3/26/2010

Welcome to Friday evening!  I don't know about where you live but here in the 'burbs of Philly, after a nice run of warm weather we have a frost warning for tonight.  I'm chilly!  Hmmmn?  That's odd, I am never chilly.  I break into a sweat if I even think hard!  Could it be that the 10 pounds I lost are making a difference in how hot or warm I feel? Note I did not say "cold"  I still have sufficient blubber to keep me from feeling cold, save for if I happen to fall into a dewar of liquid nitrogen I which case I might feel cold.

Back to the grass fed beef  vs. conventional beef saga from the other day...

Cows are made to eat grass, they are not made to eat corn.  Conventionally raised beef starts out eating grass but is later "finished" by feeding it lots and lots of corn, this is also typically when they give them steroids, growth hormones and antibiotics.  It turns out that this change of diet has profound effects on the cows body.  I'll put it this way,  Beef contains both Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids.  Omega 3 = good for you. Omega 6 = bad for you.  An ideal ratio of the fats is 1 to 1.  Why the fuck it is not 1 to zero is beyond me... anyway...  The happy cow who lives out his days on a sunny green pasture eating only grass has a fatty acid ratio of around 4 (bad) to 1 (good).  Bring that same walking dinner into a feedlot for a few weeks of "finishing" and his ratio of bad fatty acids to good fatty acids jumps to around 21 to 1.  It get worse the longer he continues eating corn.

After cooking, Omega 3 fatty acids remain liquid at low temperatures, Omega 6 fatty acids solidify.  Which would rather have running around your veins, arteries and heart?

Another reason that you might want to eat grass fed beef is that is typically raised on smaller ranches.  Smaller ranches differ from the gigantic production line ranches.  I will not go into all the gory details about how a large processing plant that can process over 300 heads of cattle per hour dispatches and butchers them, except to say this:  Moving at such a fast pace, knifes slip.  Intestines and bowels get ruptured, spilling their contents on the meat.  This is a major source of e-coli contaminations in the US beef supply.  Now the big meat industry is coming under increasing pressure to do something about it (ya think?)  Do you think they decided to slow the the fucking production process down a little bit and raise cleanliness guidelines?  Nope!  They want to irradiate all their meat, in order to kill the bacteria... which wouldn't be there if they had higher cleanliness standards in the first place.  Then they realized that Americans might be turned off by the words "IRRADIATED MEAT"  so they are trying to get approval to rename this process "Cold Pasteurization"  

I don't know jack shit about radiation but I do know that when I get an x-ray they give me a lead jockstrap for Little Bald Bill and the Twins.  And the doctor gets the fuck out of the room.  Beats me if there is any residual harm done to irradiated meat but everything else being equal, I'll take my meat non x-rayed thank you..

On another note, we have been kicking the idea of building a small chicken coop to house 5 to 7 hens (who do not crow at dawn.  One day of that shit and we'd be inviting you all over for a big chicken dinner) for fresh eggs and when their egg laying days come to an end, humanly dispatching and eating them.  To that end I've been subscribed to Poultry World magazine for a few years.  I have learned a lot, which I will not bore you with, lets just say that  industrial chicken processing makes the beef processing look like high end hospice care!  Buy free range chicken from local farmers whenever possible.

That's all for now, I'm going to watch some Formula One practice.

Thanks for reading!
Bald Bill