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Here's The Beef

Natural, sustainably raised meat has found its discerning fan club

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KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Without hormones, steroids and other controversial additives, organic beef makes a better burger.

SEVERAL TIMES each summer, Mark Ramsden fills a couple of big coolers with a few hundred pounds of ground, naturally grown "Mountain Beef" and drives from Walla Walla to Seattle. Then he boards a ferry to sell his beef at the Bainbridge Island Farmer's Market. Like other small producers, he's catering to a niche — consumers looking for cleaner, healthier beef from someone they know they can trust.

Just a stone's throw from the Bainbridge market is the swank Town & Country Market, part of the Central Market family of grocery stores where shoppers pay a premium for all-natural "Oregon Country Beef." And in Seattle, at other farmer's markets, folks are lining up for costly "pasture-finished" ground beef from "Thundering Hooves" or shopping for "sustainably raised" "Niman Ranch" ground beef at Puget Consumers Co-ops or Whole Foods Markets. What's with all this "designer beef"?

By law, any beef labeled "organic" qualifies as all-natural and free from antibiotics, steroids and animal byproducts. Cows raised for organic beef must spend a significant part of their lives grazing on live grass. If it's grain-fed, the grain must be organically grown. But what about all-natural beef that's not certified organic?

Ramsden's beef comes from a unique breed. "Corriente cattle," he says, "are descended from cows brought here by Spanish settlers in the 18th century. They're as close as you can get to game." Because they are smaller and more adapted to the natural environment, Ramsden maintains, his cattle are better for the land.

Mountain Beef and beef from Thundering Hooves are among a very small percentage of U.S. beef that's "grass-fed." Ironically, up until the mid-20th century, all beef was grass-fed. But a confluence of social and economic factors, including a surfeit of grain and a taste for costlier, fattier beef in a newly prosperous postwar America, made the old-fashioned grass-fed stuff a rarity. Unfortunately, today's conventional supermarket beef contains about twice as much saturated fat, with only a fraction of the heart-healthy Omega-3 fatty acids found in grass-fed beef. And the conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), an anti-carcinogen abundant in grass-fed meats, is largely absent in grain-fed beef.

Oregon Country Beef and Niman Ranch use meat from multiple ranches that practice standards of animal husbandry established by marketers concerned with making the beef industry more sustainable. Neither of these brands is organic, nor are they grass-fed because, in order to make the meat more tender and flavorful, the animals are fed on grain for a few weeks before slaughter. But both brands qualify as "all-natural" because this "finishing phase," unlike the fattening that goes on at most feed lots, is monitored to ensure that the grain is free from antibiotics, steroids and animal byproducts.

Where to range

Learn more about natural ground beef from these producers:

http://www.mountain-beef.com/

http://www.oregoncountrybeef.com/

http://www.thunderinghooves.net/

http://www.nimanranch.com/

Animal byproducts, such as ground bones once commonly used as a calcium supplement, are a concern to many consumers because mad-cow disease can be transmitted only through the flesh of another contaminated animal. All-natural-beef suppliers also make sure their beef is not weaned on "milk replacer." Milk replacers typically contain cow's blood. Cattle are naturally vegetarian, and feeding them the ground bones or blood of their kindred is, to many consumers, repugnant.

Not long ago, I spent a day at a ranch in Central Texas near where my father grew up. We were with one of his childhood friends who owns the land. Bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush were blooming, and along the horizon, a small herd of cattle stood in silhouette against the clear blue sky. As we walked, the Old Man and his friend shared memories of the Great Depression when their parents worked at the nearby cotton gin.

"Do you remember the burgers?" my father's friend wanted to know. "I used to ride my bike from the cotton gin into town to buy hamburgers for the crew," he said. "They charged a nickel apiece, but if I could get five of the guys to order one, the burger joint would give me six for a quarter and I could keep the sixth one for myself. Those hamburgers were the best-tasting thing in the world."

I couldn't help thinking that the cheap hamburgers these guys enjoyed as kids were all-natural, grass-fed and free from steroids and antibiotics. They would undoubtedly scoff at the high prices my generation pays for what they might call "designer beef," but I bet they would recognize the clean, honest taste.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Ken Lambert is a Seattle Times staff photographer.