Meat as a treat?

[Sasquatch]

American meat animals are fed steroids. Consuming factory farmed meat on steroids, is exactly that! You will become noteably large and won't be able to control your eating! Further more you're likely to eat junk which is now full of GMOs (HiFrucCornSyrup,ModCornStarch etc) and develop holes in your brain let alone diabetes and heart desease. Talk about population control ! 

I'll stick to fish and foraging.

[Guest Gloria Sass]

i do love a rare steak, at a restaurant i was asked 'how rare would you like it', i said 'clean the a--e and take the horns off'

[Guest Gloria Sass]

and they do eat more of a certain well known brand of hamburger than us. 

 

And Its All Made From Dogs Lips - Mike Harding

[raymw]

Much of the potentially best beef goes to dog food. Guernsey/Jersey cattle have yellow fat, and the supermarkets decided that the public wouldn't buy it. Consequently, any male calves that are born to these cattle are not raised, and often slaughtered at birth. Coupled with the bad publicity given to veal, from many years ago, few of the male calves born to any dairy cows reach our tables. Compared to locally raised and locally slaughtered animals, all supermarket meats and meat products are rubbish. If the meat starts of OK, by the time it's travelled to the few, large slaughter houses in the UK, it is stressed, and the animals are injected with a muscle relaxant (tensed up muscle is tough). When slaughtered, the liver of said animals is mush. Since ww2 there has been a concerted effort to reduce food farming in this country,

[Gruffalo]

Much of the potentially best beef goes to dog food. Guernsey/Jersey cattle have yellow fat, and the supermarkets decided that the public wouldn't buy it. Consequently, any male calves that are born to these cattle are not raised, and often slaughtered at birth. Coupled with the bad publicity given to veal, from many years ago, few of the male calves born to any dairy cows reach our tables. Compared to locally raised and locally slaughtered animals, all supermarket meats and meat products are rubbish. If the meat starts of OK, by the time it's travelled to the few, large slaughter houses in the UK, it is stressed, and the animals are injected with a muscle relaxant (tensed up muscle is tough). When slaughtered, the liver of said animals is mush. Since ww2 there has been a concerted effort to reduce food farming in this country,

I agree with a lot of your statement Ray but I do not see that there has been a concentrated effort to reduce food farming. In East Anglia, the trend has been towards vast prairies and major mechanisation to handle that. I feel that dairy farming has tended towards larger herds and the demise of what we knew as grassland farming has seen the small farmer unable to compete with the factory farming units.

 

If you are suggesting that bureaucracy has overtaken common sense by - for example - closing all the local slaughterhouses and concentrating them in a few centres, I would agree. The point about what meat "the people should be fed" must reflect the immense power of supermarkets - they decide what they want to sell based on margins and not on either quality or long term viability. 

[raymw]

While we are talking about animal welfare, maybe you'd wish to look at the following - http://action.ciwf.org.uk/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=119&ea.campaign.id=20836&ea.tracking.id=1174f49c&utm_campaign=pigs&utm_source=shared&utm_medium=link

[MJI]

At least in the UK Antibiotics are only used when necessary, in the US this is causing antibiotic resistance

[Gruffalo]

At least in the UK Antibiotics are only used when necessary, in the US this is causing antibiotic resistance

I'm not so sure about that. Shed grown chickens were fed a steady diet of antibiotics for years, most cattle farmers have acces to them. I know their use will have a cost implication but the easy option may be to give the animal the drug "just in case". Farms with large herds do not want illnesses passing through them - it is far more costly.

[MJI]

I'm not so sure about that. Shed grown chickens were fed a steady diet of antibiotics for years, most cattle farmers have acces to them. I know their use will have a cost implication but the easy option may be to give the animal the drug "just in case". Farms with large herds do not want illnesses passing through them - it is far more costly.

 

I know my Uncle only uses them for sick animals - beef farmer