Customers periodically ask us for fresh meat at our store. After doing some research, it appears that almost all fresh meat available at markets and grocery stores is sprayed with some sort of antibacterial concoction. I’d rather sell it to you frozen, without chemicals.
Meats sold fresh will lose that pretty red color a few hours after it is cut. There is also a correlation between how long a piece of meat is exposed and how many times it’s been sprayed. So that big beautiful tenderloin that sat “fresh” on the counter all day was probably sprayed five times to look that beautiful.
The other way food is kept looking fresh is with phages, commercially called Listex, Listeria solution or PhageGuard. This is another USDA organic product that is called “natural.” The industry says it is an enemy of bacteria, but they recommend you clean it off before you eat any product sprayed with Listex. As so many of our customers are working to rebuild beneficial gut bacteria, I wonder if these chemicals are bad for gut bacteria or if anyone truly knows?
One argument for fresh meat is that it tastes better. This might have been true fifty years ago with antiquated freezers. However, todays vacuum packed meats frozen at -8 degrees last perfectly fine in the freezer. There are a bunch of videos online where chefs cannot tell the difference between fresh and previously frozen meats.
At Mary’s Land Farm:
1) We continue to raise our meats and poultry following beyond-organic principles, on pesticide-free pasture, naturally, without soy or GMO feed.
2) We sell customers frozen beef, pork, poultry and lamb and they can take a few minutes or a few hours to thaw it themselves. (And a few times a year, we do sell fresh unfrozen poultry, but we freeze it all in under 72 hours, and we never spray it.)
3) We never use Listex or some other chemical to sell “fresh” meat – after all, we started this farm to avoid all those unhealthy chemical concoctions!
