Do you know the difference between grain- and grass-fed beef? Is organic beef better? And what about how the animal is killed? Read on to find out what it all means.
The range of meat supermarkets today is bewildering. At an upmarket Coles in Melbourne it is difficult to know what steak to buy let alone mince, with six different types costing from $9.50/kg for three star up to $12/kg for five star and premium veal mince and $15/kg for organic and $18 for King Island Extra trim.
There is little hope for customers choosing steak in butchers either with a dazzling array of options from biodynamic and organic to grain fed with beef varieties such as Angus, Hereford or Wagyu also thrown into the mix.
Thanks to the successful launch in 2009 of the McDonald’s Angus burgers and the Hungry Jack’s Angry Angus, the breed of meat is now firmly placed at the front of the consumer’s mind, even though we were probably eating an Angus or Angus crossbreed already; it is the most popular beef cattle in Australia.
Organic
I’m meant to know about meat. Bought from the organic butcher at my local market, the porterhouse seemed a good choice. It was marbled nicely and a deep red colour. Yet when griddled, it ended up tough and grey despite me knowing and being well practiced in cooking steaks correctly.
Organic meat means good meat, right? But organic isn’t a sign of quality. It means that the farmer has the correct paperwork and doesn’t use certain chemicals.
The problem is that organic beef is grass fed. And depending on the season or the weather, the grass can be lush and rich or poor and dry. And this makes the meat inconsistent. A bad steak is dry, tough and stringy. It’s not the moist, butter soft meat that you want. And there are over 30 variables along the life of Australia’s herd of some 28 million cattle that can also affect its texture and taste, which can be predicted by Meat and Livestock Australia quality systems.
The fact is that it is difficult to choose good meat.
Grain vs Grass Fed
Melbourne-based chef Adrian Richardson is a meat nut. He loves nothing more than to share a 1.2kg T-bone grass fed steak. What he looks for is a deep red steak, marbled with fat. But despite sourcing directly from quality abattoirs, Richardson says that he can still sometimes end up with the occasional tough steak.
Richardson’s preferred meat is grass fed because it has a greater depth of flavour over grain fed. Plus he likes the idea that animals have lived happy lives in wide expanses of fields rather than in feedlots.
Up until 30 years ago Australian beef was all grass fed. In the 1970s driven by the liberalisation of the Japanese market where there’s a taste for grain fed meat, Wagyu, Australian farmers started feedlots for cattle to be sent live to Japan.
Among the pioneers was Robin Hunt in Queensland’s Darling Downs whose family owned the Garden City Butchery (which was sold four years ago and now is known as Queensland Choice Meats). Hunt started the Kerwee group of companies in 1958 and now has feedlots with 9,200 head of cattle. Each head has 19.5 sq m (others lots go down to 15sq m) of space. That’s a bit more than the average Sydney office worker and nearly three times the space allocate to people in call centres.
It’s not a bad life for Kerwee’s cattle. And the Holstein Angus crossbreeds are fed for 60 days or more while the Wagyu spend 350 to 400 days in the lot. And that is why Angus beef carcasses cost about $3.20 a kilo and Wagyu $8 a kilo and upwards (and up $150 a kilo in upmarket butcher shops such as Victor Churchill in Sydney’s Woollahra, which does for meat what Prada does for fashion).
Queensland is the feedlot capital of Australia with 11.9 million head of cattle. Although in total in Australia only about one-third – 2.7 million head – are grain fed.
Now the big supermarkets such as Coles and Woolworths are driving the demand for grain fed meat for its consistent quality, size and because it is cheaper than grass fed.
Anthony Puharich CEO of Vic’s Meat says that while grass fed meat marks the bulk of beef in this country, the worst drought in 100 years is driving more farmers to grain. “Grain fed has had the spotlight on it in the last five to 10 years,” he says.
Puharich, who supplies most of Australia’s top restaurants including Neil Perry‘s temple to meat, Rockpool Bar & Grill, says that grain fed meat has a unique flavour, more juicy, nutty and caramelized than grass fed. Grain fed is a lot softer to eat and cuts like butter.
Feeding grain to cattle accelerates the marbling – build up of fat – throughout the meat. It is this marbling that is prized by the Japanese in Wagyu, which is scored on a scale of up to nine.
That’s not to say that grass fed beef isn’t marbled. It just doesn’t pack in as much fat as grain fed.
Conversely, really good grass fed meat, such as the Cape Grim brand in Tasmania, can be as tender as grain fed and has a natural beef flavour. Plus each steak can be traced back to the farm of origin.
But when an animal is fed on poor pasture, the flesh on the carcass dries out and becomes, tough, stringy and fibrous, according to Puharich.
How It’s Killed
This is why the grass feeding capitals of Australia are the lush Emerald green pastures of Gippsland and Tasmania, home to organic farmer Gerard Crochon. He is the polar opposite of the Kerwee feedlot which sources it’s beef far and wide from 150 farmers and markets it globally. Crochon’s Nicholls Rivulet Organic Food Farm just 40 minutes south of Hobart is a bit under 300 acres and his herd is about 70 strong, with up to 35 slaughtered each year.
While Kerwee sends its Angus and Wagyu 140 km to slaughter and allows them to rest overnight, Crochon sends his Friesian Hereford crosses to a local abattoir. And he sells most of his meat, which he helps butcher in Hobart, to customers within 20kms of his lush green farm.
“The killing is very important,” Crochon explains. He tastes every animal himself keeping what he says are the best cuts: the cheeks, skirt and blade.
“Every single animal goes through my hands from being born to butchered” he says. “It’s real paddock to plate.”
But even despite the rain, the paddocks of Tasmania are not always lush. The hungry patch in winter means little, including the grass, grows in Tasmania and the cattle are fed hay in addition to their year round supplements of seaweed and salt.
Plus the economics of cheap meat are against grass fed cattle that don’t grow as fast as grain fed. At Kerwee cattle are slaughtered at up to 10 to 15 months of age after 60 to 80 days in the feedlot, reaching some 300 kg in weight. At Nicholls Rivulet bulls may be slaughtered at two and a half years of age.
Environmental Implications
And this is where the environmental comparisons between grain and grass fed becomes, once again, complicated.
Beef cattle are ruminants, cud-chewing animals that include sheep and goats, that fart and mainly burp out prodigious amounts of methane are far more damaging greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
The biggest impact of beef in the environment is claimed not to be the use of land but these gas emissions.
According to the book Super Freakonomics ruminants are responsible for 50 per cent more greenhouse gases than the transportation sector. And merely buying meat may be worse for the environment than driving to the shops.
The book also postulates that the local food movement may be harmful to the environment simply because local producers aren’t as efficient as the big feedlots. Like I said, buying beef ain’t easy.