For part 3 of our series, “Where Does Your Meat Come From?”, we take a look at the processing of meat in slaughterhouses, which most grocery store meats go through. In this blog post, we’ll be focusing on meat which ships out from domestic slaughterhouses, and how it differs from the beef we sell from our local ranch.
When you buy meat from a grocery store, the product has already gone through the beginning stages of a long distribution process. To be advertised in the store, the animals needed to be brought to a slaughterhouse, where the meat is then processed and eventually packaged before shipping out to be sold in commercial shops.
With each step, you as the consumer lose control and miss out on the opportunity to specify part of the meat you purchase and cook. This is just one of the differences between buying beef from grocery stores and your local ranch.
Meat products often contain more than one animal
Perhaps one of the most egregious habits of slaughterhouses is the way they cram meat from more than one animal into packaging to be sold. For them, it’s more cost-efficient to use whatever meat they can in the cheapest way.
However, this also means a lot of meat bought and sold from slaughterhouses are steaks which consist of several cows in one. Hamburger meat is another example of this, as hamburger meat is just chopped up and ground all together.
The meat may not even be American-grown
Slaughterhouses and chain stores are under no obligation to let you know where the meat actually comes from. Packing plants located in the United States are allowed to label their meat as a domestic product, when in reality, the animals are imported from foreign countries.
This gives you an even less amount of control. If a meat product reads “Packaged in America”, this does not mean it is American grown beef. This is a problem because other countries do not uphold the same standards for cattle raising that we do here.
So, not only do slaughterhouses and packing plants sell meat which have been compressed and mashed together, but this meat may not even come from the States itself! We’ll cover more about this topic in a later blog detailing the benefits of buying American-grown beef.
Mass-produced meat carries health risks
Similarly, the mass production of meat prompts many different carcasses of animals to be processed at the same time. This is a major cause of food contamination. We all hear of ecoli being found in meat and that same meat being recalled from the grocery store.
Corporations specializing in mass produced meat are packaging so many different animals at once, when an error is made, an incredible amount of meat is impacted.
Cows in a stressful environment affects quality of meat
The incredibly high-stress environment while the cow is being raised and the time before it is processed affects the quality of your meat. Cows are procured and then shipped vast amounts of miles to the slaughterhouse, causing their stress levels to skyrocket in number. This, in turn, affects how the meat tastes and how well it cooks in your home.
There’s a total lack of control of your meat
When purchasing from slaughterhouses and chain stores, you also don’t get a say on what the animals ate or how they were raised. Again, the quality of control is just not there. As the consumer, you should be able to dictate the type of environment you’d like the animals to have lived in.
A healthy, ethical home where the cow was allowed to flourish and live under a minimum threshold of stress is ideal. At Designer Beef, this is all guaranteed, as our cows thrive under the care and consideration we give each animal here at the ranch.
We decide on so many things in life, it’s time to make the right choice when it comes to our beef. Take back control of the meat you feed yourself and your family.
