Tag Archives: vitamin D

Chinese Pork Is Better Than Ours

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Me again… I like an interesting headline, don’t you? But what I really dislike is headlines that deliberately deceive you. Thankfully for this writer-wannabe, English is ambiguous enough that reading today’s headline really doesn’t tell you exactly what I mean. So you clicked, right? I would totally click. We all know China’s scary food safety history. It’s a pretty dismal record.

So how in the world can I say their pork is better?

Well. When I was writing my last article pertaining to some undisclosed amount of American chicken being transported to China for cooking and processing, and then being shipped back and funneled into the general market, WITH NO SPECIAL LABELING WHATSOEVER, I stumbled upon a new bit of info that even I didn’t know.

Chinese pork is better than ours.

Not “ours” as in Shady Grove Ranch’s, thankfully. “Ours” as in American pork in general. The general “we.”

As you know, China has TONS of people. And they love pork. Thus they import TONS of pork to feed those people. Interestingly, though, they are pickier than most Americans about what the pork is fed.

Commercially-raised pork from the USA is routinely fed a drug called ractopamine, which helps pigs burn fat and build muscle. I’m not a doctor/veterinarian, so I can’t explain the mechanism to you, but basically it messes with their endocrine systems and tricks their bodies into bulking up. Think The Hulk, only with a curly tail. Oh, wait, commercial piggeries cut off their tails. I digress…

If the fact that they’re feeding drugs to pigs doesn’t surprise you, maybe this will: There is no withdrawal period. Pigs (and cows and turkeys, by the way) can be fed this drug right up to the day they are slaughtered.

Why do they do it? Because muscle meat makes more money than fat. Plain and simple. You could have guessed that. We’ve all done it—when you’re shopping for bacon, what do you do? You look through the little window on the back of the package, and pick out the one with the least fat!

Well, I have a secret for you… pigs are fat factories. And that’s a good thing. Rightly-raised animal fat is full of wonderful nutrients, with pasture-raised pork fat being especially high in Vitamin D. Here’s another secret—bacon isn’t always just neat little rows of fat/lean/fat/lean. Sometimes it looks like this:

Fat bacon for farmers

 
Don’t worry—we farmers aren’t afraid of a little (or a lot of) fat, so we usually eat the stuff that turns out like this and you never even see it. But occasionally we’ll accumulate more than we can eat, so we run special discounts on “fat” meat, like our recent batches of “Chubby Breakfast Sausage,” or our “Fat Sirloin Chops.” (Sorry, they’re all sold out now, but I’m sure we’ll have more in the future! Our newsletter is a great way to stay informed of specials!)

Image  Image
 
 
How does it happen? Well, bigger pigs tend to slow down on muscle growth and speed up on fat production. But of course there’s an inherent “cost per head” associated with raising livestock for food. So it’s more advantageous from a cost-per-animal perspective to let pigs grow big before slaughter. But bigger pigs have fatter meat, so it’s a catch-22. Industry’s solution is to use drugs to manipulate the way a pig’s metabolism behaves. They can grow bigger pigs but force their bodies to do away with the excess fat. Call me old-fashioned, but the last thing you want to be messing with is your natural metabolic processes. Sounds pretty scary to me…

When did cheapness of food trump all other qualities? Just because science *can* do something (e.g. raise pigs bigger and leaner using drugs) doesn’t mean we *should.* We feel the benefits of drug-free pork are worth some extra cost.

Apparently China does, too.  

Get this: The Chinese import authority does not allow their pigs to be fed any ractopamine ever. So it’s not even good enough for them if a drug withdrawal protocol is observed and the meat tests clean of ractopamine. Producers have to PROVE that the pigs were never even accidentally fed ractopamine. In that sense, Chinese families eat better pork than most Americans!

Maybe ractopamine use is a rare practice? It seems doubtful. If you head down to the local feed store, you can find in the Show Pig Feed section a feed additive called Paylean which contains this drug. Any 4-H or FFA kid can use it to make their piggy extra pretty at showtime. So if you though by buying “local” you’d be safe, guess again. I’m not criticizing them for wanting to do well at show. I’m criticizing the American thinking that has concluded that fat is bad, and pigs shouldn’t make fat and therefore need to be “fixed.” It’s like begrudging an ear of corn for having a cob!

Pigs make fat. It’s what they do best. The meat is really a bonus! Back when our society relied on animal fats for essentials like candles and soap, we were delighted that pigs were so efficient at producing fat! Momma rendered it and used every last bit for preserving food, greasing axles, and oiling leather, in addition to the more obvious uses like cooking oil, candles, and soap.

So how do we deal with the fat problem? Well, we certainly don’t give our pigs drugs! Our solution here at SGR, is to take pigs “to market” aka “freezer camp” before they get too big and fat. It’s part of the reason our pork is generally more expensive. It simply takes more pigs to make a given amount of pork. But once in a while, we have to “retire” one of our older, larger, breeder pigs, and more often than not, their meat is just plain fatter, and the fat can’t always just be trimmed away because it’s “built in.” That’s the case with all three of the above photos. It doesn’t cost any less to raise the extra-chubby ones. But people don’t place value on fat like they do on protein. So that’s just factored in to our natural farm management plan. That’s why you’ll occasionally see sales of fatter cuts. Once we’ve eaten our fill first, of course! 😉

And of course I’ve got my little soap factory going. If you haven’t tried our soap yet, we get great feedback on it (and love using it ourselves!!). And we use lard in place of all vegetable oil in cooking. It makes killer pastry! Toss the Crisco and switch to real lard!

I find it ironic that many Americans seem to be ok with these unnatural practices which China eschews, but are appalled when they find out that Chinese chicken factories are producing their chicken nuggets and popcorn chicken. The Chinese recognize the inferiority, and maybe even the danger, of pork fed drugs to keep it lean. Now you do, too, and you’ve got the advantage of knowing a farm that not only doesn’t feed ractopamine, but also really pasture-raises those piggies without any OTHER drugs (yes, there are others), or GMOs or other garbage (literally). 

Chinese pork isn’t better than our pork. That’s SGR’s “our.”

Pastured Meats and Your Health

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Report on Pastured Meats and Your Health

We recently put together an event at one of our Longview retail locations: Jack’s Natural Foods. We did a presentation on Pastured Meats and Your Health, and took the time to share Matt’s health story and some of the things we learned about food during his battle with ulcerative colitis. We shared about the Weston A. Price Foundation and Dr. Price’s findings on principles of traditional diets. We finished by demonstrating how to render lard and offered samples of simple favorite recipes like pork shoulder roast and roast chicken.

jacks presentation photo1

We had lots of fun telling our story and talking about how important well-raised meats and eggs because of their high nutrient content and digestibility. Consuming whole animal foods (organs, fat, bones, AND muscle meats) is key for reducing inflammation and restoring the body’s God-given ability to heal itself. It is interesting to note that there are few, if any, auto-immune diseases that are actually curable, not just suppressible, by modern medicine. Matt was one of the many victims of the effects of a toxic, low-nutrient diet which is so prevalent in our society. It has always been close to our hearts to share what we’ve learned so that others can work to be restored to good health as we were.

Perhaps you have never heard his story of recovery from ulcerative colitis. He went from a tall, muscular, athletic young man to a frighteningly thin, anemic, debilitated sufferer of intestinal disease. There was no explanation. According to doctors, diet had nothing to do with the disease and the prognosis was hopeless without drugs and surgery. After his second flare-up, which followed a year of his strict obedience to doctors’ orders, we became convinced that we had to take our health into our own hands. It took several years to get his guts back on track, but we are happy to report that it has been almost 5 years since his last severe flare-up and 4 years since he took any prescription drugs. So what did he do to recover? Those were some of the topics discussed at Jack’s earlier this month. And of course, a big part of his recovery was changing to a Traditional Diet.  

A few of the Traditional Diets principles we discussed were consuming generous amounts of pasture-raised animal fats, like butter, egg yolks and lard. Animal fat, when it comes from well-raised animals, contains lots of otherwise lost nutrients like vitamins A, D, and K. These nutrients are fat soluble and only found in their animal forms in the fat of animals. And it just so happens that these nutrients were plentiful in the most treasured foods of traditional (aka unmodernized) people groups. Nutrients like vitamin D and K are only found in the fats of animals eating green grasses and living outdoors in the sunshine.

Other principles of Traditional Diets are the intentional incorporation of bone broth and the use of unrefined salt. We talked briefly about fermented foods, raw milk, and avoiding vegetable oils.

We discussed preparing simple foods and meals, like roast chicken and pot roast in a crockpot. Real food doesn’t need to be complicated. One of my most effective strategies for implementing real food is not elaborate planning or strict routines, but rather a simple idea: keep basic supplies on hand at all times, like potatoes, onions, ground beef, lard, and broth. Even when you’re feeling uninspired to cook, you can still put something together that is real, nourishing, and delicious.

It seems there is a need in the East Texas area to learn about what is truly healthy based on evidence because there is so much misinformation out there and so many laboratory-based products that make claims upon your health. We’ve always felt that a proprietary “food” that can’t be made or grown at home but only purchased from a particular company cannot be a sustainable way to achieve and maintain health. Yes, sure, we’re selling a product, too, but we aren’t hiding how we do it or where we got our information. You could do it, too, if you wanted to! The truth is, though, that most folks don’t mind leaving the farming to us. 🙂

There also seems to be a lack of knowledge for implementation strategies. How do you incorporate these principles? Where do you get the foods? How do you cook them? Lard is among the most bewildering foods to incorporate, not because it’s hard, but simply because contemporary food wisdom eschews the use of fat almost entirely, and, well, pork fat? Won’t that kill me dead after the first bite?

We might argue otherwise. We’ve been eating it for years! And though eating pasture-raised pork fat in the form of lard is only a small part of our overall eating strategy, we often focus on that because it has the ability to displace some very nasty conventional dietary components, including trans fat and vegetable oils. Not only that, but fat has the ability to satiate the appetite. Try eating a plate of cracklin for dinner. I would guess you’d only get through the first bite or two before your body says, “Enough. I’m full.” It’s very difficult to overeat when you’re eating the good kinds of fats.

So take this as an encouragement to start taking baby steps toward a more traditional diet. Check out the Weston A. Price Foundation and their extensive (free!) database of dietary wisdom. Would you like us to come do an event like this in your area? Let us know and we’ll see if we can fit it in between feeding pigs, moving cows, and taking care of our trio of future Cadman farmers. Happy eating!

 

PS—Glenn Evans at Longview News Journal was kind enough to come and cover our event. Check it out here!