I’ve been craving meat lately. Normally my diet includes lots of veggies, quite a few mushrooms, a fair amount of rice and pasta, and a smattering of meats. Once or twice a week Sam and I will have a dinner based around a piece of fish or pork. When I’m feeling really industrious I roast us a chicken. Right now though…I want beef.

Since eating beef is a rare occurrence for me can afford to spring for the really good stuff. The beef I buy is grass-fed, free range, certified organic beef (or beef that isn’t certified organic but from a local farmer I know). Given my current craving, I decided to write about why I think this set of standards justifies the price you pay at the store. Each of these topics can be rather in-depth, so I’m going to break this up into three separate posts rather than one enormous one. I’ll save free-range and USDA certified organic for later and focus on grass-fed this time.

Grass Fed

First off, the domestic cow we know has very little in common in stature and disposition with the aurochs they are descended from. According to Anne Mendelson in her intriguing book Milk, autochsen bulls could be as tall as six feet at the shoulder; weighed over 3000 pounds; and had enormous, sweeping horns. The one thing these dangerous giants did have in common with our modern steers was their diet: grass.

Cattle have evolved to live off a diet of grasses for millennia. It’s one of the reasons they were first prized. See, humans can’t eat grass: it’s full of a complex sugar (polysaccharide, which literally means “many sugars,” if you want to impress your friends) called cellulose that we can’t digest. To get the most bang for your buck if you owned a tract of grassland, you needed a grazing animal like a cow that could turn that inedible grass into an edible product like beef or milk.

The problem is that people always want to improve on nature. Fattening a cow on grass takes a long time, somewhere around three years. That’s a long while to own an animal and not make a profit off it. Besides, there are risks and expenses that go along with raising a cow over a long period of time: what if there’s too much snow for it to graze? What if it gets sick? People began looking for ways to gets cows heavier faster.

Enter corn. Corn got a lot easier to raise after WWII when the government realized that the same nitrogen it had been using to make munitions for the war could be turned into fertilizer for farms now that the war was over. Surpluses of nitrogen fertilizer lead to surpluses in grain and surpluses in grain led to innovative ideas about how that grain could be used. Many farmers had previously fed their cows on grain for the last few weeks of their life to add extra fat to the meat, but now cows were getting fed corn as soon as they were weaned.

There are several downsides to this system.

1. Antibiotic resistant infections.  Because cows are ruminants and evolved to eat grass, corn based diets make them ill.  Their stomachs become too acidic and so they need to be fed antibiotics frequently to combat the bacteria (such as E. coli) that thrive in acidic environments.  Lots of antibiotics in cow feed leads to things like antibiotic resistant bugs (MRSA would be the most well known example, but certain strains of E. coli are learning this dangerous trick as well) infecting humans.
2. Inhumane treatment of animals.  I’m not going to say that cows raised on diets of grass are happy cows.  It’s possible they’re not.  I am going to say that cows raised on diets of corn are unhappy.  Very likely they are more unhappy than grass fed cows.  Corn fed cows are taken from their mothers earlier, raised in confinement, become ill from eating a diet they didn’t evolve to eat, and die an average of two years earlier than grass fed cows.
3. Less food for everyone.  One of the original benefits of cattle was that they turned inedible substances like grass into edible ones like beef.  They didn’t do this efficiently, it takes ten pounds of grass to create one pound of beef, but since nobody was eating the grass in the first place that wasn’t really a problem.  Now that cows are eating grains like corn that humans can also eat, we’re looking at an inefficient use of resources.  If cows are using ten pounds of corn to create one pound of beef, that’s like wasting nine pounds of human food; this is not good math by most standards.
4. Because grass-fed cows take so much longer to raise their meat costs more.  However, if you buy grass-fed you know that you’re less likely to be contributing to antibiotic resistance, less likely to clog your arteries, you won’t have sickly and sad animals on your conscience, and you’re not stealing corn from the mouths of others to feed meat to your self.  Personally I’d rather spend the extra cash.  I’ll eat less beef overall, but I’ll feel better about it when I do eat it.
5. A less healthful fat profile.  You know how omega-3 fatty acids are all the rage right now?  Well, grass fed cows have more of them for the same reason fish do: greens!  Cows get omega-3s from grass and fish get them from algae.  A lot of nutrition experts think that many people who eat “western” diets have too much saturated fat and omega-6 fatty acids in their diet and not enough omega-3s.  Compared with beef from grain fed cattle, grass fed beef has lower amounts of saturated fats and omega-6s and more omega-3 fatty acids, adding up to a more healthful food.

Because grass-fed cows take so much longer to raise their meat costs more.  However, if you buy grass-fed you know you’re less likely to be contributing to antibiotic resistance, less likely to clog your arteries, won’t have sickly and sad animals on your conscience, and you’re not stealing corn from the mouths of other to feed meat to yourself.  Personally, I’d rather spend the extra cash.  I’ll eat beef less overall, but I’ll feel better about it when I do.