July 30, 2007 12:34 PM

Eating Liberally Food For Thought: Better Know a Butcher

by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally, posted on OpenLeft.

Otto Von Bismark, Germany's "Iron Chancellor," famously said "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

Better for whom? The legislators and butchers who have something to hide? If the process of making laws -- or sausages -- is so revolting, maybe we should ask ourselves why that is, instead of sheepishly swallowing larded legislation and wolfing down pork products from parts unknown.

And those ground beef patties you buy at the supermarket are a veritable melting pot of mystery meats, made from countless cows from potentially half a dozen different countries. No wonder the meat industry doesn't want to see Country of Origin Labeling implemented. In fact, they lobbied to get a less rigorous standard into the current farm bill-you know it's gotta suck when the National Pork Producers Council gives it the thumbs up.

After decades of making deals in dark, smoke-filled backrooms, our politicians have been thrust, blinking, into the glare of CSPAN, YouTube, and Comedy Central. During the CNN/YouTube debate last week, a handful of "ordinary" Americans got to question the Democratic candidates directly. Their questions were pointed and poignant, unlike the usual beltway blather the anchors like to lob. (The candidates' answers were, alas, pretty much business as usual.)

Now, if only we could eliminate the MSM from our sausage, too. As in, "Mechanically Separated Meat" - defined by the USDA as "a paste-like and batter-like meat product produced by forcing bones, with attached edible meat, under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue."

Bits of gristle and connective tissue may, technically, be edible, and MSM is a boon to manufacturers looking for cheap filler to bulk up their product, but who really wants to eat that stuff? Concerns about mad cow disease forced the USDA to ban the use of MSM beef back in 2004, but MSM pork is still permitted, and hot dogs may contain as much as 20% MSM.

If you want to buy burgers and hot dogs that aren't adulterated by scraps of sinew and gristly globs, try the Japanese concept of "teikei," which translates loosely as "food with the farmer's face on it." In other words, get your meats directly from local farmers or the butchers who source their meats from those farmers. "Grass farmers" let their livestock graze on pasture the way nature intended them to, and because they don't confine their animals in close, disease-breeding quarters, they don't need to rely on all the hormones and antibiotics the factory farms use in the name of "efficiency." And they don't pump their products full of fillers and chemicals, either.

But what if you aren't lucky enough to live near a farmers' market, or a butcher shop that sources its meats locally? Look for products from companies like Niman Ranch or Applegate Farms, who rely on a network of small family farms to provide them with their products. It's the next best thing to local.

Best of all, of course, would be to eat no meat at all. But some of us (cough, cough) aren't ready to go that route. So we're glad we can get biodynamic beef and hot dogs that aren't contaminated by MSM and other unpalatable by-products. If we wanted scraps of crap ground up and passed off as fit for consumption, we'd get our news from Fox.