December 2005 | Naturally Tasty

The Meat Forager

To Learn about Healthy Beef, Visit Local Ranchers

by Andrea Blum

Not long ago, on the floor of a friend’s dim-lit garage, I played what appeared to be a new version of an old board game. I had just picked up a quarter of a Marin born grass-fed cow that had been butchered and perfectly wrapped into 200 pounds of flash-frozen cuts of beef. My friend and I divided it into four somewhat equal piles for us to share. I wanted the short ribs and the flank. An Argentinean cohort demanded the sweetbreads and the oxtail. But, as my friend reached for her rump roast, I lunged for my skirt steak. What we got was a wacky game of meat Twister.

I had always wanted to get my meat directly from a local rancher. It was not long after reading Michael Pollan’s “Power Steer” in The New York Times Magazine, a story about the tragic life of an average American steer, that I finally did.

Grass-fed Beef

Mike and Sally Gale, whose ranch spreads over 600 acres of rolling coastal hills in the Chileno Valley in West Marin, were my contacts. They raise their own Angus cattle, which they tend to from birth till death. The small herd of 74 grazes on certified organic pastures of rye grass. When fall approaches and the grasses lack the necessary rich proteins, Gale opens his barn doors and loads his truck with dry alfalfa. His animals are given neither growth hormones nor antibiotics, and there are no herbicides or pesticides on the pastures.

When the Gales began their venture seven years ago, they just wanted to fit in, buying stock at the auctions and having brokers visit to inspect their calves. The broker would offer a price and ship the animal off to lots in the Midwest. The Gales quickly decided they wanted to be part of a different system. They began restoring the houses, the land and the creeks, allowing the salmon and steelhead to return. They made a conscious choice to nurture naturally raised, grass-fed beef and to work directly with buyers — and to be part of the niche market. Each animal is “harvested” at the ranch in what is termed a ranch kill.

“Our animals have a great life with no stress, and we pass that gift onto you,” Sally Gale said. Their meat, because it is grass-fed, is seasonal. It’s artisanal. When the grasses are at their energy-producing peak, so are the cattle.

Ninety-nine percent of the cows dotting the typical rural landscape will most certainly be sent to feedlots to become part of the protein commodity market. At least 600,000 cows are killed in the industrial market every week.

After WWII, ranchers discovered that feeding cattle cheap corn fattened them much faster. But a cow isn’t designed to digest corn. It makes them sick, prompting industrial ranches to use antibiotics. They also use bulk-producing hormones to hasten growth — look for the time-release tag hidden behind the ear. It’s actually cheaper to feed cows grain than to let them eat grass. On rendered feed, a cow can gain three pounds a day; on grass, only a half-pound to a pound a day. It takes much longer for a grass-fed animal to acquire the right amount of inter-muscular fat — the stuff that makes meat taste good. For this and other reasons, the market quickly adopted an extreme feedlot mentality. The infrastructure is no longer set up for small producers. Pasture-fed animals became a rarity; as the industry consolidated, meat became a commodity and a cow was no longer a living being, it was a protein. The same story goes for pork, poultry and lamb. Texas kills 20,000 cows a week and Foster Farms kills approximately 2 million chickens a day.

Where’s the Beef?

Not all feedlots are evil and not all grass-fed meat is necessarily organic since some pastures could have been sprayed with pesticides. “Organic” meat could be fed strictly grain in feedlots, and “natural beef” could be laced with a daily dose of antibiotics. The only way to know what you are buying is by getting to know your local rancher and by finding a producer of healthier meat raised to your personal standards — someone you can trust when foraging for sustainable-raised beef, poultry, pork or lamb.

“You are what you eat,” beef rancher Bill Niman told me. “And you are what your animals eat too.”

The Bay Area is setting an example for the rest of the country with many of its ranchers and farmers already off the commodity market grid. In 2004, Marin and Sonoma County started the country’s first certification program for grass-fed beef. (Marin County is also the only U.S. county to have 100 percent of their produce farms certified organic.)

Kevin Lunny, a third-generation rancher on the historic G Ranch in Point Reyes National Seashore, is the first to offer 100-percent-certified grass-fed and certified organic beef in the area. He’s a grass farmer, he said, and has been working his pastures for the last five years to achieve the most consistent taste for his beef.

Marin County Department of Agriculture Inspector Anita Sauber calls the grass-fed certification the first step toward organic certification. Becoming an organic producer is very difficult for the small rancher, she explained. There are no certified organic USDA slaughterhouses in Marin, and the one in nearby Petaluma is about to close. There are no dry age hanging facilities or certified truckers .

I met Sue Moore, the meat forager for Chez Panisse, as she sold her own grass-fed beef hotdogs from a pushcart to children in the Presidio. In between loading buns with grilled onions, she told me how she runs around the country tasting meat and finding new artisanal sources for the famed Berkeley restaurant. She looks for pasture-based livestock and heritage poultry breeds. If anyone understands the complications of this business, it’s she.

“The feedlot is like an oakey chardonnay,” Moore said. “It all tastes the same.” But a new generation of ranchers is picking up where their grandparents left off, recreating an artisan product from conception to consumption. Moore explained how the cattle express the nutrients in the grass. If there is a nutrient deficiency in the soil, it shows up in the taste of the meat. “It’s all about the terroir.” She explained how buffalo once migrated thousands of miles, foraging for the best grasses and making rotations to different plains each year, creating their own invisible fences. If it were up to the cows, they would do the same. And since the cows can’t, consumers must do some grazing of their own At Chez Panisse, Moore is in a never-ending dialogue with purveyors and growers. In the end, it has to taste good. “It’s a huge learning experience,” she said. “I feel like we are just scratching the surface.”

Andrea Blum is CG’s food columnist.