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3. Meat Can Tell You A Lot About The Animal
Ok, so cheese might come from happy cows but did you know that the best meat does as well? Research tells us that the meat you buy can tell you a great deal about how much stress or illness your pig or cow was under when they were killed.
Animal meat contains a sugar called glycogen that turns into lactic acid after the animal has died. This is what makes your meat tender, as well as resistant to bacteria. However, if an animal is under a great deal of stress, exhaustion, or even disease, the glycogen is used up by the body and there is little or no lactic acid in the muscle after the death of the animal.
Now there is no way to tell if the animal was under stress its entire life, or if it was just at the slaughterhouse.
Animals that have undergone stress show this in the meat. Pork meat that is pale in color, or is a little watery or overly soft, means that pig underwent some tremendous stress at some point in its life. Also, beef will look darker than normal, drier, and more dense. Beef should be bright red, soft, and a very juicy looking.
If you see beef that is dull, very dark in color, or is dry looking, you will know that particular cow was not one of the happy cows you see on those TV commercials. Find out why some meat is banned in other countries but allowed in the USA.
Although everyone would like to think that all meat animals are slaughtered humanely with as little stress or suffering as possible, everyone knows that is not always the case.
However, considering that meat that is humanely killed produces lactic acid that fights off bacterial growth, even if someone doesn’t want to consider the comfort of the cow or pig, shouldn’t we consider humane means of slaughter if for no other reason than a health issue?
