I’m just getting back from a lovely week long vacation from school and am reinvigorated for all things food and agriculture related.  So…last post we looked at the benefits of grass-fed beef over corn-fed.  This post I want to discuss the differences between beef from free-range cattle versus those in confinement.

Definition:

Free-range is a surprisingly open term.  Steve Gold of Murray’s Chickens in The United States of Arugula relates a story about trying to pin down the definition of the term by calling the USDA, “The government told us it’s whatever Larry Forgione* says it is.”  Not the most exact of definitions.

However, despite a lack of government regulation of the term, you’re still likely to see it pasted to all manner of products at the grocery store.  Milk, beef, chicken, and eggs are all candidates for the “free-range” label (personally I’m waiting for someone to try boosting sales of celery with a “free-range” label.)

Ignoring for the moment the fact that no egg in history has ranged freely, what do producers mean us to believe when they apply a sticker proclaiming a product to be free-range and what should we actually take from such a label?

Okay, it’s not quite as open a term as I first led you to believe, but it’s close.  The USDA does regulate free-range labeling when the labels are applied to chicken that has been raised specifically for meat.  According to the USDA, in order for a farmer to label a chicken as free-range, that chick must have “access to the outdoors.”

However, as Michael Pollan pointed out in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, farmers can raise chickens in confinement for the majority of their lives and then open the doors of their cage just a few weeks before slaughter.  Then they just keep their fingers crossed that the chickens have learned to stay inside.  Another option that has been used are “sun balconies,” which allow chickens to step outside and view the outdoors, but never venture into the great wild.

For other meats such as beef and pork, the USDA has no specific definition of the term free-range.  Any farmer can put this label on anything, rendering it meaningless for the consumer.  Because the free-range definition only applies to chickens raised for meat, the same problem is true of eggs labeled free-range or cage-free.

Why Free-Range?

What if the world were perfect and free-range really meant something.  What if, for the sake of argument, it meant that cows could wander around grassy knolls, grazing where they pleased?  Why would beef from cattle that were raised free-range be better than that of cows who were raised in confinement?

Well, for one thing the meat would be naturally leaner.  This is pretty logical.  Think, for example, of a secretary who sits at a desk all day and compare her lifestyle with that of a postwoman who walks from house to house delivering mail.  Which of these women would you expect to have a higher percentage of fat in her body?  It’s the same for cows.  Cows that are confined don’t get to exercise and burn off excess calories.  This produces marbling, which can be very tasty, but it’s also why the beef we eat today is less healthful than beef from 60 years ago when free-range was the standard rather than the exception.

Also, free-ranging cows are likely to be grass-fed (at least in part).  This means that all those health benefits I mentioned in my last post come into play.  Less saturated fat, more Omega-3s, and a better ratio of Omega-3s to Omega-6s.  Cows eating grass is a good thing, and when you have cows wandering over grass they tend to eat it.

Aside from the health benefits (or at least a smaller number of detriments) of free-range beef, there are also animal welfare and environmental effects to consider.

Cows who are free-range tend to live longer lives than those raised in confinement.  This is because as they exercise, their weight gain is kept to a slower rate than that of a cow who stands in place all day.  Since you don’t make a profit slaughtering a cow until it reaches a certain weight, the free-range cows live longer.

Their lengthier lives being happier is more difficult to defend.  How do you know if a cow is happy? Cows raised in confinement get all the food they want and don’t even have to walk to the dining room to get it.  But somehow, I tend to think that animals are happiest when they get to do things that resemble what they evolved to do.  Cows evolved to lumber around and chomp on grass.  I feel better knowing the beef on my plate came from a cow that at least got to do that.

The environment is even more tricky because it’s both a matter of how you raise the cows and the scale on which you raise them.  Large scale meat production is bad for the environment.  Period.  However, one of the benefits of a free-range system is that it’s harder to increase in scale.  It’s one thing to have 10,000 cows in a confinement pen, it’s another to buy the amount of land you need to let 10,000 cows roam around, and another altogether to herd those cows when they’ve eaten all the grass and fertilized all the earth in a specific plot of land.

Some research seems to show that the type of fertilization provided by roaming cows (cow pats) is better for a diverse system of grasses than homogenized fertilizers.  However, the scientific evidence is by no means conclusive.  Either way, too much fertilization is a bad thing.  If the land can’t absorb it, it gets carried away by rain and damages water systems.  Free-range might be part of the solution, but smaller numbers of beef cattle are a much bigger part of that solution.

The Last Word:

Producers no doubt hope that we will walk away from a steak labeled “free-range” imagining a beautiful grassy expanse full of comfortably grazing cattle who roam where they will.  But we know to be skeptical.  I think knowing your farmer is pretty important in general, but if you choose to eat meat I think it’s doubly so.  If you know where your meat comes from then you know if the free-range label on it is bunk of not.

Next up: Organic, and what it means in terms of meat.

 

For Larry Forgione, Owner and operator of the River Café in New York, free-range chicken was chicken that had been allowed to run around someone’s yard.