No Way to Know Where Your Meat is From

There was a recent (quiet) uproar over meat labeling laws being repealed in congressional budget negotiations. In case you didn't know, grocery stores will no longer be required to label the country of origin for meat products.

Of course with TC Farm you'll know your grass fed meat has been carefully raised just an hour or three away from your house!

At first glance the loss of knowing where your meat is from seems like a big loss for consumers. However, once you consider that 'raised in the USA' actually means looser standards than pretty much every other country (including Russia and China), you start to realize maybe it isn't so bad for consumers.

In the United States it is legal to use growth drugs like ractopamine without having any disclosure. In fact, 70-80% of the pork and beef sold in this country has ractopamine in it. 160 other countries have banned the drug due to safety reasons. In the only human study to justify its use, one of the six men in the study had to be removed because of heart abnormalities. In the US, meat with growth drugs can even be labeled as 'hormone free and steroid free'. It seems crazy that even China outlaws these drugs due to safety concerns, but not here where the big agribusiness lobbyists are in full swing.

Still, now that the law has been repealed, a one pound package of hamburger in the grocery store could literally be made up of hundreds or thousands of steers from all over the world without you ever knowing where it came from. It might be marked as a '4 out of 5' on some sort of arbitrary scale, but they won't need to indicate where it is from anymore.

When you get a pound of ground beef from us, you'll have the best dry aged beef available AND it won't be a mix of random cows.

What do you think about this issue? Do you have any thoughts about meat labeling or what is allowed in meat? Keep the conversation alive in the comments below!