Pasture Perfect by Jo Robinson
When I visited the Buckeye Highlands farm of Max and Mary VanBuren a month or so ago, it was the first time I stopped and thought about where the food that I cook comes from. Like most Americans, I think about food production hardly at all, unless I find that my local mega-mart is out of something that I want. But my eyes were opened at that point, and I now refuse to close them.
Pasture Perfect, by Jo Robinson, could easily be categorized as an infomercial about grass-fed everything; beef, lamb, poultry, even bison. But that easy categorization would be an oversimplification. Her detailed description, in chapter 3 (Down on the Pharm), of a typical factory chicken farm actually made me nauseous. I never want to eat factory-raised chicken again.
I expected the book to be a series of plugs for her website, eatwild.com, but she avoided mentioning the website until the last chapter of text, which is about where to buy grass-fed meats and dairy. The final six chapters are filled with recipes, many of which are from many of the farms that the author visited during her research.
The terrifying things that I learned from this book are really too numerous to mention; but here’s one ridiculous thing; did you know that a study was done to find out if feeding cattle STALE BUBBLE GUM would be a good thing? Turns out that bubble gum factories give away stale gum by the truckload; a cheap and easy way to feed the cattle, right? Yuck.
In the preface, she tells a story about giving a speech for about 500 cattle ranchers in 1999. She had written a precursor to the book that was for sale after the speech; when she announced that fact during the question & answer session, about half of her audience left to begin lining up to purchase the book. People become evangelical about grass-fed after one taste; ranchers like it because it means that they can make more money, and it is more environmentally responsible.
The problem seems to me to be that people who are concerned about things like this will read this book and books like it; those who really NEED to be informed about these topics won’t pick it up, which is really a shame.
