Ingredients
You Are What Your Dinner Ate
Your meat is only as healthy as the food it was raised on.
By Fiona MorrowMeat: To eat, or not to eat? With this protein’s spate of bad press, how does one not just throw meat eating out the window—or fridge—entirely? The key, it turns out, is sustainable meat.
Traditional livestock farming, where animals roam free and feed off the land (rather than from feed lots piled high with modified grain), does more than create happier beasts and better-tasting food. It also makes for healthier meat—which means a healthier you. Grass-fed beef, for example, is lower in total fat than grain-fed. It has fewer calories and, boosted by the natural chloroplasts (the stuff that makes grass green) present in lush pastures, is high in heart-healthy, cholesterol-fighting omega-3 fatty acids. It also contains higher levels of conjugated linoleic acid—an antioxidant that helps reduce body fat and, in animal studies, has been found to reduce cancer. So, as author Michael Pollan explained in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and now expands upon in his new In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, it’s not so much what you eat, but how it was treated before it ended up on your plate.
More and more top chefs across the country are demanding thoughtfully raised and sustainable meat for flavor, too: You’ll find it on menus from Westchester County (Blue Hill at Stone Barns) to Chicago (Charlie Trotter’s) to San Francisco (Acme Chophouse). The trend has moved so fast that demand has started outstripping supply. Part of the stampede comes from the unlikeliest of places. At Sparky’s All-American Food in New York, the grass-fed hamburgers have tempted people who haven’t touched beef in 20 years to try it: “Even vegetarians!” notes owner Melissa Benavidez.
And it’s not just beef. It turns out that pork raised the old-fashioned way can also be good for you. Take the prestige Spanish ham, jamón ibérico de bellota, whose wonderful nutty flavor comes from the pigs’ diet being rich in foraged acorns. Recently approved for import into the US, the ham will be available from Virginia Spanish emporium La Tienda (tienda.com) in early 2008. Pre-orders have been coming in for the past four years. The finished product might be 25- to 30-percent fat, but it’s the good kind: the composition is similar to that of olive oil (the black pigs are known as four-legged olive trees) and it’s bursting
with good monounsaturated fatty acids, known to lower LDL (bad) cholesterol and raise HDL (good) cholesterol.
Some of these formerly traditional but now rare breeds of pigs (like the Ossabaw Island hog) are raised in the US at farms such as Caw Caw Creek (cawcawcreek.com) in South Carolina and Cane Creek Farm (canecreekfarm.us) in North Carolina. Like their Iberian counterparts, these animals produce fat rich in monounsaturated oleic acid (the same found in olives) rather than the saturated fat commonly found in pork. Order their meat by mail, but get in line: Caw Caw Creek supplies to überchefs Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller.
Traditional livestock farming, where animals roam free and feed off the land (rather than from feed lots piled high with modified grain), does more than create happier beasts and better-tasting food. It also makes for healthier meat—which means a healthier you. Grass-fed beef, for example, is lower in total fat than grain-fed. It has fewer calories and, boosted by the natural chloroplasts (the stuff that makes grass green) present in lush pastures, is high in heart-healthy, cholesterol-fighting omega-3 fatty acids. It also contains higher levels of conjugated linoleic acid—an antioxidant that helps reduce body fat and, in animal studies, has been found to reduce cancer. So, as author Michael Pollan explained in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and now expands upon in his new In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, it’s not so much what you eat, but how it was treated before it ended up on your plate.
More and more top chefs across the country are demanding thoughtfully raised and sustainable meat for flavor, too: You’ll find it on menus from Westchester County (Blue Hill at Stone Barns) to Chicago (Charlie Trotter’s) to San Francisco (Acme Chophouse). The trend has moved so fast that demand has started outstripping supply. Part of the stampede comes from the unlikeliest of places. At Sparky’s All-American Food in New York, the grass-fed hamburgers have tempted people who haven’t touched beef in 20 years to try it: “Even vegetarians!” notes owner Melissa Benavidez.
And it’s not just beef. It turns out that pork raised the old-fashioned way can also be good for you. Take the prestige Spanish ham, jamón ibérico de bellota, whose wonderful nutty flavor comes from the pigs’ diet being rich in foraged acorns. Recently approved for import into the US, the ham will be available from Virginia Spanish emporium La Tienda (tienda.com) in early 2008. Pre-orders have been coming in for the past four years. The finished product might be 25- to 30-percent fat, but it’s the good kind: the composition is similar to that of olive oil (the black pigs are known as four-legged olive trees) and it’s bursting
with good monounsaturated fatty acids, known to lower LDL (bad) cholesterol and raise HDL (good) cholesterol.
Some of these formerly traditional but now rare breeds of pigs (like the Ossabaw Island hog) are raised in the US at farms such as Caw Caw Creek (cawcawcreek.com) in South Carolina and Cane Creek Farm (canecreekfarm.us) in North Carolina. Like their Iberian counterparts, these animals produce fat rich in monounsaturated oleic acid (the same found in olives) rather than the saturated fat commonly found in pork. Order their meat by mail, but get in line: Caw Caw Creek supplies to überchefs Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller.
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