The Backyard

The Backyard

Thursday, March 6, 2008

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?


Organic meat that is. The meaning of the famed Pink Floyd song "Another Brick in the Wall," is what the listener wants it to be -- what they believe. And that is what made the song such a classic. At the moment, this song, for me, relates to "how can you expect to compete in multi-sport races and do ok if you don't get adequate protein?" Over the past couple months, I've experimented with no meat (but eggs and milk), with just fish/eggs/milk, and of late with some beef and pork added in. All the time I focused on about 100g of protein a day. Low and behold, I'm feeling best, recover best, and perform best with the meat in the diet - no surprises there for most folks. Meat was not part of my diet for two reasons -- primarily the enviornment and how most animals for food are raised. I adamantly oppose factor farms and feedlots, and battery-cage raised poultry which causes huge environmental concerns (mass food production using GMO beans/corn, water consumption, methane gas issues with the waste feedlots generate, etc). ANY raising of the animals in confinement is cruel and unneccesary, in my opinion and I will not support those industries if I can help it. Thus...enter organics. Our local Natural Acres will be my meat-buying establishment of choice. I can see the cows in the field, the chickens in the barnyard, the water flowing in the stream that they drink from, and it all appears good and the way it was meant to be for the environment. There's no excess water needed, no processed feed other than that which is cut from the neighboring fields (grown organically of course!) and its the way animals should be raised. Right now they are offering a special on lean ground beef -- $2.99 a pound. That's about the cheapest I've seen organic beef ever. Organic pricing is definitely falling which means more consumers are making the switch to organics. Better pricing is coming, for sure.

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