Keep cows happy and still eat [organic grassfed] beef

May 20, 7:52 PMOrganic Food ExaminerNatalie Rotunda

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When I was a kid growing up in Illinois, six nights a week my Mom served us delicious dinners of chicken, pork, beef roasts, and hamburgers. She met meat, loved it, and passed on the love to my siblings and me. She’d grown up around farm animals; her dad---my gramps---had been a dairy farmer. Never did she question whether she should skip the pleasure of eating meat; she'd seen how well gramps treated his animals whose life’s purpose was to provide milk and beef for his big family, and his customers’ families. His herd never stood in mud and piles of manure in a feedlot. If he were still living, I know he’d struggle to understand why feedlots are allowed to exist. Gramps would have been an activist, for sure…a meat-eating activist.

The organic food movement caught up with me about 10 years ago. I found a nearby source for organically grown fruits and veggies and grains, and called it a day with meat, believing that was the trade-off for going organic.

That’s the huge misconception about eating naturally occurring, organically grown good food. Going meatless, it turns out, affected us in a couple of ways. Our energy levels sagged, and our overall health suffered. Fortunately, the food co-op we belong to sells meat. Let me tell you that biting into a real hamburger re-ignited that Mother-given love affair with meat. It was a bit of bliss, and life was good again.

I have undergone one very important change about my choice to eat meat:  how very much I deplore everything about the factory farm system. Like my gramps, I eat meat that comes from animals raised in a humane environment. For me, that translates into the only logical source---organic grassfed beef, and free-range chickens and turkeys.

I’m more aware than ever about the Big Eat-Meat Debate. I don’t feel guilty because I prefer to bite into a real burger instead of  a non-meat burger that tastes like crap to me.

A part of our society does have a problem with meat-eating people like me. Reasons vary. Mostly, the people who choose not to eat animal protein tell me it’s because they strongly oppose how the animals are raised. Surely, they can’t mean cattle that graze the land for their food. Probing a little further, I usually learn it’s the ‘factory farm’ meat they object to. It’s a point we agree on: Feedlot cattle live (if you can call it that) a miserable, inhumane existence. For that reason and several others, I’ll never help support the continuation of the corporate meat industry.

Because the debate sits in my head---purely because I want to know how and why others feel as they do---I recently checked out a book at the public library whose title grabbed me by my tastebuds: “The Compassionate Carnivore, Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat.” Catherine Friend wrote the book that may just grab you, too.

I haven’t finished reading the book yet. I like what I’ve read so far, though. You see, Catherine knows both sides of the Big Eat-Meat Debate: She’s a meat-lover, and her partner and she own a sheep farm. Thanks to her willingness to share her mixed feelings about meat food, and her experience as a farmer, I’m able to climb into her head throughout the 259 pages of text to get a better handle on just why I don’t feel guilty about being a carnivore.