Got Beef?

The recent recall of millions of pounds of beef reminded me of an experience I had the first week of my marriage. I was twenty years old and had always eaten beef from grass-fed cattle raised by my family--my father, grandfather, uncles, and friends of the family. In the sixties and seventies, my family and some of their friends ran a couple hundred head of cattle on government land in the marshes of Old and Lost Rivers, located about midway between Beaumont, Texas, and Houston, along the I-10 corridor. And we usually had a few head of cattle on our small plot of country land, maybe a mama cow or two and three or four calves whose future was our freezer.

Flush with money we had received as wedding gifts, my husband and I went shopping for the ingredients of our first home-cooked meal as newly-weds. We purchased some packaged ground beef. I don't remember what particular dish I was preparing, but I do remember my shocked response to the meat as I began to brown it in a skillet. It smelled funny. It looked funny. It looked nothing like the meat I had eaten up to this time.

I called my husband into the kitchen. "I think this meat is spoiled," I said. "It smells awful."

Tom looked at the meat, leaned forward to sniff it, and then started laughing. "Anita," he said, "there's nothing wrong with this meat. It's just not your daddy's grass-fed beef. This is what store-bought beef looks like. The cattle are kept in pens and fed grain to fatten them. So the meat's got a lot of fat in it."

I've had my share of hamburgers and restaurant-prepared beef dishes since then, but over the years my father continued to supply us with meat. One of my favorite dishes for years was fried steak served with rice, homemade gravy, and shallots fresh from my father's garden. However, in the mid-90s, Tom stopped eating red meat, stunned by his father's early death from heart disease. Now he is a vegetarian, and I only eat red meat when I'm visiting my parents, whose small, seventy-five acre farm can support the twenty or so head of cattle they raise, mostly Brahman cattle. My parents' freezer is always full of meat from grass-fed cattle, fish my sister and her husband catch in the Sam Rayburn reservoir, and shrimp caught by a distant cousin who shrimps in the Gulf of Mexico. And my father maintains a huge garden of vegetables, fruit trees, and sugar cane.

Most Americans, however, not only do not know the source of their food; they don't even think of where their food originates until some big news item such as the beef recall catches their attention--briefly. And that's a shame. We should be concerned with more than the safety of our food supply. We should be concerned with the ethics of our food supply. If we are going to eat meat, we should think about how the animals are raised and treated, what the animals are fed, how the animals are slaughtered.

If only Americans would remain outraged long enough to initiate serious changes in how that hamburger meat gets from the cow penned up and pumped up with antibiotics, to the slaughter house, to the supermarket, to the family's meal of Hamburger Helper. Of course, when people begin to think about the ethics of their food supply (just type the phrase "the ethics of eating meat" into Google and note the results), the responses and discussion can be very wide ranging. But at least the participants are thinking.

Other Voices:

A veterinarian's view of the use of antibiotics in beef cattle, in Cattle Today

"The Ethics of Eating Meat: A Radical View", by Charles Eisenstein (the Yoga of eating)

Grass-fed cattle, on Atlantic.com: "Back to Grass," by Corby Kummer

"Chew the Right Thing," a Mother Jones interview with Peter Singer, bioethicist and author of Animal Liberation

Michael Pollan, "An Animal's Place," on Peter Singer, vegetarianism, and "conscious" meat-eating