Beef Recall: Another reason to be a locavore

There is a beef recall in 11 Western states for potential E. Coli contamination. Eating locally grown, grassfed beef can all but eliminate your exposure to E.Coli, as E.Coli is a scary and dangerous side effect of the industrial food chain. As described (much more eloquently!) by Michael Pollan in his article "Power Steer":

Most of the [E. Coli] microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids—and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection. Yet this process can be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, has discovered that switching a cow's diet from corn to hay in the final days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a change, however, is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.

I'm convinced that I should not eat or feed my family meat grown industrially, and to that end, I sought out locally grown, pastured, organic beef. There are a number of ranches in the Bay Area, including Morris Grassfed Beef, Marin Sun Farms (found locally at Country Sun), Chileno Valley Ranch.

You can find grassfed meats in your area here.

I've bought a a quarter of a cow from Chileno Valley Ranch. Our beef, organically pastured with no antibiotics or added hormones, is being picked up next Saturday and should last us for the next year. I learned only recently that beef is a seasonal product; feedlot beef is not seasonal and can be "dispatched" any time of year.

Grassfed beef is more expensive than the industrially grown beef found in grocery stores (our quarter of the cow is roughly $5/lb., or $430 for a 90 lb. quarter, plus butchering fees), but Mr. Pollan explains how the true cost of industrial beef is much higher than the price tag on the grocery store shrink wrap:

And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not cheap at all, when you add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.