I’m just a consumer, so what do I know?

 

Well, that’s not exactly the complete picture. I’m a consumer and food guy who has worked for one of the big all-natural meat companies in years past. People would call in and ask if the product was organic. It wasn’t. Just natural. No antibiotics. No feed additives. No hormones. These were humanely treated animals, but not organic. And that troubled a surprising number of people. It was as though “organic” in and of itself actually meant something.

 

Well, it depends. If a label tells me the product is organic according to standards set by Oregon TILTH, the grand daddy of all organic certification programs, I pay attention. All others, federal standards included if not most especially, pale. These are the standards set by committee, standards set by politics and compromise. The thing that’s overlooked too often with organic farming is the farmer. You can be a crappy organic farmer and that’s what your product’s going to be like, albeit crappy organic. You can be a cruel, ignorant organic farmer and mistreat your animals, but when they go to market they are certified organic.

 

For me organic means I am feeding the earth, because organic suggests sustainable farming practices. The farmer is growing topsoil as much as any crop, and isn’t poisoning the soil or the water table with pesticides, fumigants, and fertilizers. Or with manure loaded up with growth hormones and antibiotics. That’s the theory anyway.

 

So, I buy organic hamburger at the crazy-ass price of $4.89 a pound! I’d buy all-natural if Costco carried the product, but they don’t. If the meat is organic I am assuming the feed was organic, the farm wasn’t treated with any pesticides, fumigants, or chemical fertilizers, the feed lot isn’t sprayed with poison, the animals aren’t fed antibiotics and growth hormones to rapidly put on fat and muscle. Are they grass fed? Maybe. We hear grass fed and think of lovely Swiss alpine pastures. Grass fed is more likely a bale of hay tossed over the fence into the feed lot. But, if the animal’s organic then the hay should be organic too, and, like I say, that encourages healthy topsoil.

 

What I am not thinking about is how the animal is slaughtered. Unless the slaughterhouse is all-organic – and I have heard they exist, but only at an artisanal level, not commercial – there’s no telling what’s gone down the line or when. Fine, maybe a company has enough clout that all their organic animals are segregated and slaughtered together after the entire line has been scrubbed down, and maybe the slaughter practices are as humane as can be made possible. But there’s nothing in organic certification that says it’s so. And don’t be thinking about prions, those renegade proteins that set you up for Mad Cow Disease. They may not be in that organic beef when it arrives at the abbatoir. But no manner of scrubbing and sterilizing the slaughter line gets rid of rogue prions. They aren’t bacterial. They aren’t viral.

 

Put “daily beef slaughter” in your search engine of choice and you get the national figures. Last week well over a half million cattle were slaughtered. One week. Most of those animals grow up on feed lots on a diet of drugs and hormones, standing around in piles of manure. There’s a feed lot like that just off Interstate 5 half way between Los Angeles and Sacramento. You can smell it long before you can see it. The locals call it “Cowschwitz”. Farther south, however, down closer to Bakersfield, is the other side of the story, a mega dairy with thousands upon thousands of head of milking cows. Not organic, and just as smelly. Milk cows, however, are held to a higher standard. If they have to be put on an antibiotic to treat infection, their milk can’t be added to the daily take. So there’s a little extra care involved. They can be pumped with hormones that force them to produce more milk than would be normal. So by the time a milk cow has done her do she has burned all the fat out of her system. No steaks there. No standing rib roasts. Just hamburger. And it is so lean, when they grind milk cows they have to add in fat.

 

One of the salmonella strains that causes so much trouble, forcing recalls of millions of pounds of hamburger everyone has probably already eaten by the time the recall is in effect, is most common in the dairy herd. When I buy organic hamburger I am thinking the chances are pretty good I am not getting ground up milk cows that have seen better days. I might be wrong. What do I know? All I am is a consumer.

 

I could, of course, stop eating beef. But for now…..