local(ish) meats: where can I buy year-round withOUT joining a club/pickup system?

[Anonymous]

Washington Green Grocer (delivery service)

[Anonymous]

Do y'all really know what you are getting when you pay ridiculous prices for Salatin's hogs and such? Honestly, now: Those chickens stand on grass, true, but eat the same grain all the other chickens do. I've raised chickens and the meat birds he grows are too stupid to eat a bug if it bit them. In addition, there may be some room in those pens when the chicks first get in them but they are quickly just as wall to wall as any commercial op.

Hogs: They eat grain, not anything else, and run around in essentially sterile pens. Definitely not pastured in the sense that they actually obtain some nourishment from the ground they live on.

Cows: Hey guys, most cows eat grass. It isn't particularly great healthy grass, either.

[Anonymous]

18:00 that is not true. I actually specialize in food safety and humanely raised meat for my job and what you say is really untrue. As an aside, I grew up with chickens, goats, horses, cows, and pigs and went to a school with a sustainable animal agriculture program. Anyway, I know a bit about it.

Factory Farm raised meet is extremely different and what they eat is extremely different. Chickens, for example, eat in addition to grain, ground up other dead chickens and vitamin laced newspaper and calium from the processed waste (i.e. their own poop). Hogs don't run anywhere. They are packed to the point where they can't move and are horrible abused and also fed "reprocessed" animals.

Cows are similarly fed grain but also vitamin laced newspaper and other filtered wasted products and they are usually on feedlots, which means not a blade of grass to be seen.

There is a lot out there that pasture raised animals are healthier and taste better, but there's something powerful to be said about making a consumer move for humanely raised meat.

Anyway, OP you can buy Polyface and other kinds of locally grown pastured meat at FieldtoCity at 2nd and Rhode Island NW as well as right by Lincoln Park on the Hill at P&C Market.

[Anonymous]

The purpose of a pig is to eat. In a field, given a dead critter, they will eat it. The natural diet of a hog is NOT grain.....pigs are nasty filthy animals who eat their own excrement and wait for another hog to piss so they can drink it....in a nice clean pen with clean food.

Cows spend 95% of their lives on grass. The commercial cows then go to feedlots for fattening. Sorry, but the pastured meat people and PETA play up the horrors of feedlots to sell their own agenda. It's like puppy mills---plenty of them are nowhere near as bad as the ones in the news.

Nonetheless, there's no justification for the prices those people charge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The purpose of a pig is to eat. In a field, given a dead critter, they will eat it. The natural diet of a hog is NOT grain.....pigs are nasty filthy animals who eat their own excrement and wait for another hog to piss so they can drink it....in a nice clean pen with clean food.

Cows spend 95% of their lives on grass. The commercial cows then go to feedlots for fattening. Sorry, but the pastured meat people and PETA play up the horrors of feedlots to sell their own agenda. It's like puppy mills---plenty of them are nowhere near as bad as the ones in the news.

Nonetheless, there's no justification for the prices those people charge.

But, how do I know where my food is coming from if I buy it from a mass market?