Thursday, May 20, 2010

Grass Fed Beef

We just bought 70lbs of grass fed beef from a local farmer in Virginia. In fact it's the farmer from the movie Food Inc.  His farm is Polyface Farms in the Shenandoah Valley.  If you haven't seen Food Inc I encourage you to watch it and you'll rethink your whole meat situation.  It was more expensive than buying our meat at Costco, but we wanted to give our money to a local farmer, eat good meat, and hopefully help the environment at the same time.

We picked it up yesterday, all nicely vacuumed sealed and labeled, and made burgers for dinner. The meat definitely smelled different while it was cooking and it was totally delicious.  We got about 30lbs of ground beef all in 1lb packages, some Chuck Roasts, Flank Steak, New York Strip, Fillets, Top Sirloin, Sirloins, Round Roasts and a Brisket and an Arm Roast, which I had to look up because I've never heard of it.

We have pledged to eat less meat but a better quality of meat when we do eat it. We are thrilled with this purchase so far and it should last us for a while.

Now I just have to figure out what to do about the chicken.  We eat a lot of chicken and it's really expensive to go organic free range, around $4.00 a pound.  I'm buying hormone free chicken at the moment, and staying away from Tysons chicken all together, but we are looking at getting better chicken in our diet.

2 comments:

Marc Shapiro said...

It is hard to describe the aroma of the burgers while they were grilling, but it reminded me of my childhood ... and the burgers were great!

Carrie Oliver said...

I would love to taste the grass-fed & finished beef from Polyface and if I still lived in the DC area, I'd make the trek! I hear you with regard to chicken, we don't eat much of it these days as it's hard to find pastured birds (the government makes it very difficult for people raising less than 30K birds to sell their chicken). I've paid a bit over $6.20/lb for pasture raised heritage chicken (fed organic grains and whatever they found outside). When I compared it to the price of the pre-cut commodity chicken (breasts, legs etc.) at the store, it was about the same price. We used every last bit of that bird so it actually felt like a bargain.