What Does “Locally Raised Meat” Mean?

Reader Contribution by Cole Ward
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I’m all for keeping my food dollars in my community. What I am not for is paying three times more for local meat and getting the exact same thing as “conventionally-raised” (eg: high-volume production) meat.

When a farm advertises “Vermont Raised” meat, it seems logical to expect that its animals were born on that farm and spent their entire lives there. If the farmer buys cattle from somewhere else, brings them back to the farm for finishing and advertises the meat as “local”, is it really local? Or if the farmer is buying culled cattle from another state and feeding them for a few months, without knowing (or caring) how the animals were treated or fed before they got to him.

Don’t assume this doesn’t happen. It does, much more often than you’d believe. But more to the point – how would you know?

Local doesn’t mean healthy. It’s a claim meant to give people a sense of security about what they’re eating. The local movement is a great movement but increasingly I see the term prostituted by cheats trying to cash in on it.

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