Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Who wants to know where their meat came from or what's in it? A couple of weeks ago, we asked the question, where's the beef today? What we're going to look at is, where's your beef coming from and what's in it?
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Welcome to the Duster Mud podcast, episode.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: 50 over the Hill.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: No, we're just getting started.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Hello.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: After 25 years of travel around the world while rich was in the air force, being a fighter pilot and policy staff officer, we retired to the Ozarks and started a first generation regenerative farm. And one of the things that we grow here is beef. And it is really a hot topic for us right now.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it is.
We think that it tastes better when our beef.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Why?
[00:00:56] Speaker B: We know that it tastes better, but.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Why would it taste better? It's just beef.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: I don't know. Let's talk about it.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Okay, so ground beef.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Ground beef.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: First off, where does it come from?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: A cow.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Yep. And there are labels out there that say product of the USA. And at least as of right now, what that means is that the meat was, at the very least, repackaged in the United States of America.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:01:35] Speaker A: So when you see a label that says product of USA, that meat could have come from anywhere in the world.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Okay. So I was big time into the grocery shopping thing for about 20 something years, and one of the things that I really would look for was the american flag, or product of USA or made in America, whatever labeling happened to come on that package of beef, so that I was sure that the thing that I was feeding my family was grown by a rancher here in the United States somewhere. And then that beef was taken to a slaughterhouse and hung and then put into a package.
No, you're just shaking your head over there. No.
So it's not oftentimes it's not a rancher in the United States.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Product of the USA simply means that whatever the product is, as far as meats are concerned. Now, I'm not talking about cars or whatever. We're actually talking about beef. Not getting into that beef specifically product of the USA means that that product was packaged in the United States of America. So a typical trip, let's use ground beef. A typical trip for ground beef, it comes from Brazil, Argentina, somewhere, as trimmings off of the primal cuts. So they cut it into sides or quarters, and the trimmings coming off of that then get put into a package, and that package is shipped to the United States that is then opened and repackaged. A lot of times, ground and other things done to it, and then that then can be labeled product of the USA. So first off, product of the USA, made in the USA, whatever. It's all a voluntary label. You don't have to put it on there. No, but at least as of right now, that's changing and we'll get to that. But as of right now, product of the USA only means that it was in some way packaged in the US.
Cool.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Why bother? Actually, why bother? To me, it's fraud.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: And there were a lot of petitions happening to the food safety and inspection Service FSIs, and there were a lot of petitions saying that exact same thing. This is deceitful. This is fraud.
With this label, you are deceiving the american public. So the FSIs actually changed the rules.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: Okay, what are they today that took.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Into effect this week?
The rules now say that in order to bear the label of product of the USA, made in the USA, have a US flag on it, the animal must be born, raised, slaughtered, and processed in the United States of America. It's still a voluntary label.
It doesn't take effect, though, until January 1 of 2026. So we're still about two years out from that, actually. Meaning what you would just intuitively think.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: That it means, I want the Chiquita banana sticker on my beef. I want to know that it came from Brazil. I want to know that it came from Japan. Why do I get to know where my oranges come from and my bananas and all of the other produce, but beef gets the pass on the whole thing? I know you don't have an answer for it, but I would just like to pose the question of why on earth does beef just get the pass on? Sorry, you just don't get to know where it comes.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Other than we shipped in a whole bunch of meat and we packaged it up in a different kind of plastic tube, and now we're selling it to you with a product of USA label on it.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Yeah. What you're talking about is they term it cool, I believe, country of origin labeling, and I don't know why.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: It does not apply to beef.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: No.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: And the USDA, who is all up in every food producer's chili, approves this labeling.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Right.
But it's changed. Right.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: Took effect this week.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: This week?
[00:06:30] Speaker A: This week it is.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: As of now.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: As of now?
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Well, technically, in two years.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: The way it's worded in the rule, as it's written, is that people are encouraged to start following the new rule now, but it's not mandatory until January 1. Of 2026. And at that point, whenever you use that label, if product of the USA is placed on your label, you have to submit written, like we could write on a sheet of know this cow was born on our farm, raised on our farm, you're now slaughtering it and processing it.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Documentation.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: So the onus is going to come on, the cow producer, the actual live animal producer, to produce the information and keep the documentation that that animal was born and raised here. And that's going to be the cost has to be passed on for having to do that in some way. Okay.
How are we supposed to really know what is a way that we can really know where the meat is coming from?
[00:08:01] Speaker A: To know that, at least as of right now, for the next almost two years, to know that the beef that you're consuming came from the United States of America, you need to go find your farmer.
Local.
Bi local.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Now, two years from now, January 1 of 26, if it bears the label product of the USA, there is at least documentation. Whether or not that documentation can be forged or falsified, I'm not going to pass judgment. But there is at least documentation that says that when it says product of the USA, it bears documentation that it actually is product of the USA.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: So do you think that there will become two different classes of meat of beef?
[00:09:01] Speaker A: I do. I actually was thinking about this one. We didn't really get a chance to talk about it. But what I was thinking about on this one is I think that this is going to potentially open a bit of a new market for a medium sized producer. So the huge producers are still going to import the beef. There just won't be a label on it. Right. Because they want to be able to sell the $2 a pound ground beef. And the only way to do that is to be bringing it in from other countries.
That's the only way to do that. And because they need to be able to sell that cheap meat, I just think that there won't be any labels on those products. I think it may open a market for a medium sized producer packer processor that can create for itself a niche market where it actually will be product of the USA. And what you will find is that beef cannot be sold at the very cheap prices that you see in the stores today.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Right.
So where our beef comes from is one question. Yeah, there is another question that is out there, and it has been since probably 2012 when ABC busted open with a news segment for a while.
And it's very difficult to know these days what is actually in our ground beef.
Let's talk about the what, not the where.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: So a bit of deceiving thing here is, as you mentioned, in 2012, ABC News ran a story. They subsequently got sued, ended up settling out of court with a whole bunch of money. Producers incorporated, BPI, some number of millions. They sued for over a billion. It is rumored that they settled for some number of millions, over 100 million. But anyway, after they ran a segment on their lean, finely textured beef, LFTB, and they pejoratively referred to it as pink slime.
What happened, though, after that is BPI in know? A few years later, they sort of let it settle down. And then a few years later, they started running an ad campaign. And the ad campaign is literally called, dude, it's beef.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: So lean, finely textured meat is the last of the last finest of the finest at the end, trimmings off of the hide and bones. And what's left after that animal has been processed, the very bits that are left are collected, they are packaged, they are sent to beef products, Inc.
And there those fine trimmings, which are beef in all fairness, are then processed to the point that they are a usable substance in food stuffs. Yeah, that's the nicest way I can say.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: I couldn't think of a nicer, more politically correct way of saying politically correct.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: As I could be.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: The pauses really gave it away because.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: I had to think about every single word. Yeah.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: So one of the biggest places that they produce this, the meat packing plant is actually right next door, and they send it basically in a conveyor belt over to the facility that does the LFTB. Lean, finely textured beef, or now called ammoniated beef product, ABP. You'll also hear it called ammoniated. So as the trimmings leave, they're not dry, aging. Right. They're not hanging, which naturally takes care of some of the bacterias and stuff. So the trimmings make their way over. They are then ammoniated, which is a food safe process for killing the bacteria that could exist on the meats.
It is then ground and heated to about 100 degrees so that they're then able to separate the fat from the meat.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: So they basically render it off. Ish.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Ish, yeah.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: So they render it, and then that's why it's called lean lean. So they render the fat off of it, and then they're able to then extrude the meat products.
And it looks almost like an extruded chicken food or something. Pelletized meat product. And it is then beef. And so this is not new.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: No.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: The newer thing is that in 2018, the USDA decided that that entire thing, that product that comes out of that, call it lean, finely textured beef, call it ammoniated beef product, like, whatever you want to call it, the USDA said that shall henceforth be known as ground beef.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Right. So pelletized beef products, the bottom of the barrel really is cheap ground beef.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: It is.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: It's pink.
I'm saying that for a reason, because one of the things that we've noticed about farm grown ground beef, not just ours, any that we've gotten from other farmers before we were even farming, is. It's red.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: We were curious.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: It was really red. And you look at the two different. At the same substance, we're going to call both of these ground beef and this one over here, grown directly on a farm and taken to a small abattoir and processed there, versus this commercially produced beef stuff, it's pink.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: I can't say that it's always the reason, but a reason would be that it contains ammoniated beef product or lean, finely textured beef.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it does.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Okay.
But it doesn't have to say it.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: That's the thing, is all of the labeling that we have to have in this world, and all of a sudden, this thing doesn't have to. It's exempt.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Well, the USDA, after they actually went and inspected the facility, they did all of this stuff, and they talked about it for six months, and at the end of their deliberations, they said, dude, this beef is beef. This is ground beef, period.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: It is ground beef.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: And thus, it is all you have to call it is ground beef.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: It is.
[00:16:34] Speaker A: So when you pick up a package of ground beef, typically it happens in the chubs, the opaque packaging, so that you can't see what's inside it, and you pick it up and it says ground beef. That's what it is. Because the USDA determined that this thing that they've made is ground beef.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: One of the large place where this type of ground beef goes to is restaurants.
Okay?
They're big consumers of this type of beef, ground beef.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: So the interesting thing is, if you start diving into the research, which I did a little bit, and there are lots of different restaurants and food grocery store chains that say, we do not have lean, finely textured beef products. We do not use lean, finely textured beef products. The interesting thing about that, though, is from a legal perspective, because the USDA determined that the lean, finely textured beef is only ground beef, those places could say, we only use ground beef. And legally it would be true, because the government agency in charge of what you call things and how you label them said that is now just ground beef.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: So I don't know that I trust the places that say we don't use this because it's no longer a thing. From a legal perspective, it's not even a thing. It isn't a thing. That's right. It's just ground beef.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Okay.
So when you buy ground beef commercially in a grocery store, the bottom line is you don't know what it is and you don't know where it came from.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: That's correct.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: If you would like to know what it is and where it came from, we highly encourage you to find a local farmer and buy it directly from them if at all possible.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: That's what we did.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Yep, it is. And look, first of all, you're supporting the United States farmers who are doing everything that they can to stay afloat.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: The ranchers that are doing everything they can to keep the business going so that we can continue to make food in this country.
You're supporting that. You're also putting what you know on your table, and it tastes so much better, right?
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
And if you are ever wondering why it tastes better, there could be a reason. There really could be. It may not just be in your mind. I know that this came from the farm down the road, so it must taste better just because I think it tastes better. But there actually really could be a difference in the meat.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Before we conclude, I mentioned that there was some new stuff coming out of the FSIs. One of those is a new guideline for label approvals, and that took effect in March 2024. So very recent. And there are a lot of things that you can claim on a label that does not require you to have that label approved. And a few of them caught my eye.
One of them is big agriculture. Factory farming or factory agriculture.
You can put big Ag on your product without having it approved.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Just in case you wanted to put big ag. No.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: Not sure why anybody would put that.
Can you put small ag?
[00:20:31] Speaker A: Well, you can put family farm raised. Family owned ranches. Farm raised.
Farm to fork. Farm to table is a new one that you can put on there. Oh, that's cool. I found that farm to table was a pretty cool one.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: For me, a neat one is you can now put the homegrown by Heroes logo on your label, which we're a certified homegrown by Heroes organization farm. You can put that on there. You can say premium, you can say made in the USA, which we talked about already. And finally, you can put veteran owned on your label also. So some pretty cool things that you can put on your label.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: So as consumers, we have the opportunity through how we spend our money, the food that we buy to influence the industry.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: Yes, that's absolutely correct.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Every time you spend your dollar on local beef, you are supporting that. You are saying to your local community and you are saying to the industry at large, I want beef that's actually grown here.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a vote. It's a vote. With your dollar, with your money. The vote is, I want this right.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: So go find yourself a local farmer. What were some of the websites that we've put out there before?
Eatwild.com is a very good resource to find somebody near you that is growing regenerative, ag or otherwise, that you can get your beef from locally.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: That's the website I would use.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you guys for hanging out with us again. If you're enjoying these podcasts and these videos, make sure to subscribe to our channel. Like, and if you think that you know someone else who might be interested in the information, share it with your friends and your family. And until next time, bye.
