Organic grass-fed beef is not only so much better for you, it also tastes infinitely better than what is considered beef these days. Everyone loves burgers and a sizzling steak, but the quality of our domestic beef has plummeted over the last forty years as factory farming has taken hold across the continent.
In the past, hamburgers became popular because they tasted great. Thick and dense with nutrients, they literally melted in your mouth. One burger was so good that it was totally satisfying on its own. Why did they taste so good then? It is not pure nostalgia. They literally tasted better because the norm forty years ago was organic grass-fed meat. Did you know that cattle are not built to eat grain and that they literally get sick if they are given too much? It’s pure biology, but at some point grain and corm farmers discovered that feeding grain to young cattle made them grow faster and heavier. It seemed like a good thing.
Today, cattle are routinely transferred from their natural pasture to grain when they are less than 18 months old. At that age they are already abnormally fat and almost ready for their “grain finisher”. Young cattle are saturated with hormones almost from birth. At 45 days of age, the factory-raised young calf is started on steroids and hormones. One steroid in particular is called trenbolone acetate, an anabolic steroid or tissue-building drug. If Barry Bonds uses this drug, he is kicked out of the league, but all the meat eaters are taking this second hand drug.
At 45 days, a pellet containing this or other steroids is implanted in the calf’s ear, which, combined with hormones, such as estrogen, can increase the calf’s daily weight gain by as much as 20 percent. Instead of absorbing nutrients slowly and naturally over time like organic, grass-fed beef does, factory-raised calves are fed grain feed laced with antibiotics, causing them to grow much faster.
If you’ve tried organic grass-fed beef, you know it’s dense, juicy, and delicious. Factory-fed beef has muscles surrounded by fat, inflated by androgens. The meat is pale and watery. In fact, the meat from these cattle is often not even safe to eat.
Those pellets, for example, are supposed to be inserted near the back of the ear, which is removed before processing. But, the implant is often accidentally embedded in the cartilage, crushed, bunched up, missing or abscessed. So where do the granules go? If ground into meat, they are even dangerous, capable of creating a host of human diseases and conditions, including low thyroid, enlarged prostate, male pattern baldness, random female hair growth, and many more too horrible to count.
If you love beef, your choice is simple: organic, grass-fed beef. Cattle naturally raised on grassy fields surrounded by their herd and allowed for the slower process of natural maturation produce meat that is not only delicious, but packed with good grass-fed nutrients.