I was not used to that. But now I tend to buy grass fed beef when I do get it from the supermarket and thus don't notice a big difference vs my farm meat.
Now it’s probably corn finished and pesticidy, but it does taste more like I remember as a kid.
For me the biggest taste difference is from the grass, not the organic.
The nutritional value of the meat produced / consumed may be chemically similar although there is some research to support the higher human health benefits (CLAs, Omega 3s,Omega 9s, etc.) of grass-fed beef, but it is the stewardship used to raise those animals has a vastly different impact on the environment. Can't really speak to your neighbor in particular but you could ask him/her about rotational grazing and their antibiotic / animal healh protocols.
Just because you can't see the tail-pipe emissions coming from your car doesn't mean they aren't real and impacting your health and the viability of future generations.
Really this is a failure of the educational system in the US. If people knew the facts, they would be supporting and buying from local producer-owned cooperatives. One good example that I know of in the Upper Midwest market is https://www.wisconsingrassfed.coop/
Even people who know the difference might prefer to buy cheap factory farmed meat, might not have freezer space to hold 30 pounds of meat until they can use it, or $250 to tie up in what amounts to personal beef futures.
The coop meat you linked is pretty competitively priced and I’m sure it’s good. Even with that, it’s more expensive and for some people, price really matters.
This is an idealistic liberal fantasy that implies rather condescendingly that anyone who does otherwise is uneducated. I support my local grocery store in whatever way I can, but I buy what I can afford, try not to support slave labour if I know about it, but otherwise it's far more important to me that I cover my bases for energy, nutrition, and desire. Tailpipe emissions can be measured, and people avoid them all the time largely by not having cars or living near congestion, if they can afford to, because it makes the air gross. If the result of paying more for steak means mostly that it tastes a bit better and you feel morally superior, then an educated person of moderate means would choose the more reasoned choice compared to what it cost them. I don't think it's like the difference between literally inhaling from an exhaust pipe or breathing mountain air. I think it's more like pretentious juices that I see at my local mart. One is already expensive at $8 and is basically sugar, and the one labeled organic small-batch hand-squeezzed is $18 for the same size, and is basically sugar. Ya it might taste better, idk, but I sure as hell am not paying $18 for a jar of juice.
Waking up at sun rise every day to let them out is a pain but more than worth it. That said I wouldn't recommend keeping hens unless you've had exposure to them on some level other than visiting a farm.
That's pretty cool. Is it battery operated? Do you have your chicken coup next to your home or did you run power to the hen house?
I recently bought a few acres in SE Texas and several people have recommend I raise chickens both for the eggs and also to help with some of the insects around here.
Why don't you recommend it?
I moved from Houston to my new 5 acres in August after watching the housing market for a year and actively searching for a home for about 6 months.
Honestly the real selling point is that this home has AT&T gigabit fiber :)
Stringing it along existing poles is cheap, and installing it in new underground utilities is cheap.
Digging is not required in many locations. Citywide rollout in Christchurch (400k people, low density) mostly used horizontal underground drilling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzGZl0jKRS8
New Zealand (similar size & population to Oregon) with a population ~5 million, used a lending model to fund a national fibre rollout in a private-public partnership. The Government lent money, but expected the project to have a final cost of ~$500M USD after loans repaid in 15 to 20 years. https://archive.vn/20170807221541/http://www.stuff.co.nz/bus...
84% of NZers can access fibre, and uptake is 64% and rising.
Faster internet for residential service also requires faster interconnects. It requires public infrastructure, residential modem upgrades, residential line installations, backhaul and datacenter hardware upgrades, new servers to mine all that extra data, more expensive equipment to fix/repair line breakages, and better trained technicians who also understand fiber too instead of just copper.
Why waste money on that when the plebs are perfectly "happy" with ADSL or cable and pay a hundred bucks for shitty service and almost zero human support?
Not GP. Can't imagine why they wouldn't. Once you're past the construction phase -- coop, containment, predator defense -- they're fairly low effort. Provide food and water, clean the coop regularly, and pay enough attention to them to quickly notice if your birds start getting sick.
Source: Started with 6 chicks and 8 rescue hens a couple years ago, presently around 40.
In Britain a lot of people rush out to get rescue hens and stick them in a rabbit run on their patio which is what I try to avoid encouraging.. being turned into dog food is a better outcome than the quality of life some chickens get.
Of all of the farm products discussed in the thread, eggs show the biggest difference in my opinion
"Handbook on Natural Pigments in Food and Beverages"
Chapter 14 - Feed Additives for Influencing Chicken Meat and Egg Yolk Color
Pigmentation of egg yolks and poultry tissues (mainly skin and fat) directly reflects the contents of carotenoids in the feed of birds. In most countries of the world, consumers prefer pigmented egg yolks, whereas pigmented poultry tissues are less desired. Especially in the southern part of Europe, eggs with a golden-orange tone of yolks are preferred. This is achieved by supplementing feeds of birds with both yellow and red carotenoids. For this purpose, nine carotenoids are approved as feed additives in the European Union, five natural and four artificial products, six with a yellow color and three with a red color. This chapter describes the ways of pigmenting egg yolks and poultry tissues, how to measure the achieved color, the factors affecting the color of the product, the deposition rates of carotenoids, and the contribution of carotenoids in egg yolks to humane intake.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008100...
Here's one of these products from BASF:
https://nutrition.basf.com/global/en/animal-nutrition/produc...
Poultry cannot produce carotenoids on their own, which is why the color of egg yolks depends on the carotenoids combination in their diets. However, it is not only the quantity of pigments that matters but also their bioavailability and color intensity. With Lucantin® Yellow (C-30 ester) any egg yolk color between light pastel yellow and reddish is possible.
Last year I purchased a 1/4 beef directly from a local farm and, as a life long city dwelling techbro, found the whole experience awesome. As dumb as it is, I really liked feeling 'closer' to where my food came from. I know the farm, the people who run it, the age and hanging weight of the beef, where it was processed, and so on. I even like that you get everything, including the generally 'undesirable' cuts, because you're processing an entire cow. I haven't purchased beef from a store in almost a year at this point!
I've been enamored with it ever since. On the techbro side, I wonder if there's something more small farms can do "local beef as a service" wise. The process, at least with the farm I went through, was clunky and manual to say the least (especially when doing it for my first time).
It varies, but the range is generally between “no, someone’s working a job outside the farm to make ends meet” and “margins slim enough that one small disaster means no longer being able to cover expenses.”
So supply prices rise as production falls... to the monopoly maximum marginal profit extracted from the consumer, just as predicted!
Accidents of policy do happen, but would you agree that it is suspicious that 4 food packing companies are making massive profits on such a 40-year-old accident and no one has thought to just fix it yet?
So if you have a body of law which enables the creation of these things, details how they are managed, and then they develop into oligopolies, this is not something that happens "naturally" -- it's a deliberate result produced by whoever controls those laws.
They are implementing regulations that put smaller butcher shops out of business. That said, the regulations may be good, but if the burden is too high .... well you have a problem.
The people in Tennessee already had to deal with the federal government implementing policies destroying the domestic tobacco industry. Btw this just means foreign farmers reap the profits. The federal government made the input costs to tobacco prohibitively expensive through taxes and regulations.
They then converted mostly to grass fed cattle farms. Now there are multiple aspects that make it difficult to be profitable.
It’s really painful to watch.
2008 also had a pretty large impact for farmers losing their farms, followed bu drugs, increased taxes, etc make it pretty difficult. All the farmers complain around me about “getting good help”.
I assume this is due to the low pay to quality of life ratio offered by farming jobs.
That means that even small farmers lean hard on H-2B to pick up the slack. Interestingly those wages are actually pretty competitive: around $12 an hour plus room and board.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/family-farms-are-doomed-buy...
Now I pay 2x-3x for meat compared to the local big-market (or Whole Foods), but meat is supposed to be expensive if raised humanely and sustainably, so I'm OK with that. Plus I like meeting my chickens before eating them. "Portlandia" was not far off.
[0]: http://www.schochdairy.com/
[1]: https://www.marionacres.com/
[2]: https://friendsoffamilyfarmers.org/opn/soggy-feet-enterprise...
[3]: https://www.kookoolanfarms.com/
This is the place for small farmers.
Even if you outright own the land, by the time you figure in maintenance and equipment on any cattle farm under 500-1000 head of cattle you simply can't turn a profit in a meaningful way. What you CAN do is use it as a tax shelter where you sorta break even if you squint and hope.
It may not be enough to live on but for a hobby, it's pretty much free money. Although I assume the market charges a stall fee that will eat into profits, but still...
Myself, I like good eggs, but I’m not paying $1/egg.
It looks like Whole Foods charges about half that for fancy organic eggs.
However, if you sold them at the Ferry Building in San Francisco and had a good story about why your eggs were special, I think you could get $12 a dozen.
How many of us are going to balk at $1/egg after we just paid $5 for an espresso and are ogling the $50 bottles of olive oil? Especially if we've been conditioned to not eat too many eggs because "cholesterol."
In my experience, a small farmer basically needs to cook their books to appear profitable. Profit is not realistic if you include all of the actual costs.
If government were out of the picture would small-scale farmers be better able to compete with Big Ag? If you were making policy, what would you have government do instead?
2. Right to repair. Seriously, they cannot repair their own equipment.
3. Add legal protections against GMO companies. Or other large private companies. More than a few small farms have be buried in legal bills.
4. Stop putting corn ethanal in gas. Its a poor use of fresh water. It’s provided almost universally by large farms. It reduces the quality of gas. We are much less dependent on foreign energy than when this was put in place. I guess this one will mostly sort itself out with electrification.
5. Universal healthcare. Or affordable healthcare for small businesses in general. Farming is very accident prone work.
6. Put stricter health regulations on animal husbandry. Big ag animal farms are some of the least sanitary work environments in the US, I’d rather shovel coal.
Edit: Bonus, consider loosening drone regulations for rural areas. They are valuable surveying tools, and line of sight requirements is unnecessary in many agri situations
Basically if you live on the farm you don't pay. If you own a property remotely or its above a certain scale you pay x% a year asset tax.
I think this could solve a bunch of foot in the door issues around farming.
To add to this they need to break up the meat processing side. In US there is something like 4 meat processors holding most of the market. It's far too dominant for one country. There need to be I dusty breakup and easy of regulation for local small scale butchers.
When money is of no concern to you, sure. But reality is many people can't even afford to buy organic foods.
Here's a 1922 document showing American retail prices of food from 1913 to 1920:
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bl...
Take a look at eggs, for example (page 21 as numbered in scans, 27 in the PDF). In 1920 egg prices fluctuated between $0.528 and $0.924 per dozen. Adjusting that price by consumer price index, it's something like $7.02 to $12.29 per dozen in current dollars. Back then people were forced to produce their own food, spend a larger portion of their income on food, or simply go without. Poverty that would force someone to eat cheap eggs now would force them to eat no eggs back then.
It absolutely was, but of course there was less of it. Have you ever had real farm fresh eggs from a free range chicken? It's a completely different thing from those white shells with bright yellow yolks you get at the grocery store. Same goes for vegetables. Ever had a home grown tomato? Those things are worth their weight in gold. The grocery store version is really just a bunch of water in the shape of a tomato.
But to compare our homestead eggs to the store's, you can simply hard boil the two and then use a knife to cut the eggs in half. Our pampered chickens make much denser yolks that are much harder to cut. There's clearly more of something in them.
Measurement and correction of soil trace element abundances -- often on a small scale -- is already state of the practice for large scale agriculture.
The whole micronutrient thing sounds like trying to apply a thin coating of science to a non-scientific thought process.
Which means the atoms of single nutrients transform into molecules by biochemical processes.
Second, those structures are involved further into transporting nutrients around the plant during growth.
Third, the structure of the soil with a healthy network of fungi and soil seems to be important. Or at least that is the way plants have evolved, even if it seems chaotic and inefficient (like photosynthesis).
Fourth, with wine people speaking of the Terroir, which determines the complex interactions of soil, geography, temperature, sunshine, weather and whatnot else to produce that one specific taste. Why wouldn't the same be true for other plants and products thereof?
Fifth, if it would be sufficient to give them just the 18 common nutrients, light, water and heat they need, why can't we have them massproduced in the most efficient way in growhouses via (say) Aeroponics, where their roots are in no growth medium at all anymore, just sprayed with a fine mist which contains all the necessary nutrients?
Sixth, science is the process of understanding what happens by modelling, until further evidence necessitates revising of the model.
If one does not completely understand how the interactions between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza contribute to taste and nutritional value of the harvest, pointing to big-AG instead, that isn't scientific either, only dumb commerce.
Seventh, I'm not saying I know it, or others do, it's just that we all don't really know so far. While you pretend to.
Do you really think all the posters in this thread complaining about taste are suffering from some placebo/nocebo effect? Dancing their names under the full moon, or what?
Man, you are so killing my nerves!
Plants make their own organic molecules. They're not fungi, slurping them up from the soil.
Micronutrients, as the term is used in agriculture, means specific chemical elements that are needed in lesser amounts than the primary nutrients (N, P, K) and the secondary nutrients (Ca, Mg, S). Micronutrients are B, Cu, Fe, Cl, Mn, Mo, and Zn.
Soil structure is of course important, but that doesn't have anything to do with micronutrients.
You know those human growth hormone jumbo chicken beasts that have the woody texture and taste like water? They are cheaper for a reason...
Which country do you live at? They don’t give growth hormone to chicken in US, which are enormous nevertheless, so I am now somewhat morbidly interested in seeing US enormous chicken breeds that are additionally given growth hormones.
I'd also recommend you to try different kinds of fresh water fish that are available in places like Burma and Thailand. These fish are more and more difficult (expensive) to buy thanks to overfishing, but the variety and the flavor will just amazes you.
In general, I believe that factory farming has reduced the variety of available food in the US. Whether that impacts the long term health/flavor of the food is something we probably should conduct a long-term scientific study to confirm.
My wife and mom (from the same country) both told me that they cannot eat the chicken from US markets because of the smell, and it took me a while (15 years) to get that distinct scent that they mention and once I starts cooking more and more, I learned to distinguish that myself.
That's probably because supermarket milk is typically homogenised, meaning it's been put through a very narrow funnel with great force until the fat globules break and become more evenly distributed throughout the milk. That's why supermarket milk doesn't have "cream on top". The fat stays suspended in the milk liquid and doesn't rise to the top (as is normal with milk that hasn't been homogenised). Homogenisation also usually standardises milk to a certain fat content while the excess goes to make butter, so you can expect homogenised milk to be just exactly 3.5% in fat (for cow's milk) while the milk you get from your local farmer is going to vary a lot above and below that, depending on season, feed, reproductive cycle and activity of the animals etc.
I suspect that the fishy smell in US chicken is because of a chlorine wash. There was a bit of a scandal about it recently in Britain.
brands like Straus are generally available on the west coast, not sure about other regions