If you can, Harris recommends always opting for grass-fed meat. Now, grass-fed has become a bit of a buzzword in health and well-being conversations, but Harris provides some thought-provoking insight into the cattle-raising process: On Harris’ farm, it takes cows about two years on the pasture to reach what he calls their “slaughter weight,” which is about 1,200 pounds.
“The life of an industrial creature is very, very different,” he explains. “It is all about how fast you can grow the animal and how cheaply you can do it.” In the industrial model, he says it takes around 18 months for the cow to reach 1,500 or 1,600 pounds. “It produces an unnaturally obese creature that would never occur in nature,” he explains.
And unnaturally obese creatures have a much shorter life expectancy: Says Harris, the average natural lifespans of a cow is around 20 to 24 years; but if you left an industrial cow to live out its days in that feedlot, “[it] wouldn’t live to be much older than that 24 months old,” Harris notes. “The creature is dying of all the diseases [from] obesity and lack of exercise that kills most of us.”
According to Harris, it’s naive to think that eating an unhealthy creature would have no impact on our own health. “Somehow we have come to believe that eating a creature that is dying of obesity is just fine. It won’t hurt you.”
Of course, grass-fed meat isn’t accessible for everyone, but at the very least, try to understand where your animal sources come from and how their lives can affect your own.
