Reality Bites
Do you recall a time before beef recalls? As an organic grass-fed farmer, I know the origin of 0157:H7, the e-coli bug that is the source of nearly every beef recall in the past decade. Yet I’m still shocked and amazed that the American public has no idea at all why beef is recalled and still most people associate beef recalls with human contamination, like not washing your hands and haven’t a clue what’s in their half pounder.
I was visiting a local diner the other day when I offered to provide the owner our safe grass-fed organic beef. I would have never offered, it’s just not the kind of place that can understand organic, but he had a disclaimer on the menu about how eating his hamburgers rare can cause you to become ill. He bragged to me about how he’s still the only place in town that serves them rare. Every day at lunch, he fires his loaded gun into the crowd. “Never had a problem,” he said. Never been sued is probably more accurate. People often don’t realize when they’ve been infected. A bladder infection, a stomach flu, how in the world does he know?
When I asked the owner if he wanted to serve a beef that had very little to no chance of causing e-coli infection, like all completely grass-fed beef (I was prepared to meet his price of his cheap meat, just to stop him), he raved about the company that he uses for his rare wonderful hamburgers. This company he uses sells irradiated beef after having two of the Nation’s largest beef recalls in history in 2000 and 2001. Watching him try to convince me how wonderful his beef was seemed surreal. I had no idea how many people still have no idea how contaminated their meat is. C’mon!
Jack in the Box e-coli beef sickened over 600 hundred and killed children 15 years ago. Don’t tell me you don’t know there’s a problem. Below is my dose of reality. Once you read it, if you continue to eat conventional beef, well, you’re just avoiding reality.
It seems that nearly two decades in the field of organics has put me out of the conventional loop. Persistent ignorance and avoidance of reality, unless it’s fake reality TV, is what the United States is becoming known for. Sadly the truth is that conventional food is about as real as the last episode of Survivor. I read recently in USA TODAY that processed meat is a key culprit in the link to cancer. The suggestion? Limit your red meat intake. Absurd. It’s like suggesting to limit your water intake because we found it contains hundreds of chemicals and bacteria, so only drink a little poison. People filter their water, they are so concerned about the quality they pay millions. Turn on your meat filters people! Demand clean, grass-fed and organic meats. PROCESSED is the key word and culprit, not the meat. We need to separate the adjective from the objective.
Here are my Top 10 Reality Burger Facts.
1) All humans and cows have e-coli, that is true, however beef recalls are caused almost all the time by 0157:H7, a form of e-coli caused by force feeding fed lot cattle so that their stomach acid rises to a level where this bacterium is present. It makes humans ill because it is stronger than what our bodies can fight off. It didn’t exist until modern times and if you take an infected cow and put it on an organic all grass-fed facility, it will normally be rid of the bug in about 30 days.
2) Corn is not what cows are supposed to eat. Cows eat grass. They are not designed to eat corn, although it does cause them to be fat, but I’ll get to that later.
3) Corn consumption causes cows to have gas, methane is what they call it. Methane clouds are caused by feed lots.
4) 90% of the conventional hamburgers that are eaten are not beef cattle; the meat comes from dairy cattle that haven’t produced enough milk in the last couple of days so they were yanked from their spot at the milk station where they’ve been standing in their own feces for the past months and turned into burgers. YUMMY.
5) One family farm each hour in the United States disappears forever. There are five million less family farms than there were in the 1950’s. http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/familyfarms
6) Almost all the conventional beef served in the United States comes from less than 10% of the farms.
7) In the 1950’s we had about 19 million dairy cows to produce the milk we needed for our relatively small population. Today the United States has about 8 million dairy cows and produces an overabundance of milk for 300 million people, but of course they’re not using growth stimulants. Come on folks. Do the math; our daughters don’t need to be mature at 9 years old. Our children are eating the hamburgers made from these dairy cows, not happy cows from cattle farms. It’s simply not true and ignoring the truth won’t make the beef any better for your children. Buy grass-fed organic beef. If you stop eating beef, you just will feed your children more non-organic pesticide dipped produce which will still cause hormone disruption. There simply is no way around this. There are only two options here; ignore the truth or change.
8) Fat comes from corn, fat makes estrogen. Fat from animals, saturated fat, clogs arteries. Our USDA grades our beef on how much fat it has; the more fat, the better grade it gets. Just how absurd that is in a country with rampant heart disease is just too much for me. Next, they’ll be spraying our beef in the production line with Lipitor instead of making farmers do the right thing.
9) Corn is not good for cows. Corn is bad for cows. We are growing more corn that we ever have in this country and almost none of it is going to end up as biodiesel. The real truth is that corn uses tons of our fresh water and that 75% of our fresh water is used for crops. We need to worry about water, not just oil and wake up to the fact that more pesticides are used to make corn than just about anything else. Alternative fuel? How about not using the car so much? We don’t need to fire up the car every time we have to have a coffee or go to the dollar store. Just how ridiculous is this going to get? Millions of dollars are going to already rich farmers as corn subsidies so that we can talk about biodiesel. It’s simply not true.
10) The last reality is one that we at Rosas Farms challenge anyone to answer. We own and operate an all grass-fed certified organic farm. We raise our own beef.
I can’t make a 99 cent burger. Hmmmm.
