Grillmaster's Meat Gift Collection

There’s a growing demand for meat from animals raised in better conditions. What hasn’t necessarily grown is our knowledge about what exactly makes those conditions “better” and how we can find the information to make informed buying decisions. Here are my top recommendations for what to look for.

My number one question is: Do the animals have enough space?

Confined animals get sick more easily because diseases spread quickly when animals are kept close together, so the solution is to pump them full of antibiotics. Confined animals fight with each other, so the solution is to physically alter them by doing something like clipping their teeth or beaks and docking their tails – they’re still going to fight, but now they’ll do less damage to each other. I could go on – the problems of packing too many animals in too little space are many.

You could ask about antibiotics and physical alterations and a bunch of other details. Or, you could ask if the animals have enough space to live as they please – ideally, outdoors on pasture. In some parts of the U.S., that may not be possible year round – harsh Michigan winters, for instance, aren’t the best for many animals. But asking “are the animals raised on pasture?” is a great place to start a conversation.

One note of caution: watch out for answers that dodge the question, like “Our animals have access to pasture” (translation: they live indoors and likely never go outside).

What labels are useful?

When you can’t ask your farmer or retailer directly, what should you look for on the label? A lot of claims sound good. However, many labeling terms don’t actually mean much for animal welfare, including common ones like Farm Fresh, All Natural, Hormone Free for poultry and pork, Cage Free, and Free Range. Even Organic means less than you might assume: it requires animals get organic-certified feed and prohibits antibiotics, but specifies little about how the animals are raised.

A few certifications that do indicate high welfare standards are the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), Certified Humane, and Animal Welfare Approved (AWA). For an in-depth look into dozens of labeling terms, check out the Resources section of agreenerworld.org.

When you buy a bottle of wine what factors do you consider? I’ll bet one is what grapes it’s made from. We expect that a Cabernet Sauvignon will taste different from a Pinot Noir or a Chardonnay.

How about when you buy a pork chop? Do you consider the breed of the pig? No? You’re not alone. Over the last half a century, the meat industry has selectively bred more and more standardized animals, taking the breed completely out of the consumer’s mind. Pork is pork, right? Well, maybe. The vast majority of the pork that you buy at the grocery today is likely to be a breed developed over the last few decades, so it’s all going to be pretty similar.

The current trend is towards speed over quality.

While we used to breed animals to be disease resistant, or good tempered, or hardy, or delicious, the current trend is toward one very particular trait: the ability to convert feed into meat as quickly as possible.

First, it happened with chicken. In 1925 it took fifteen weeks to grow a chicken that weighed 2.2 pounds. By 1990 you could grow the same chicken in about four weeks. The biggest cost to raising a chicken is the feed so the quicker you can raise a chicken the less feed you have to give it and the less expensive it is to raise. With the new, faster growing chickens, the slow growing chickens that had pecked around farms were economically obsolete. Within a few decades, dozens of centuries-old heritage breed chickens were almost extinct. They were replaced by a few new breeds. Chicken meat became cheap and suddenly the dream of a chicken in every pot became a reality. Well, maybe a McNugget in every bucket.

But there were a lot of tradeoffs. These chickens lost their disease immunity. Wo they started getting daily antibiotics in their feed. They grew too big too quickly for their skeletons to keep up causing them to have trouble moving around without fracturing bones. So they were jam packed into tiny cages that barely allowed them to move. And while the meat was plentiful, it was bland.

After seeing the financial success they had with developing new chickens meat executives turned their attention to pork. Today, commercial pigs grow faster and bigger than ever. Also, like chickens, the vast majority of modern pigs bear little resemblance to the breeds that were rooting around on farms 75 years ago.

Back then, pigs were raised both for their meat and for their fat. Did you know lard was the number one cooking fat in America until World War II? Then, during the war, lard was so important as a grease used in making explosives that advertising campaigns implored housewives to switch to using “more healthful” vegetable fats like margarine so that the lard could all be used in the war effort. Long before the Mediterranean Diet craze put the nail in lard’s coffin it was on its way out. The idea that animal fats were bad caught on. Farmers started breeding pigs to be leaner. The meat industry noticed that lean muscle developed much more quickly than more flavorful fat and that sped the changes along. Within a few decades pork became so lean and that it ended up being advertised as a stand-in for chicken.

The good news is that there are a handful of farmers out there who are still raising heritage breed pigs.

These are the same breeds that could have been raised by their grandparents. Here are a few that you may find on the market today, including Zingerman’s. They do taste different!

Berkshire: one of the most common heritage pigs today, Berkshire pork is tender and incredibly flavorful—you might call it especially “porky.” It’s a popular choice with chefs.

Duroc: first developed in New England around 1800, Duroc pork is earthy, nutty, bold, yet clean and juicy.

Ibérico Pata Negra: these are the famous pigs that root in the forests of southern Spain and eat the acorns to become Ibérico de Bellota. The meat is usually cured. When fresh it’s unbelievably rich and savory, almost like a cross between beef and pork.

Red Wattle: originally from New Orleans, Red Wattle pork has incredibly complex, herbaceous, subtly sweet flavor. Its prized fat melts in your mouth.

Tamworth: first developed in Ireland, and known for being one of the best breeds for bacon. The pork has sweet, nutty notes.

Cory Carman grew up in the Wallowa valley in eastern Oregon, the fourth generation on her family’s cattle ranch. On the wall in her office, she has a map of the surrounding land. She can point out which plots were purchased by her great-grandfather a century ago, and chart how the land was later split between uncles and cousins. Her grandmother, who lived ninety years on the ranch, probably knew the area better than anyone. As Cory describes it, “She had a profound knowledge of our land; where the water pooled when it rained, when the elk moved down, the hidden draws where the cows hid.”

Cory didn’t intend to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps and become a rancher.

Instead she left home, got a degree in environmental policy at Stanford, then spent a few years working on Capitol Hill and in LA. But fifteen years ago, she came home for a summer and saw that the ranch was struggling. She had always thought of the ranch as a sort of retirement project, but she saw that if she didn’t step up then, it might soon go under.

When she took the reins, Carman Ranch, like practically every other cattle ranch in Wallowa county (and in the US), relied on conventional methods. That included treating the grasses the cattle ate with plenty of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. When the calves were weaned—at about nine months old—they’d be sold at auction, then trucked off to feedlots. As Cory took stock of the situation, it was clear to her that those systems were unsustainable. The prairie grasses on the ranch were receding, and every year it was getting harder to support the herd of 300 cattle. At college Cory had done a work-study project on grass-fed beef; at the time, she only found 50 ranches attempting it in the US. Nevertheless, she felt passionately enough about it to convince her family to give it a shot.

Producing grass-fed beef is first and foremost about producing great grass.

The new system would use no fertilizers, limited irrigation, and regular, methodical movement of the herd onto small patches of grass, grazing the animals the way grasslands evolved with herds of elk or buffalo.

“When I first moved back and started changing the way we raised cattle on the ranch, my grandmother was really disappointed. She had grown up in pre-industrialized agriculture, and she saw a lot of the changes that happened during her life as a sign of progress. When I stopped using fertilizer and chemicals, she felt like we were going backwards,” Cory says. But before too long under Cory’s management, the grass bounced back, lush and bountiful.

The grass was only one part of the equation. The point of growing great grasses is to harness their nutrients via great beef. Doing so requires a deep knowledge of both grass and cattle. Cory can tell you all about the various components of grasses, and which parts contain more proteins or more carbohydrates, and how those components change as the grass grows. She uses that knowledge to put the right cattle on the right pastures. Younger cattle need more protein to build bones and muscle, so they benefit from grazing on younger grasses. As grass grows older and taller the proteins tend to die away, making those grasses better for older cattle that need more carbohydrates to help them put on fat. And all cattle do best on the richer, more varied grasses of the summer. When grass-fed cows are brought to market while the grass has little nutritional value, the beef is much tougher and chewier. Cory’s cattle spend their whole lives outdoors on Carman Ranch, eating the lush, bountiful prairie grasses. She only brings them to market between May and November, when the grasses are at their richest and the beef is at its most flavorful.

The results speak for themselves.

The beef is tender and juicy. The flavor tends to be a little earthier and more mineral, with a huge, robust beefiness. And it’s won over even the toughest of critics. “After I’d been back on the ranch for several years,” Cory remembers, “my grandmother finally looked at me and said, ‘you know, you’re doing it the way my mom did it.’ That was the best compliment she could have ever given us.”