DOWN ON THE FARM
Farming has as much impact on our environment as air and water pollution combined. The fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides farmers use soak into and contaminate our ground water as well as pour straight into our stream through rainwater runoff. And that's just agriculture. Animal husbandry brings its own set of environmental complications. However, like every other facet of our lives, there are big changes afoot in farming. This page will attempt to track them.
Curative Powers of Grass-Fed Beef 06.15.10
There comes a time in our lives when people begin to believe they should be consuming fewer chemicals. Not just the obvious things like salt, nicotine and saturated fats, but the nastier things like pesticides, herbicides and synthetic hormones. You begin to wonder about lasting impacts from having these things floating around in your bloodstream for half a century. You start stopping at the organic produce sections in the supermarket before recoiling at the prices and moving on. You envision for a moment the residues coating the inside of your lungs before inhaling that cigar you're enjoying with your single malt scotch. As you sip that scotch you weigh more deliberately the wisdom of once again bathing your dwindling supply of brain cells in ethyl alcohol after an illspent youth devoted to drowning same in a broad spectrum of intoxicants.
Before you assume NBN is once again on a mission to bum you out, relax. All this middle-aged angst actually has a happy ending. We've discovered the curative powers of organic beef for middle-age anxiety over environmental health threats. Make no mistake, NBN has pounded down our share of Big Macs. Hey, we’re lugging it. But there’s this movie out called Food Inc. that will put the fear of food into you. This is must see TV for anyone with an aversion to auto-immune diseases. According to this movie, chicken, cows and pigs aren’t raised, these days, they’re cultivated with the same sort of chemical inducements discussed in Biodiversity News today. Without getting into all the gory details the movie does, we'll just say that movie definitely takes the fun out of Happy Meals. So, does that mean you shell out $1 each for organic bananas and $16 per-pound for grass fed beef?
Call it kismet, but just about the time NBN started weighing these unpleasant realities we discovered Tendercrop Farms. Five miles away there’s a market that sells grass-fed beef, free range poultry and whatever you do to pigs to help them lead a cleaner, happier life before being eaten. Contrary to popular belief, grass-fed steaks and other organic meats are not all lean and tasteless. On the contrary, every incarnation of muscle tissue Tendercrop sells is delicious, so far as we’ve eaten anyway. We ate this steak Sunday, it was slaughtered Friday. For all we know the day before that it was chowing down on clover thinking nice thoughts. This steak was every bit as delicious as it looks. There was blood in the plastic bag we carried the meat home in. No styrofoam cartons pressurized with oxygen that adds months onto the shelf life of steak.
We’re not being paid to promote Tendecrop. (In fact, we’re not being paid at all. Please see our Reader Services page to correct this travesty.) We’re just making a point: You can have your organic steak and eat it too. Just not as often as you used to enjoy the hormone-fed, antibiotic-injected, penned-up versions of meat supermarkets sell for a third the price. Those steaks can taste pretty dam good too. Who buys grass-fed organic steak for three times the price of the chemically enhanced version during these tough times? We do. In a perverse twist of logic, shopping at Tendercrop has become part of our new austerity plan. Here’s how it works. We’ve cut back to only eating meat once or twice a week. When we do, it’s usually a 1.5 inch rib eye or strip streak that costs about $10 each for a 12-ounce serving; A perfectly marbled, morsel of the grass fed fellow pictured two paragraphs up. Steak for us has become once again what it was when we were kids: a treat.
During the week we fill the void with various cereals covered with flax seed and left-overs climbing out of the Tupperware they’ve been sentenced to. On the weekends it’s Tendercrop bacon with free range eggs for breakfast and grass fed beef or day-boat haddock for dinner, usually with a side of some sort of chemically enhanced veggies. (We haven’t gone that organic, yet. We explain why in Popular Wisdom this week.) We’re not just doing this because we're slaves to good-tasting food that's good for you. We also are getting a little concerned about what stuff like Zeranol does to your immune system. Do we really want any more of these things clogging our capillaries and muddling our metabolism than absolutely necessary? Warning: This is where this cheery conversation turns a little dark.
Could there be a link between all these chemicals in our environment and the increase in autoimmune disease? Let’s indulge in completely reckless speculation for a moment. Is it possible all these complex chemicals are rolling through your blood stream like millions of little red flags setting off alarm bells for your immune system to attack? Could all these complex chemicals be wearing out your immune system the same way white sugar and wheat wear out your pancreas, giving you diabetes? There is also thought to be a connection between auto-immune diseases and cancer. While we wait for science to sort out some answers, it just seems like common sense to hedge our bets by consuming fewer chemicals. And, as all the above suggests, you can still enjoy a fine steak every once in a while. If you want to know what’s really in your Big Mac, check out this Mother Earth News piece.
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