In my last blog post, I wrote about what pasture raised means. This may seem like a minor detail to some but I promise that it is not. I have written about this in the past here and here. I promised at the end of my last post to suggest some things to know and questions to ask before purchasing meat.
- You should strive, whenever possible, to know the farmer that produces your food. Having a personal relationship with that farmer allows you to get to know them and get a feel for if you trust them. Most local farmers would be happy to show you around their farm. Websites like local harvest is a great place to see what farms are around you though it is obviously an incomplete list.
- Ask questions about how the animal lived, where they were housed, and what kind of feed they ate. These are the most basic questions in determining the quality of the meat you are buying. Were the animals raised on pasture? Did they ever receive any antibiotics or hormones? Were they fed a species appropriate diet with no GMOs? You value eating quality meat because you know how important it is to your health, the same principle holds when it comes to the quality of what your food ingests.
- Listen for explanations that don’t make sense or it seems like the farmer is dancing around something. Unfortunately, misleading language is very common in the food space. For instance, access to the outdoors does not necessarily mean they live outdoors. There is a grocery store chain in the health food space that has a six tier system for grading the quality of chicken. The problem is that their definition of pasture raised doesn’t involve movement. By my definition, that is not pasture raised. When it comes to food labels, they are very commonly manipulated, I wrote about that here.
I say none of this to scare anybody but I do want people to be aware. There are people out there who use buzzwords to increase their profits without living up to those standards and I hate to see people ripped off. The good news is that there are options out there to get the quality that you desire, you just have to know what you’re looking for. If anybody has any questions or suggestions for this topic or any other, please leave a comment or email me at baileyfamilyfarmtn@gmail.com.