It also makes the meat or fowl less tasty. As I read it (Harold McGee? Julia Child?), meat needs to pass through rigor mortis (and ideally be aged afterward) to have good taste and texture. Meat that was flooded with stress hormones right before it was killed won’t get properly ‘rigored.’

So what we have here is a case of what’s most pleasant for the animal is also best for the seller’s reputation and the buyer’s taste buds. A three-fer!

On the scale stretching from mass-producers (Hormel, Tyson’s) to raise your own, where does Whole Food’s own label meat lie? I’m interested in both living conditions and slaughtering practices. There’s a fair deal of information on the WF website but I’d like a more disinterested source.

Buffalo Groves is about 2 hours south of Lasater in Kiowa and produces amazing buffalo. Buffalo are easier to raise than beef cattle, as they will find their own food and water even in the winter–it’s 90% hands off.

The processing plant that is used is for free range cattle only (mostly beef and buffalo, but they also process lamb and goat), so it is smaller, but does a healthy amount of business for its size.

More attention needs to be brought to factory farming and how destructive it is, to people, animals, and the environment.

My advice: try to find a local farmer for your beef (eatwild.com and localharvest.org both facilitate searches by location), or find a small family rancher that ships by searching for keywords like “grass fed beef” or “organic beef.” A time investment now will pay off with a safe source of meat for years to come. If you really don’t want to spend time looking, you are certainly welcome to check out our organic grassfed beef!

I think the keys are “small” and “family-owned and operated.” Why small and family? Well, atrocities like we’ve seen on the news occur primarily at large processing facilities. I think that when workers process 400 head an hour in an industrial processing plant, they simply become numb to the fact that they are working with a live animal.

Small ranchers like us usually use small packing plants where perhaps 15-30 beef are killed in a day. At our processor, because it is USDA inspected, each and every animal is inspected before and after slaughter. In addition, animals are processed one at a time, and so there is no “line speed” to try to keep up with.

Finally, most small ranchers have an attitude of old-fashioned husbanding toward their livestock. While you can sometime find an abusive operator, most small farmers and ranchers who have livestock do so because they like animals (if they don’t they generally become crop farmers). Before we started using this processor, my husband spent a day watching them to make sure the animals were humanely treated. We spend two years treating these cattle well; we believe it is simply wrong for their last few hours to be stressful or painful.

Small ranchers that sell direct to the public also generally have a sense of responsibility to their customers. You cannot hide behind anonymity to avoid personal responsibility when you sell directly to people. We have a number of customers with serious health issues that purchase our beef because they have compromised immune systems. We take that confidence very seriously. And as parents ourselves, we want to produce something that others can feel good about feeding their children.

A vegan diet is not appropriate for all individuals. A person with a classic anaphylactic allergy to soybeans, peanuts, or tree nuts should not go vegan. Nor should a person who is gluten intolerant. Nor should some diabetics.

A vegan diet works very well for some people, and I’m glad it’s an option. But choosing to not eat animal products does not mean one can ignore the conditions in slaughterhouses and on farms. There are too many people who *need* the food that comes from a slaughterhouse. And that means that slaughterhouse needs to be humane, clean, and safe.