Burger King has pork? You mean in the ham for the Croissan'wiches?
I'm going to kick a cat to make up for this cowardly decision by BK.
Bacon on breakfast stuff, too, I'd guess.
Good for them. But as noted elsewhere, the big thing would be for them to move to a similar policy for beef. And to quit spraying that gross starch coating on their fries. Yeesh.
Huh. This news makes me marginally interested in trying one of their products for the first time in over a decade. PR success!
I was thinking that -- what would count as a similarly incremental policy for beef? Grass-fed would be a huge step, not a small one.
5 -- don't bother. In 1995 I tried a Whopper after about 6 years of not having eaten there. I was just astonished that I could ever have wanted that shit.
Yeah, but the bad news is now there are chickens and pigs running around everywhere you go, and you have to watch for eggs underfoot.
But is a Whopper worse than a Big Mac? Every once in a while I really, really want a Big Mac.
Free-range pork is one of the few remaining sources of trichinosis (along with wild boar and wild bear). Pigs are omnivores with a bullet -- carrion, shit, you name it.
6: As I recall, the burger industry is mostly using knackered dairy cows; grass fed might be sourceable there. It almost certainly isn't in cattle bred for consumption.
10: bah. Trichinosis is a lesser evil than e.coli & a host of other issues inherent in industrial beef & pork operations.
I do miss McDonalds' tallow-fried french fries. While I see the sense in making the only basically vegetarian thing on the menu actually vegetarian, vegetable oil just isn't the same as animal fat for frying.
But I'm drifting away from animal rights here.
Wait, MCD's fries are veggie now? Are you sure? I thought their response to the whole busted-in-Bombay scandal was just to announce that they were using beef flavoring (not frying oil, though) and be done with it.
13: It isn't even strictly an animal rights point of view that gets you to ideas like this. Any serious look at the industrial chain we're using now has to leave you questioning how significant the (avoidable) health & nutrition consequences are. One of the most stridently anti industrial feedlot people I know doesn't care about the effect on animals at all ....
what would count as a similarly incremental policy for beef
I dunno, but I suspect it would be a question of percentages--we're purchasing 1% this year, 2% next year, 4% the year after that, and so on. Is this going to be the thread that actually forces me to read Fast Food Nation?
Trichinosis: the lobby that dare not speak its name.
14: Oh, if that's the case it's just stupid. Who cares about the beef flavoring, the point of frying in tallow is that it's a heavier fat so it doesn't soak the fries the same way -- they were crisper and lighter. If it's not to cater to vegetarians, then they just suck.
And Emerson -- got any sourcing on the 'free range pigs have trich' claim? I know wild game does, but I can't see why farmed pigs would be more likely to carry disease just because they aren't locked in boxes. (and a quick google isn't coming up with an answer.)
16:
The thing about grass-fed beef these days is that as I understand it, it's essentially non-existent in the kind of numbers that work with the supply chain someone like B.K. buys from. Which is more than a little wierd, since the non-grass fed kind is primarily corn-fed, again as I understand it, which doesn't really work for cattle; hence all the drug cocktails.
FFN is worth a look, so's `The Omnivores' Dillemma'
Walruses also spread trichinosis.
My guess is that free range pigs get trichinosis if they eat carrion. It depends on where they range, I presume. My source is the CDC. There are fewer than 20 cases a year, almost all from wild boar and bear (given the walrus shortage in the US). The disease is very seldom fatal.
Semen of trichinosis-infected humans does not carry the disease.
Have any of you seen Our Daily Bread? It is a documentary about industrial agriculture.
Yeah, I think 'free-range' implies 'pigpen', not 'wandering around unobserved eating dead hoboes'. I doubt there's much additional risk from free-range as opposed to caged pork.
19--
Right, so maybe it's a tenth of a percent, then a quarter of a percent, and so on--what BK would be doing here is essentially creating the larger market needed for grass-fed beef to come out of the gourmet ghetto.
For the deptessing angle on this, check out this post.
Burger King fries are absolutely delicious. I'm appalled by the lack of pee & comity on this point.
Hmmm. This is from 2001, with McD's saying that "natural flavor" means "beef extract" and if you didn't know that well you shoulda asked. However here's one from 2006 where they got sued by a vegan for having dairy products (?), which makes me think they had got the beef out. But Wikipedia pronounces them Not Vegetarian.
Ah-ha!
French Fries:
Potatoes, vegetable oil (partially hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor (wheat and milk derivatives)*, citric acid (preservative), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (maintain color), dimethylpolysiloxane (antifoaming agent)), salt. Prepared in vegetable oil ((may contain one of the following: Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated corn oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness), dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent). *CONTAINS: WHEAT AND MILK (Natural beef flavor contains hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk as starting ingredients.)
Makes me wonder what the vegan was on about.
Burger King fries are absolutely delicious.
Is this a sophisticated Austinite joke?
What we get is an incredibly low cost per calorie for the food we buy, but that's not doing us any good.
I wonder if that's true when we factor in all of the government subsidies associated with food production.
26: That makes absolutely no sense as a marketing decision -- how much flavor difference could a little 'beef extract' make, that would make up for pissing off all the vegetarians in the world?
I wonder if that's true when we factor in all of the government subsidies associated with food production.
The subsidies are a big part of the problem. They're the reason corn syrup is so cheap and prevalent, for example.
Right. It's also why corn is used for cattle feed.
Right. And if the government is going to waste insane amounts of money on subsidising farmers, why can't it buy us some interesting cheese, heirloom tomatoes and grass-fed beef, rather than tankers full of high-fructose corn syrup?
I tend to assume that it's possible to simultaneously make food better tasting, healthier, less cruel, and less damaging to the environment without any tradeoffs between those factors
We'll eat ponies!
24: Yes, but the problem is that someone like BK is too large to bother buying from farms. So at best, they will buy from large slaughterhouses, or more likely a conglomerate. I could be wrong, but I've been told that the grass-fed operations are so relatively small, the big guys won't even talk to them. So anything you get is going to be through a smaller, local slaughterhouse.
This doesn't even address the other side, which was that as I understand it, almost all the beef used in fast food burgers comes from dairy cows past their producing age, so it's a different story. Similar scaling problems though, but there may be other reasons for market pressure to grain feed dairly cows (taste?). I don't know.
I think you all have the causality wrong above. Food isn't cheap because of the subsidies, rather the subsidies (primarily on corn) exist to keep the (industrail) food cheap.
The subsidies sure aren't helping farmers; they are all going broke. At least in the case of corn (which is the real lynchpin in all this, and the majority end source of north american food) it isn't the farmers that are subsidised directly, it is the crop. This maintains market costs below production costs, and allows continual downward pressure --- forcing increased supply.
From the link in 24: Of course it's good news but don't forget that they are still going to be raised on factory farms. The pollution issues will not go away, the meat and eggs are still going to be bland, and Burger King buildings will still blight the landscape. But what the hell, you can't have it all.
Oh boo fucking hoo. This sort of reflexively superior class-based snarkery is why people think Trey Parker is funny, people! Obviously strip malls are a blight; accept this and move on! I'm a vegetarian and this makes me want to go eat a Whopper just to piss this guy off.
by the way, LB, as to your further thoughts: I'm pretty much certain your `knee-jerk' is basically correct. The externalized costs of the current american diet are huge, and it is entirely possible to grow reasonably cheap alternatives that are tastier & healthier, but not quite as cheap (and in some cases, don't travel as well)
Small farmers are going broke, but doesn't most of the benefit of subsidies go to ADM and similar, which are doing nicely?
In any case, I'd rather trade off a higher cost for industrially produced corn for cheaper and more plentiful organic produce, free-range meat, etc.
I've been told that the grass-fed operations are so relatively small, the big guys won't even talk to them.
I wonder whether practices by other industries facing similar issues of scale could inform agriculture. Merlin, for example, is a licensing agency that pools the catalogs of tons of independent record labels in order to represent them in dealings with big digital distributors like iTunes.
Subsidize the corn if its used to create biofuel. The corn syrup is killing us.
I remember reading about the difficulties in starting up a small-scale licensed slaughtering facility (maybe in the Times -- this is the only thing I'm finding and that's not it) for small farms, so I think that's part of it.
Problems are probably greater with livestock for reasons of transport -- aggregating 50 head of cattle here, 25 200 miles away, and so on is an entirely different logistical problem than aggregating intellectual property. But I don't know anything for real.
Fucking liberals. The pig's pain is what seals in the tastiness.
40: Of course, I'd make that tradeoff in a second.
Yes the subsidies (which is about 1/2 the income of field corn producers, if I recall correctly) are in effect a pretty direct subsidy of the big industrial producers and processed foods (e.g. ADM, but also Tyson, and McDonalds) by taxpayers money that gets sold as aid to farmers.
My point about the structure of the subsidies is that it is guaranteed to do just that. Market prices drop because of oversupply, subsidies are paid per bushel, and they drop every year (or stay fixed, so effectively lose to inflation). The only way for your small farmer to maintain the same income is to up production (and probably go further into debt on mechanization). So the farmer needs more land (debt) or more yeild (talk to Monsanto, pay 2x as much for seed hoping for 2x yield. More petroleum based fertilizer, etc). Since all the farmers do it, you have even bigger crop the next year, and hence the price drops again.
lather. rinse. repeat.
Fucking liberals. The pig's pain is what seals in the tastiness.
42: Corn production of this type is totally dependent on petroleum. The biofuel idea is stupid unless predicated on this sort of oversupplly --- then it's just not a great idea.
If I recall correctly, corn production in the US (including transport) uses about the same amount of oil as cars do. That could have been all agriculture though, of which corn is just the largest slice.
For an area with fewer incremental steps, like beef, it seems like higher or midrange restaurants following Wolfgang Puck's recent changes are what is necessary to make the market noticably larger so that the big boys have an opportunity to buy something.
I'm dimly remembering - from Fast Food Nation? - that some of the big fast food chains were bigger players in getting slaughterhouses to do microbial testing than the government regulatory agencies, due to some institutional weaknesses. If they wanted more grass-fed beef, I'm sure they could get the ball rolling.
52: Thing is, under the current system, there just isn't any way to have grass-fed not be significantly more expensive. Fast food is so price fragile I can't see them pushing. Unless there is a real food-scare about corn-feed and feedlots (which is possible).
On the other hand your highrange are often doing it already (tastes better) and large scale adoption by midrange could really help.
US eats a lot more chicken than beef though iirc, so a lot of the system is set up for that, too.
Also, good for Burger King for doing what they're doing, but I think it won't really be (or be seen as) a positive move until and unless they ramp up their use of these products. Going from 2% of their eggs to 4% of their eggs will impress me more than the first 2% did.
Subsidize the corn if its used to create biofuel.
If you're just growing corn to turn it into fuel, that's a bad idea--it requires more energy than it provides. Biofuel only works if it's made from excess material (like stalks) that we have already.
Hemp, man! (Actually, hemp may be practical biofuel. I simply don't know.)
The linkage of dangerous strains of E. Coli to corn-fed cattle could cause a real scare - I'm pretty disappointed that that angle fell beneath the waves of last fall's spinach fiasco.
55: yes, hence 51. Even worse though, building yet another dependance on field corn into the economy is probably a really bad idea, even if it is using some otherwise difficult to leverage biomass.
Hemp, man!
Don't know about biofuel, but it's better than cotton for making cloth. The whole plant is usable for fiber, rather than just the cotton ball.
"Trichinosis is a lesser evil than e.coli."
These heart worms aren't really bothering me so much, just so long as I don't get any gas.
A start on kindness-to-cows could be made by stopping all those fucking growth hormones. Ever seen the dragging-on-the-ground udders on a poor cow that's been - dare I say it - beefed up?
We need to get people eating more goat. It's a much more eco-friendly animal. [As are bunnies, but bunnies are too cute to eat. Bambis, however, make fer good eatin'.]
Regulating and restricting antibiotic use would also be a good step, for a lot of reasons. It would probably make beef more expensive all by itself, but that would narrow the gap with non-corn-fed cattle.
59: I'm a little suspicious of this, considering that back when hemp was still a more mainstream product, I have the impression that it was devoted to making rope and paper, not cloth. On the other hand I suppose processes have improved -- they weren't making cloth out of wood then either.
56: The problem isn't really alternate sources, it's usage. Corn for biofuel only makes sense because we have this whacky corn market driven by other things.
The main thing about todays corn is that it is spectacularly high yield (of carbs, particularly) so long as you can feed it lots of crude oil in the form of fertalizer. Nothing else comes even close. It's like magick, but it's entirely predicated on cheap oil. It surprises me that this doesn't seem to come up in the oil dependancy discussions much.
60: That misses the point. Trich. is something we can handle with proper food handling. There are all sorts of problems with, for example, stuffing cattle into feedlots and making them eat corn against their physiology, which even though we throw a truly impressive array of pharma. etc. at it we simply cannot handle. Bottom line is, just for one example a significant percentage of all the hamburger in the country has fecal matter in it, and this is coming from feedlots that are breeding ever more resistent bugs as we train them on all the antibiotics we have....
E. Coli was just one of many issues with the system. Trich is hardly a comparable problem (and wouldn't be a problem at all in the scenario LB is metioning --- noone is talking about letting the pigs out in a forest to root for acorns and whatever else they find).
56: It surprises me that this doesn't seem to come up in the oil dependancy discussions much. I keep hearing it but apparently our congresscritters can't over the din from the corn lobby. We're not going to do a Brazil unless there's something better than corn used.
64: The fertilizer angle (of corn, and of crops generally) does come up pretty regularly at dedicated spots like The Oil Drum and alt-energy sites.
Jesus, is this moving fast! But to 38, I'm a snobbish, anti-strip mall architect, but I didn't read the line about BK bldgs blighting the landscape as a literal critique of the built form - more of a complaint about the ubiquity of a shitty restaurant (the writer's a chef, fer cryin out loud).
OTOH, I may have just taken that (wholly justified) sentiment right in stride....
64: They can soften it up pretty well now so that clothing can be made out of it. Probably wouldn't want to wear a hemp t-shirt, but a hemp sweatshirt would work fine.
Utilitarian smocks for everyone!
OK, maybe someone can answer my question here: back when I first started getting into biodiesel (in the late 90s), leftover oil was where it was at, for a variety of obvious reasons. I understand that nationwide-scale production couldn't just rely on leftover grease fomr the local Chinese joint, but is there no role for recycled cooking oil in a larger biofuel effort? I mean, surely McD alone creates millions of gallons of waste oil/day. And then you reduce the crowding-out effect, and the evil of subsidizing petro-intensive industrial ag exclusively to "reduce" reliance on imported petrol.
Er, 68 was to 67, not 64.
62: My only experience with bamboo-fiber clothing was that it wore out awfully quickly. But I guess it grows quickly, so...
70: My wife's favorite shirt on me is a hemp long-sleeve, button-down thing. Obv. not suit-suitable, but, when ironed, quite nice.
Think linen.
Up in Canada, they make hay bales dedicated for building construction out of hemp. It's hippie/anarchitect nirvana.
64,67: Sure; what I mean is the people who know about it talk a lot, but most people don't seem to have any clue how oil-reliant industrial agricultures is. And, as you say, there is no legislative traction whatsoever.
There's a store in Northampton that sells mostly hemp-based clothing. I'm told it's quite comfortable.
I think this BK decision is an excellent step in the right direction, although it's true this would have much more of an effect if it were about beef.
Also, whoever said that Big Macs are better than Whoppers is insane. Whoppers are delicious.
Whoppers come with pickles, right?
77: I'm more likely to eat a Whopper than a Big Mac when I'm just generally hungry (they remind me more of a "hamburger"), but I only ever crave Big Macs, with their distinctive flavor.
77: Triumph of the `food scientists', that.
You can cook both e coli and trich out of food. But a little e coli is no big deal, so we can keep our beef succulent and red.
I agree that trich isn't a big deal either, it's just a slightly bigger deal than e coli, if you get it.
Well, my point wasn't that you can't cook e.coli out, but that we are essentially constructing nastier ones in these feedlots. And, as I thought I had been clear about, that this is only one of a very large number of questionable results, from a purely nutrition & health point of view, of this system of meat production.
I also find the statement that trich is a slightly bigger deal questionable, if for no other reason that the death statistics. E.coli is something like 50 or 60 a year, and unless I'm completely misremembering, the total reported cases of trich aren't even close to that, let alone deaths (which are extremely rare). Fair enough that we'd have to look at historical data to really be relevent to this discussion.
Trich, on the other hand is a) nothing new, and b) not actually an issue in what LB was talking about.
I think the reason that trich deaths are so rare is that it has almost completely been expunged from domestic pork populations. Also, people have had it drilled into them not to undercook pork. I'm all for free range whatever, and for undercooking things, but if I had to choose between a dose of e coli, and trichonosis, I'd choose the former, is all.
It is sort of an issue for what LB was talking about, in that wild pigs could theoretically contract trichonosis. And, you know, the wild pig problem.
That makes absolutely no sense as a marketing decision -- how much flavor difference could a little 'beef extract' make, that would make up for pissing off all the vegetarians in the world?
A lot, actually. The big fast-food companies have craving down to a science, and apparently the beef extract increases craving significantly. Vegetarians aren't a good demographic for McDonald's anyway, for lots of reasons.
The trichinosis lobby is obviously too powerful to defeat.
83: That's why I said we'd have to look at historical data.
But no, it isn't an issue for what LB was talking about, because nobody was suggesting wild pigs. It's just a question of living their entire lives in a small box, or being able to wander around a bit.
Now I know why Sausagely wants a handgun: to protect himself from the impending hordes of wild BK pigs.
I'm suggesting wild pigs, is the thing. I should have come out and said it earlier. Suggestion: wild pigs.
86. yeah.... i probably shouldn't be posting in the middle of a million other things.
On the other hand: what could possible go wrong with a massive increase in the wild pig population? Especially those 600lb with nasty tempers. It's not like North American Homo-Sapiens couldn't use a bit more selection pressure, right? Just saying.
How about mini-bacon from those pot-bellied pigs that were the rage a few years back? Talk about a boutique meat!
90: I'll go for that. I volunteer Santa Monica Blvd for the first intro of a horde of seriously annoyed heavy-weight wild tuskers.
As I understand it, the only way the biofuel equation starts to make sense is when energy prices rise to the point to justify the extra cost associated with cellulose-derived fuels, at which point you don't have to dick around with growing and fertilizing a specific crop (and driving up the cost of that crop's other, non-fuel uses, e.g. food), but can just let prairie grass go nuts and mow it 2-3 times ayear.
90: My current fantasy for what I'd do if I ever made fuck-you money involves buying up a 1000 acres or so of oak forest and letting a herd of pigs roam free, fattening up on acorns so that I might slaughter them and turn them into ham, bacon, sausage, etc.
I might be a little obsessed.
90, 92: We need to reintroduce the elephant to North America. We can't reintroduce the exact same kind of elephant that was here, but we can probably make do by breeding a little bit of wooliness into African elephants.
Getting the six ton sloths back will be harder.
95: Perhaps a nice genetically engineered elephant/bison cross?
Pigs are also good at disposing of cadavers. I believe that you have to crush the skull for them first, though. You wouldn't want to give them someone who'd been recieveing chemo, though, because that might taint the meat.
On the other hand: what could possible go wrong with a massive increase in the wild pig population?
Feral pig populations are taking off. There's at least one country in TX now paying for pairs of ears.
95: Let's get rid of the horses to make room. They're a fairly recently introduced pest and they're not all that hard to spot compared to Japanese Beetles and such.
On an entirely irrelevant note: didn't Gaijin Biker mention somewhere that he'd finally found a rabbi, and it was this guy? Or am I hallucinating?
Let's get rid of the horses to make room And hire Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift to do it. Who'll we find to do the cooking?
94: If you put together a business plan, maybe can arrange a buyer's co-op. I'd be up for investing in some high, high quality pork....
It wouldn't go cheap, Roth. Cadavers aren't thateasy to get.
Where do you people get your grass-fed beef? I know where to order frozen grass-fed bison, but I don't know of a local butcher selling grass-fed beef.
Whole Foods charges a lot of money for its Naturally-raised beef which may be hormone-free or something, but it's not grass-fed. I can't imagine how much true grass-fed beef would cost or how one would find it.
I don't get it. I've heard of it, but I don't know where to buy it.
Huh, my Whole Foods does have grass-fed beef.
104: Farmer's markets, specialty butcher shops, order online (Niman Ranch).
Trader Joe's has it. They're fed on grass and told lies so they don't get stressed-out
Another thing. Did you all know that John Mackey, CEO of Whole Paycheck, and Michael Pollan debated at Berkeley?
Mackey has an incredibly long blog post in which he tries to refute Pollan's arguments that local food is better than mass-produced organic.
He refers to grass-fed beef (from New Zealand, I guess) in his letter, but I have never seen it in any Massachusetts store.
I remember reading somewhere that in at least some southern states, the hunting season for wild pigs is always open, and if you see your neighbors pigs off of his property, you have to tell him once to get them back, and then can shoot them on sight.
Cadavers aren't thateasy to get.
Presumably this is where Dr. Oops comes in.
Or PK's fucked-up childhood. Humans are soft targets, and .22 shells are still cheap.
OK, so ... hunting.
I have this girl problem. There's a girl I like, but she doesn't believe that I'm sincere in chasing her. So, what can I do to convince her? Without taking the fun out of the situation.
The best answer I can think of is just to persist - with reasonable subtlety.
Normally don't you lock them in your basement chained to a pipe if they're not responsive?
when you say she doesn't believe you, have you actually stated this to her, and she just thinks you are trying to play her, or are you trying to be subtle about it? In the latter case, I'd suggest being really up front.
114: Why are you so worried about "taking the fun out of the situation?" Getting the girl would be fun. If you worry so much that it prevents you from taking appropriate action and you wind up without her--that won't be so much fun.
116: This all came out in a flirtatious conversation at the end of an evening - the kind of encounter that would often lead directly to something else in more of a domestic setting - but it was suddenly all clouded with doubt.
There's a girl I like, but she doesn't believe that I'm sincere in chasing her.
This sounds weird. Does she think you're kidding or something? Maybe she thinks you're gay?
The best answer I can think of is just to persist - with reasonable subtlety.
Perhaps too much subtlety is the problem.
but it was suddenly all clouded with doubt.
Jesus Christ, do you hit on women the same way you tell stories? No wonder there's doubt.
OK, no it's not terminal wetness on my part, although I can see it could look that way. It's the 'are you just playing' thing that Soubzriquet mentions. And the right answer is 'yes', right? Honestly, I have no idea what I want. You have to start somewhere.
Hey, this is the cadaver pork thread.
122: And maybe that's the problem. Is the presidentiality concealing a mild case of necrophilia? Your more cadaverous ladies often find it difficult to express their enthusiastic consent to a good porking.
In response to the "are you just playing" thing, I recommend this statement:
Well, we could go pick out china patterns together, or you could kiss me and see how you like it.
Alternately:
Baby, come help me out of this bathtub. I am stuck in it.
121. It does sound as if she is worried that Big Bill is more interested in his little brown brothers.
Dude, man up and ask her out on a date. TO a restaurant. No movie, just dinner out, with drinking and then maybe walking around through a pleasant neighborhood. Then take her back to her place, and either kiss her goodbye (sets you up for next date), or let her invite you in. If she invites you in, be sure to attempt to kiss her. If you don't, you're never going to kiss her.
That's all. Not that hard.
(Note that this technique leads to chicks wanting to marry you. Just know that with great power comes great responsibility.)
No restaurant, just bar. Unless you're already quite secure in the knowledge that you can spend two hours conversing without making out. If you run out of things to say in a bar but you're still enjoying each others' vibe, you can start making out or just leave. Restaurant, not so much.
Thanks to 23 now every time I go to Burger King in the morning to eat their Croissanwiches, I'm going to think "mmm, now with dead hobo".
Burger King fries are absolutely delicious.
It's been said that the King makes them himself.
127: If you can't spend two hours conversing, then your odds of sealing the deal go down, unless old Will T here is smoover than he's sounding.
Irish beef is almost all grass-fed - seven or eight month grazing season plus grass silage feed in winter. There may be some occasional supplementation with grain concentrates, probably more so with dairy cattle but they're still mainly grass-fed. So BK and McD's burgers here are presumably from grass-fed animals.
Ironically the "look" of Irish beef in steaks or whatever puts off some European consumers because the beta-carotene in the grass makes the fat yellower, which they perceive as unhealthy.
131: Yes, all the above is pretty much implicitly about the US (& to a lesser degree, Canada) food system. I suspect Irish beef is a good bit more expensive, too. Here the grading system emphasizes fat too, in the form of marbleing of the sort you get from not enough mobility and a weird diet (for a cow, that is).
TJ's does often have grass-fed beef. Which really weirds me out: how the fuck do they do it so cheap? I'm convinced there's some horrible secret they're keeping, like it's the grass-fed beef that die of horrible diseases and would otherwise be made into pet food. Or they're owned by the mafia.
132: Sounds like something from Stand on Zanzibar.