Why would you buy the cow.....

When I started to write this post I had one simple goal...well maybe not a simple goal, but ONE goal: to encourage beef eaters to shop with local grass-feeding ranchers in a thoughtful, sustainable way.


Other issues soon bubbled up as I attempted to write: Why would you even try to find local grass-fed beef? Readers would need to know the difference between corn-fed beef and grass-fed beef, an explanation of why we feed corn to cows (below), the definition of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the various atrocities of CAFOs, and the scads of social, environmental, and health benefits of choosing to eat grass-fed beef.

Since I'm particularly opposed to our oppressive monocrop of field corn, I felt compelled to address corn feed. I'm going leave the rest of the research to my industrious readers based on the links embedded in the above paragraph. But there are simpler reasons to go local.

When I buy local beef, I have all of the above information in mind, but I have two simple reasons for going local: I like farmers, and I like animals. It makes me feel good to support farmers I've gotten to know at farmers markets and through my work. And I have peace of mind because I know that these farmers treat their livestock humanely. I've seen it with my own eyes, and so can you. When you're buying local, you have the miraculous advantage of being able to visit the farms where your food was raised, and even butchered....if you want.

A couple of weeks ago, Jeremy Parker of Missouri Grass Fed Beef near Salem, MO spoke at a dinner for Slow Food St. Louis. On Jeremy's farm they manage 930 acres of gorgeous rolling pasture, and about 100 head of cattle. He and his two brothers work hard building fences and planting red clover hay, timothy, orchard, grass, alfalfa and other pasture so that they can rotate the cattle and crops sustainably.

You can find Missouri Grass Fed Beef at Local Harvest Grocery, Baumann's Fine Meats, the Maplewood Farmer's Market, Tower Grove Farmer's Market, and a small smattering of restaurants in the St. Louis area. Out of towners can always find excellent local food information in the Local Harvest Database.

Local livestock faces more challenges than other industries in the home foodshed. Small-scale ranches and butchers are having trouble staying in business. Giants like Tyson and Smithfield are dominating the meat market, and they have in-house butchers. The number of small-scale butchers has almost halved since 1992.

For farmers like Jeremy, there's another problem. Customers desire prime muscle cuts: rib eyes, strip steaks, porterhouses, t-bones, and filet mignon. With a hundred cattle per season, lets assume he's butchering between 5 and 25 cattle at a time - depending on demand. If he's butchering 5 cattle, that's only a handful of the aforenamed cuts, so what happens to the rest of the meat?

Jeremy solves this problem by selling only whole and half animals. If his customer (often a restaurant or small grocer) can't handle at least half an animal, it doesn't make financial sense for him to split it up. Once, as a favor to a local chef, he butchered several animals himself so that he could provide a slew of choice cuts for an event, but he swears he'll never do that again. He would prefer to see a restaurant serve a number of different cuts in one evening the way that they do in parts of Europe and South America.

Sadly, many cattle ranchers end up selling these less sought-after cuts at a much lower price, or turn them into processed foods for pennies on the dollar. That setup puts those farmers in a very precarious financial situation ... they're taking a significant loss.

People who live in farm areas are more likely to know what to do with the other cuts. My Aunt and Uncle give away parcels like tongue and liver to people they know happen like them. But in the city, it tends to be a different story. According to Shannon Hayes of Sap Bush Hollow farm in upstate New York, "To sustain local agriculture, consumers need to have a basic understanding of how to work with each of the different parts of the animal so they can make meal planning decisions based on what the farmer has in stock, not what the recipe featured in the latest cooking magazine tells us we have to run out and buy." Ms. Hayes has written two cookbooks addressing the issue "Farmer and the Grill" and "Grassfed Gourmet." I plan to break out the pressure pan, and imagine the possibilities. It always amazes me how eating local or eating heirloom varieties has me trying more new foods than eating in the global food system ever did.

While I was working along Ms. Hayes' public education, and my Aunt and Uncle's coop lines of thinking, a colleague had another idea. Bill Burge is a co-leader of Slow Food St. Louis, and a food critic who has gotten to know a number of socially conscious chefs through his work. Bill's idea is to get restaurants teamed up together so that Niche, for example, would get all of the prime muscle cuts, while the rest of the beeve could be ground into hamburger meat and sold to a bar or family restaurant that could make things like meatloaf and burgers.

So...I throw it back to you. What about the restaurant idea? Do you know of cafes, bistros, brasseries, or diners on either end of the spectrum that might want to participate? And what about you? Would you cook cuts of meat that you hadn't attempted before? I'm not necessarily talking about the liver and tongue, but what about chuck, shoulder or brisket? Would you give'em a shot?