What’s The Beef With Beef?

I love beef.

Nothing satisfies like a prime cut of beef tenderloin, especially if it’s sauteed in fresh garlic and butter…

except Beef Wellington.

I grew up eating beef…and lots of it. Our freezer was full of steaks, soup bones, roasts, short ribs and ground beef.

I remember a time when we kids would say, “Not steak again today!” People at school thought we were crazy!

So, you get the gist that we ate beef alot. And so did my folks. However no one in my family had or has had heart disease. No one has high cholesterol.

So why the bad rap for beef?

Well it doesn’t help when wellness guru’s bash beef as though it has always been a pariah.

It hasn’t.

Even though I cringe when I think of it now, my father used to love to eat that rim of fat on his porterhouses.

Still no heart disease.

Again, why the beef with beef?

Well, let’s first defer to your ancestors. But since I don’t know your ancestors, let’s start with mine.

My “people” were of the land. Yes, there were agrarian. They also fished and hunted buffalo. A new generation walked the land and grew their own food, raised chickens, hogs and cattle.

They fed their cattle grass and topped it off prior to slaughter with grains, namely corn. Most of what they raised would be considered “prime” beef by even yesteryear’s standards.

How do I know that?

Many moons ago when I was a kid, my father taught me how to pick meat from the local grocer. I once made a mistake, buying a “marbled” piece, and boy did I get it. My father stated that he did not work hard for me to waste his money on fat in the meat.

Fat IN the meat was considered poor quality beef.

Back then, there was no Choice, no Select grade. There was only one grade – prime. Back then, people were coming from the farms into the cities. They were used to their own high quality foodstuff and their high quality organic beef.

Supermarkets were a new animal. They had their own butcher shops. To get a prior farm boy to buy their meats, the quality had to be similar. And it was EASY when there was only one high quality organic grade…beef that was grassfed and very lean.

Otherwise that same farm boy would have done what my father did – just go and buy 1/4 to 1/2 of a cow from a farmer who raised their cattle like they did, have it butchered and put it in the freezer.

Fast forward to today.

Today, agribusiness controls farming and ranching on a huge scale. Now “yield” is the mantra of the cattleman. So steers are shot up with growth hormones to make them get bigger faster.

They are also shot up with antibiotics to help them live longer and fight off disease, protecting the cattleman’s investment.

Both of these practices have resulted in problems for your health. Look at women who are carrying weight more in the torso like men (this carries a much higher incidence of not only heart disease but cancer) – could this be due the steroids that are being injected into the steers?

And resistant bacteria is not just a problem with cattle. We’re seeing that also in people with physician overprescription of antibiotics. So now there’s a parallel in your food. Only it will make you sick!

Very sick.

We won’t even talk about the old practice of adding ‘color’ to ground beef to have it appear redder.

You are what you eat…and you are what what you eat EATS! Make no mistake about that.

Cattle, cows, steers, whatever you want to call them – they are herbivores; they were meant to eat grass. Today, all sorts of atrocities are happening with the food chain; deliberate atrocities. Alot of disgusting stuff is making its way into the feed. Feeding cows ground up animal carcasses is insanity (wonder where Mad Cow came from?). Cows do not possess the necessary machinery to digest animal matter of any kind. Their stomachs cannot digest animal products. So they retain the residues, poisons and diseases IN all of this stuff.

And YOU eat it.

All cows eat grass – everyone USED to know that!

Now not all beef is “made” this way…not all beef is tainted (just the majority of what is found in most grocery stores). I live in agribusiness central and I cannot eat the beef in my local grocery store. It smells funny and tastes ‘different’ in a bad sort of way. There is no organic meat in the store. So for me to find organic beef is to find an organic rancher through word of mouth.

And you must define organic.

The last time I asked, my friends told me they grew their steers organically. I then asked if they shot them up with growth hormone. “Of course,” they said. “You have to do that to get them to grow!” Mistakenly, they thought that all residue from this would ‘wash out’ of the meat by slaughter time.

Fat chance! That’s where the residues concentrate.

So what “is” the problem with beef?

Chemical beef.
Antibiotics in the beef.
Feed given to the beef.

So it isn’t beef that’s bad – it’s the stuff that is being fed and injected into the beef that’s bad…which make eating it bad for you.

Very bad.

One solution is to only buy organic beef. In the east, you can buy from the Amish. In many of the western states, organic beef can be found in your neighborhood grocery store.

And boy is it good!

Or you can join a food co-op and share buying in bulk.

Another option is Bison! Bison do not like to be handled and they are naturally lean. I recommend Montana buffalo and Alberta buffalo as both were mild tasting. I’ll work on a list of some mailorder vendors for organic beef and list them here for you shortly.

So, yes, you can still enjoy a good organic grassfed prime steak with a clear conscious just as long as you remember this mantra:

“All Cows Eat Grass!”
Pass on the injections please.

cheryl
aka Dr. J
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