The safety of our food supply has become an increasingly salient issue. We all have to ask ourselves how safe is our food really? There has been a lot of beef recalls of late, and most involve stomach churning incidents of animal cruelty and the deadly E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria. Whole Foods was just recently embroiled in a nation wide recall where it admitted that two months of its ground beef was unsafe and possibly tainted with e. coli bacteria.   It has since said it is going to monitor its beef packing plants but e. coli is a hard thing to prevent when you are feeding cows corn in crowded feed-lots. In fact, feedlots are responsible for the dangerous E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria. First isolated in the 1980s, it now thrives in the intestines of most U.S. feedlot cattle. When cattle are fed other things than grass, like corn or grain, their intestinal tracts become unnaturally acidic which favors the growth of the deadly E. coli bacteria.

Michael Pollen brought how we grow food into the public consciousness with his widely popular book “The Omnivores Dilemma.” He spends one chapter on how the American production of corn influences how we eat, and how feeding corn to cows developed. It is a must read for anyone interested our food supply and is extremely informative.  As Michael Pollan explains:
"Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids - and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infections."

On a grass-fed diet e. coli is not an issue because the ph balance is at a point where e. coli is not deadly to us, and also there are negligible amounts of the bacteria in the cows stomach and intestines because the cow is eating what nature intended: grass. A grass-fed cow does not suffer from bovine bloat, cow acidosis nor does it harbor the deadly e. coli bacteria. We can inspect our meat processing facilities all we want but it is the system that feeds corn to cows that is to blame and that is why grass-fed meats are so exciting! They provide us all with a safe, healthy alternative!  Now we can enjoy our meat rare and not worry;  grass-fed is as good for the cattle as it is good for us.