Meat + Poultry - September 2006 - 47

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mainstream industry. They've seen
the success of organic. They're gaining an understanding of this new consumer interest in responsible, ethical
and environmentally conscious eating
and buying."
Pollan, a thoughtful, funny and
abundantly curious writer, is a professor of science and environmental journalism at
the Univ. of California-Berkeley's graduate
school of journalism. Pollan
is a self-pro claimed "foodchain journalist," and he is the
Pollan
fi rst journalist to
think about and describe the food
chain in a narrative fashion.
At the end of March 2002, Pollan's
long article titled "Power Steer" was
published in the New York Times
Magazine, where he is a contributing
editor. The story was built on a fascinating and remarkably simple idea.
Pollan bought a calf from a South
Dakota ranch, then followed its life
through the months of pasture grazing and feedlot fattening until the moment of truth at the slaughterhouse.
The Times headlined the story on the
cover of the magazine as "This Steer's
Life." Almost immediately after the
story ran, public interest in grass-fed
beef - which is to say, in beef raised
in alternative ways to the mass-production system Pollan had described
- soared.
He thinks the public was ready for
a change. "We have an unprecedented obsession with food and health in
this country," he says. "Why are we
so vulnerable to diet fads? I think it's
because we've never had a vibrant
food culture of our own. You don't
see this obsession in France or Italy
or Japan."
But not all new trends in food interest are fads. "Grass-fed beef as

an idea allows environmentalists
to converse with ranchers in a way
that hasn't happened before," Pollan
adds, "and I think that's one of the
most hopeful things about this. And
we're seeing consumers buying beef
and other foods now for ecological
reasons."

B.S.E. motivated?
CBW's Kay is also fascinated by the
rocket-launch of interest in grass-fed
beef, but he sees the segment's ascent
as a public reaction to animal health
and food safety issues. "B.S.E. was the
real trigger," he says, "and E. coli too.
They combined to create a kind of fear
about standard beef production systems
and that led the public to search for alternatives. Whole Foods said their beef
sales went up 20 percent after December 2003," when U.S.D.A. announced
the discovery of the first B.S.E.-infected cow in the United States. "Whole
Foods has a tremendous influence on
the way a subset of wealthy consumers thinks about food. As for grass-fed
beef specifically, there certainly has
been a lot of talk, but the market is still
very small."
But Kay agrees with Pollan that
grass-fed isn't a flash in the pan. "It's
created real opportunity for small

producers like Mike and Sally Gale
and many others. They can sourceverify their beef in a way the mainstream industry still can't - in the
way many consumers wish the industry could. I think also that there's going to be growing interest from other, larger producers in grass-fed. The
mainstream industry has fi nally gotten over its hang-ups regarding alternative production methods."
In addition to the pastoral aura
grass-fed beef carries and its kind of
anti-feedlot position, there's also scientific research suggesting grass-fed
beef is healthier for humans to eat
than feedlot-fattened beef. On grass,
the ratio of fatty acids in the beef favors omega-3, the same healthy-heart
fatty acid found in salmon. On corn
and grain, less healthy omega-6 dominates the fatty-acid ratio, according to
several studies.

U.S.D.A. proposal
Panorama Meats, Inc., the new
name for what had been called Western Grasslands, a cooperative of beef
producers raising and marketing their
own grass-fed beef, is a major player
in the new niche. Mack Graves, who
once worked with Perdue Farms and
was also C.E.O. at Coleman Natural

Photos courtesy of Chileno Valley Ranch
www.MEATPOULTRY.com

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