Two very recent articles regarding mah bidness, grass-fed cattle, have generated a few emails to me. The first one from Slate.com regarding e-coli ...and the second from the NYT blog, Freakonomics.
Both articles were pretty piss-poor reporting and neither dealt with a myth ...so I can easily understand the confusion.
The Slate article concerned itself with the question: "is grass-fed beef safer than factory-beef?" Good question ...but the article was confusing as hell. To the author's credit, it seemed to me to be a situation where the editor was pushing him to "Punch it up! Call it a MYTH!" For the edification of all a youse, there's really not much reason to think that grass-fed cows have any different bacteria in their intestines than factory cows. The only way those bugs get into the actual meat we eat, however, is during careless slaughter (a word that did not even appear in the article) usually driven by frantic meatpackers flogged ever-forward by shareholders seeking ever-greater returns. Grass-fed beef in the US, being an expensive boutique product, probably receives more careful slaughtering practices ...but not necessarily.
A few days later, the freakonomics blog in the NYT setup yet another strawman to knock down in their "A Myth of Grass-fed Beef" ...where no myth existed. Apparently, people are telling the author that cows ate grass early last century. Or maybe they keep taunting him tales of cows not eating corn way back when ...or something, it's not exactly clear. Whatever it is they're telling him, it pisses him off!
When you read weirdness like this, don't freak, don't wonder, just take it to the Yanq.
Lemme tell ya, cows love corn, always have, always will:
Little boy blue, come blow your horn.
The sheeps in the meadow.
The cows in the corn.
What cows don't love is standing and lying in their own shit and the shit of all the other cows, with no room to walk, being pumped with antibiotics, and eating NOTHING BUT CORN. Well, sometimes they get the dumpster residue from cookie and potato chip companies and crap like that.
Cows love a balanced diet. So much so that we get our word "grazing", as in buffet tables, from COWS! That's a cow word. Don't take my word for it... ask Negrita!
If you were to watch our cows in a fine pasture, you would see them seemingly wandering everywhere for the different grasses that they think are the tastiest (kinda like the rumaki always disappears first at the buffet.) Then, they all stroll around eating their second-favorites, and so on.
If there is corn there, they will munch it happily. But given the option, they won't eat corn exclusively. Cows love a balanced diet and they know instinctively that they will die if they eat nothing but corn (the feedlot operators know that ...that's why they kill the cows as quickly as possible.) My cows live for 3 years in paradise ...rather than confinement feedlot cows that live only about a year.
Send yer cow questions to:
letters@yanquimike.com.ar
No comments:
Post a Comment