A couple days ago I sent this email to a friend of ours, Mike Sweetman, the meat manager at Green Hills Farms, “the best little grocery store in America“, according to Inc. Magazine.
Hey, Mike! Here’s a question for Mr. Meat Manager: Does Green Hills serve up ground beef with ammonia in it? Read this New York Times article and send me a pithy comment that I can blog.
He was aghast. Actually, his response was unprintable. So I asked him to explain why we can trust the meat at Green Hills. Here’s what he said:
This is the first place I have seen that does NOT use tube beef to grind burger out of. I order cases of Certified Black Angus, Choice grade shoulder clods to grind our 81% burger. We also use… get this… whole top rounds for our 90% and we use prime sirloin tips for our 93%. This is one reason our ground beef cost a little more. As I get along here I realize our prices are a bit more, but for good reason.
I was at the store on the boulevard (I won’t say the name) and it was a mess. The case looked awful, the chicken breast was in the fresh case, but it was frozen. At Green Hills we hand inspect every cut in the morning for date; if they don’t look good we pull ‘em anyway regardless of date. Our beef is all CAB (Certified Angus Beef). We do not sell it as that because our Erie Boulevard competition has a CAB program. They bring you in under the thinking that all of their beef is CAB when only a few cuts are.
So we have good reason to charge a little more for our meat. Not to mention our attention to customer service is second to none. And then you have me, with cooking instruction and my witty sarcastic humor to make your shopping fun. I’m also going to be getting in some all-natural angus beef soon.
Michael Sweetman-Meat Department
That was enough to convince me. As it turns out, unless your grocer is grinding your beef for you, you are likely buying beef parts and scraps that may come together in that “tube beef” from over a dozen different places, even different countries. That means that E. coli has many different pathways into your hamburger.
If you stop in at Green Hills and have a chat with Mike, be sure to mention how you heard of him. Then leave a comment here to tell us about your experience.
Buy local, eat well.
I don’t use ground beef at home and rarely eat it at restaurants (i.e. 1X per year or less) but do know that green Hills has a stellar reputation for their meats. And quite often the old school method is best. My mom was the eldest daughter in a large family and was always sent to the butcher to buy the ground beef and mandated by her mother to watch the butcher grind to to order to ensure that they got exactly what they paid for (this being a small world and a smaller town… that butcher shop was in the exact same storefront now occupied by the Real Food Coop).
I was just talking with my friend about this the other day at the resturant. Don’t remember how in the world we got on the topic really, they brought it up. I do remember having a excellent chicken salad with cranberries on it. I digress…