One of the aspects of our small-scale grass-fed beef operation that we enjoy is connecting directly with our customers and showing them our farm and cattle. It’s been our experience that people enjoy seeing where their food is coming from and meeting the people (us!) who are producing it.
But it is far more often the case that answering the question “where does your grass-fed beef come from?” is difficult to answer. One might reasonably assume that the packaging would tells us where it was raised and processed, but in most cases that isn’t true. In fact, it’s quite rare to know your food’s origins.
Misleading Labeling
Surprisingly about 85% of the grass-fed beef sold in the United States is imported, mostly from South America, New Zealand, or Australia. Part of why this is so surprising is that you’ve probably not seen this indicated on the labeling; the grass-fed beef you find at the supermarket is almost always going to say ‘Product of the USA’. The corporations importing the beef only need to further process (that is, cut or grind) and re-package it to be allowed the official USDA ‘Product of the USA’ stamp.
This wasn’t always the case, though. In 2015, Congress repealed what are known as Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) requirements for pork and beef. No longer do importers need to tell you what country their beef or pork came from.
Mixed Meat
Ground beef presents another level of difficulty because of the way its processed in large meat-packing facilities. The meat of hundreds of animals are ground together. Even a single hamburger patty can contain meat from a hundred or more cows. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a hamburger made from multiple animals, but it does make it impossible even for the distributor to know where the meat in that hamburger is from.
Without knowing the origin of one’s food, one cannot know how that food was raised. Were the cattle really all-grass fed on pasture and not just given grass-pellets in a feed lot? How were the animals treated? Were they given lots of antibiotics? What impact did the grazing practices have on the soil? Were the farmers paid a fair price?
When you buy directly from a farm, these kinds of questions become easy to answer.
