Food processors spend a lot of money keeping their fingers on the pulse of the buying public and responding when they discern a trend in what consumers want. Unfortunately what they respond with often is not what consumers had hoped to get, or even what they think they are getting.
Yes, the Department of Agriculture does have a definition for what can be considered organic food, but beyond that when you start talking about products calling themselves natural, genuine, local, or other buzz=terms consumers want, it all gets very, very cloudy.
Grass-fed beef is one of those cloudy terms that just got a whole lot cloudier. I’m sure consumers who are spending more for grass-fed beef, have an image of cows roaming freely over grassland munching away to their heart’s content, as opposed to being stuffed with corn and antibiotics in giant feedlots.
Turns out now though that the part of the USDA that had defined what grass-fed meant has decided to drop the definition, saying it “doesn’t have the authority to define and determine whether specific grass-fed claims that companies make on their packaging are ‘truthful and not misleading,'” reports Techinsider.
So before you pluck down extra bucks for something that calls itself grass-fed beef, do some research on the producer, it’s buyer beware in this category for the time being.
John