Letterbox - Grass vs Corn Fed

Dear Watchers:

The “Grass-Fed Beef Test Project” article published in the January 2009 Whatcom Watch fascinated me. When I was an oil geologist working for Texaco, four of my colleagues and I spent two weeks in Buenos Aires in Argentina where we stayed in the best hotel in town while evaluating an oil field for sale. We soon learned that you couldn’t fail to get one of the best dinners in the world if you liked beefsteaks. The cattle was grass-fed and had a much better flavor than beef from cattle corn-fed in feedlots like we were used to in the USA.

Understandably the farmers in the grass-fed beef test think that beef is beef and concentrated on making a profit from their land and preventing erosion. My focus is on what grass-fed beef would do for the consumer. My experience has been that it may very well have a better flavor, though that probably would have to be tested with different grasses and different growing conditions.

Grass-fed beef tends to be leaner than corn-fed beef from feedlots. The latter tends to have fat marbled in with the meat that cannot be cut out. Hence, grass-fed beef would be much better for people with high cholesterol who need to be on a low fat diet.