There is a post on What to Eat discussing a suite of lawsuits between a meat packing company and a church regarding responsibility for sickening people who ate meatballs at a church fundraiser.

I raise beef to sell at local farmer’s markets. Concern about food safety is one of the reasons my customers buy my beef. Even though my beef is 100% pasture-raised, any beef can still contain e-coli (and even the 0157 strain), because it is present in most environments to some degree. Is my beef safer? Maybe.

There are several reasons we have more ground beef recalls now than in the “good old days” that have nothing to do with whether the animal is grain or grass-fed;

1) we have better surveillance and identification systems. Tainted beef is sometimes identified by random testing and illnesses can be definitively determined to be caused by specific strains associated with ground beef.

2) beef is often ground before it hits the grocery store, giving the organisms time to spread through the product. In the “old days” when grocery stores employed butchers, ground beef was often or usually ground at the store, giving less time for the organisms on the surface of relatively large cuts of beef to be mixed throughout the product.

3) the grind is a mix of several or many animals, sometimes from different processing batches or sources. This increases the chance that one animal carried a pathogen. [theoretically, this would result in diluting the contaminant as well, but the bugs can multiply pretty quickly].

So what’s the bottom line for local beef?

On the plus side for food safety; Local ground beef usually comes from a single animal and is typically ground and frozen within 24 hours of when the beef is processed into individual cuts. It also usually stays frozen until it is purchased. In most localities, beef for resale must be processed under the supervision of a state-licensed inspector, similar to inspectors at larger plants. There is also direct (or at least more direct) accountability between the producer and the customer.

BUT, local producers/vendors are not required to (and usually don’t) have an approved or professional food safety plan. Locally processed beef does not undergo random testing for contamination. Food safety regulations for storing and selling beef vary greatly by location–from the ridiculously restrictive to absent. In our own case, we are concerned enough to monitor our freezers daily and to sell from freezers rather than coolers. We also eat beef from each animal before we sell it.

Nevertheless, there are no guarantees. You can provide the best insurance on ground beef safety. Cooking to 160 degrees, being aware of (and not consuming) beef that smells off or is past the “use by” date, keeping meat preparation areas and utensils separate from other utensils and areas (especially serving) and proper hand-washing before and after handling raw meat are your best assurances of safe ground beef. The American Meat Institute has a handy site for safe handling of all types of meat.

I believe that our meat supply is currently safer than it was 40 or 50 years ago, whether you buy your meat locally produced or at the grocery store.

10 Tips for Homemade Ice Cream Success: From Serious Eats. What would the 4th of July be without icecream? And I staunchly maintain that if you make it yourself, you can consider it a “local food”!

The Small Screen With a Big Impact: from Blogher. Some scary statistics. The average child in the US sees 15,000 commercials annually that promote candy, highly sweetened and processed food and fast food. One more reason to get the kids off their duff and out into the garden!

Best and Safest Sunscreens: Just in time for the long weekend, Environmental Working Group has released a comprehensive review of sunscreens based on UVA and UVB protection, as well as presence or absence of harmful chemicals.

Cow Fat Motor Oil: from EcoGeek. Another cool green-geek find from one of my favorite sites. This motor oil is made from animal fat, biodegrades sufficiently that it can be safely poured on the ground and is non-toxic!

Common livestock production practices coming under fire. from Advocates for Agriculture. Procedures such as castration are coming under fire as being “mutilations”. Being a big proponent of preventing unwanted pregnancies (in any species), this seems like a slippery slope to me.

WIC-ensuring buying power through prohibiting organic: From US Food Policy. There’s no arguing that organic foods are generally higher priced. The Michigan WIC program has placed limits on foods in an effort to increase the nutritive buying power of food stamps. Along with many convenience items, organics are specifically prohibited on many foods.

Nourishing Frugal Food: found via the Nourished Kitchen . The Nourishing Gourmet is having a frugal food festival. July 11th is main dishes and July 18th is sides and salads. Hmm, I’ll have to post a recipe from here to contribute. With two growing boys, I sure know about stretching the grocery dollar!

A recent research study of conventional and outdoor antimicrobial-free (no antibiotics) production systems showed pigs raised outdoors without the use of routine antibiotics carried more bacteria and parasites, according to Feedstuffs newspaper. The research sampled pigs from three states (WI, NC, OH) and compared “niche-market, outdoor and antimicrobial-free (no antibiotics)” to “intensive indoor (conventional)” rearing systems.

Blood tests showed the outdoor pigs had significantly more exposure to Salmonella and Toxoplasma. Two pigs from different outdoor farms had antibodies to Trichinella. Trichinella is the parasite that infests muscles, and is the primary reason we have all been conditioned to cook pork thoroughly. The parasite has been virtually eliminated from conventional rearing systems.

I admit to being a little surprised by the research. In keeping with my science-geek image, I tracked down the authors, who very kindly sent me a copy of the original research paper. The research seems solid, and the stats are supported by other research in this country and in Europe.

So why the higher infection rate in outdoor pigs? The reasons given by the authors include exposure to wild and domestic animals (i.e. cats can carry trichinella), and access to soil and moisture which are viable environments for pathogens.

The skeptic in me can’t help wondering exactly what the outdoor systems studied were? Were they just raised in outdoor pens, or were they “pasture-raised” where they were foraging for a significant part of their diet? It is common in the chicken industry, where “free-range, vegetarian-fed” chicken and eggs abound, for such chickens to have access to the outdoors, but be no more pasture-raised than if they were confined indoors.

It is important to remember that many production practices that come under fire, such as indoor rearing and antibiotics, were put into place to increase food safety and/or animal welfare in response to increasingly intensive animal production. Merely removing these practices without addressing the reasons they were implemented in the first place does not necessarily bring about the benefits to humans or animals envisioned by consumers who purchase based on a “free-range” label.

In honor of our blogger-on-the-road, Lisa, we’re going geeky with this week’s Earthlinks.

Should Biotech companies Blog? Are blogs by biotech companies a good idea from a corporate standpoint? Maybe if more companies had open blogs, there might actually be some real communication.

Animal Research, Giving the Gift of Life: a guest post on noted Ethicist Terry Etherton’s blog, by Barb Glenn, (a wonderful woman and friend from the Bio Industry Organization) .

Guaranteed Tender Steak: from Feedstuffs Foodlink. Technology to the rescue–University of Nebraska scientists have developed a method of identifying tender beef while it is in the processing plant.

Plants have Social Lives: also from Feedstuffs Foodlink. Plant behavior is more complex than you think. If plants are sentient, does that affect how we should grow, harvest and eat them?

Kudzu-A Potential Biofuel: from Ecogeek. The “plant that ate the South” may be the answer to Suzanne’s biofuel headache.

And as always, one slightly less serious link to end:

Make your own icecream drumsticks:  Does this make icecream count as “local food”?

Get ready to challenge your preconceptions.

Milk-fed veal is arguably the most hard-to-defend meat production system in this country from an animal rights point of view. Most veal is produced from male dairy calves, which are a byproduct of sorts, of the necessity of having a cow calve yearly in order to produce milk. As all dairy calves are, they are removed from the cow shortly after birth and grown using specialized production practices, to produce the very tender, pale meat most US consumers associate with veal.

Serious Eats recently posted about Azulana, which produces pastured raised veal. Most beef calves in this country are raised on pasture with the cows until weaning. Pasture-raised veal basically consists of harvesting these these animals at weaning, rather than growing them out to mature beef. Veal raised in this way is classified as “red veal”, because of the stronger flavor of the meat that results from the rumination process necessary to digest grass.

It turns out, that until sometime in the 1950s, most veal sold in this country was produced this way. Pastured veal would have to be among the most “natural” of meats, because the animals are grown with minimal intervention, no supplemental feeding, no confinement, on a diet of milk and grass.

Men are from Science, Women are from Fashion and Style: Blogher (cyber-central for women bloggers) chews through the NYT’s placement in the Style section of an article about how women are behind in science. Made me wonder about science education (or lack thereof) and how it affects our ability to think critically and intelligently about some of the food issues we discuss here.

Farm Bill Passes, Vetoed, Veto (sort of) overridden: From American Farmland Trust. Although a seemingly dry topic, the 2008 Farm Bill has some important provisions for nutrition programs, farmland preservation, healthy and local foods and conservation progams.

Who Eats Rice, Anyway? From Chow. A discussion of how agricultural research budgets across the world have declined dramatically in the last few decades—bottoming out in time for this year’s food crisis. The US is in the midst of slashing support for research that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries.

Which Pots and Pans are Safest - Unearthing My Mother’s Cookware: From The Not Quite Crunchy Parent. Turns out Mom might have known best, after all.

Déjà chew: The food price crisis in context : A guest post on Ethicurean that shows the solution to the world’s food crisis is not a simple matter of people food vs. animal feed nor crops for food vs. crops for fuel.

Toilet Paper Rolls? Yes, Toilet Paper Rolls From Green Mom Finds. 101 things to do with a toilet paper roll before you recycle it (102 if you count the original intended use).

I’ve had a couple of e-mails from people in the beef and pork industries in the last couple weeks. The gist of their gripe is that the local, pasture-raised beef and pork I sell is causing damage to animal ag industries. They have some legitimate points: “Negative campaigning” against traditional agriculture is an oft-used marketing method for foods bearing labels of alternative production methods. All too often at the Farmer’s Markets, I hear that food from the grocery store is not safe, is loaded with chemicals and hormones or is causing everything from global warming to early puberty to worldwide hunger. I hear all sorts of exaggerations of reported ill-effects, many of which fall into the realm of urban myths.

It is these very issues that are part of the reason I blog. We’ve barely scratched the surface here with posts on early puberty, organic honey and free-range chickens, cloning, food labels and a variety of other topics. There is never a shortage of material; just a shortage of time to do the background research to provide a balanced and accurate review of the issue at hand.

So, by promoting our locally raised meats, am I contributing to the downfall of American Animal Agriculture? I maintain that I am promoting it. Here’s why:

• There is no better spokesperson for agriculture than a producer. Consumers and producers are usually separated by multiple companies. When I sell local, I reconnect the consumer to agriculture. I remind them that ultimately all our food is produced by PEOPLE, not corporate conglomerates.
• When I hear wildly exaggerated claims and misconceptions, I can correct them. The same quirk of human nature that causes people to believe their neighbor before they’ll believe a corporate expert works in reverse too.
• I have customers eating meat that wouldn’t otherwise. For their own reasons (whether I agree with them or not), many of my customers are willing to buy meat from me, when they buy much less or none otherwise. How can this be hurting the industry?
• The products I sell DO taste better than run-of-the-mill grocery store items. They also cost more ($2-$4/lb more). Most people agree that homegrown tomatoes taste better than (even organic) grocery store tomatoes. Why does it seem so surprising that homegrown, individually managed, top genetics beef tastes better? If this creates a demand for higher quality products, isn’t that a good thing?

There is a knee-jerk dislike of movements like local, grass-fed, or organic among many of my more traditional Animal Industry colleagues, and a similar distrust of corporate agriculture among many of my customers. I hope, in my small way, I am building some bridges.

West Michigan’s small-scale alternative food systems - and the future of such endeavors, from Ethicurean.

Who’ll Cure Our Kids, Big Pharma Or Small Farmers? from Eating Liberally. Makes some interesting points about how food marketing prepares us for pharma marketing.

Dan Barber on Food–Meet Adam Smith, from the Faceless Bureaucrat, who throws some amusing cold water on a professional chef’s rose-tinted view of small farms.

Dog meat on the menu in Korea (illegally), from Food Law Prof Blog. Because dog meat has been linked to salmonella and staph infections, there are now calls to classify dogs as livestock in order to bring dog meat under food safety regulations. Our comment: You probably shouldn’t invest in Korea’s pet product market.

Lawmakers Find $21 a Week Doesn’t Buy a Lot of Groceries, from the Washington Post. Only four members of Congress take on “Food Stamp Challenge” issued by the House Hunger Caucus. Is that close to the number of congressman with actual military experience?

What Do You Do When Your Child Lies? From Scribbit. Good suggestions and discussion on an issue all parents face sooner or later. We would add: Begin creating a trust state of mind. Take you and your friends to the mall this weekend? Sure. See that PG-13 movie that might be too racy? Sure. Because we trust you and your common sense. But one hairline crack in that trust…

From Izzy Mom, Best. Newspaper. Clipping. Ever.

Guest post by Ann Bagel Storck. Reprint of her article in the Daily News section of Meatingplace.com

Ninety percent of consumers agree with the statement, “I trust the meat, poultry and fish my grocery store sells is safe,” according to the Food Marketing Institute’s U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends 2008 report, released last week.

They express less trust in the government: 79 percent agree with the statement, “I trust the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ensure that the food I purchase is safe.” Only 76 percent hold this view about the FDA, the survey says.

The report also covers consumers’ financial pressures and nutritional concerns. Economic worries are compelling Americans to cook at home more and eat less often at restaurants (71 percent). Consumers also are buying fewer luxury foods (67 percent) and more store-brand items (60 percent) and eating more leftovers (58 percent).

Meanwhile, 41 percent of shoppers say they are “very concerned” about the nutritional content of the foods they eat. When evaluating whether a food is nutritious, shoppers focus most on the fat content listed on the Nutrition Facts label, with more than half checking saturated fat, trans fat and total fat. More than four in 10 check the calorie count, look for whole grains and focus on the salt, sugar and cholesterol levels, FMI says.

Feedstuffs Foodlink (one of my best sources for information for this blog) has sponsored a brochure which clearly defines many of the common food label terms for meat and poultry.

It is important to keep in mind that all food must meet specific quality and safety regulations set in place by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, with meat and poultry products tested by the USDA Food Safety & Inspection Service.

Labels do not reflect differences in quality or safety-they only describe the way in which a meat or poultry product was raised or processed.

The following clarify some of the most common label terms used for meat and poultry products: More can be found on the complete brochure.

Certified
The term “certified” implies that FSIS and the USDA Agriculture Marketing Service have officially evaluated a meat product for class, grade or other quality characteristics. If used under other circumstances, the term must be closely associated with the name of the organization responsible for the “certification” process (for example, “XYZ Company’s Certified Beef”).

Organic
Products must consist of at least 95 percent organically produced ingredients (excluding water and salt). Any remaining ingredients must consist of approved nonagricultural substances or inorganically produced agricultural products that are not commercially available in organic form. Organic meat and poultry products mean the animals were reared without regular use of antibiotics and without growth hormones (growth-promoting hormones are not allowed in raising hogs or poultry).

100 Percent Organic
Products must contain only organically produced ingredients (excluding water and salt). Organic meat and poultry products mean the animals were reared without regular use of antibiotics and without growth hormones (growth-promoting hormones are not allowed in raising hogs or poultry).

Made with Organic Ingredients
These processed products must contain at least 70 percent organic ingredients and may list up to three organic ingredients or food groups on the label.

Chemical Free
This term is not allowed to be used on labels.

Free-Range or Free-roaming
Producers must demonstrate that the poultry has been allowed access to the outdoors. This does not mean that the animals were raised outside.

Natural
A product may be labeled “natural if it contains no artificial ingredient or added color and is only minimally processed. this label designation does not indicate how the animal was raised.

No Hormones
Hormones are not allowed in raising hogs or poultry. Therefore, the claim “no hormones added”cannot beused on labels of pork or poultry unless it is followed by the statement “Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormone”. In beef, the term “no hormones administered” may be used if the producer documents that no hormones were used in raising the animals.