Our first step on the road to real whole food eating definitely began with making the switch from regular beef to grass fed beef. I was diagnosed with IBS at a very young age and eating beef has always been a trigger for me so I really didn't eat very much beef until this point.
One thing I learned from "Food Inc." is that most beef that you buy in the stores has a variety of things in it from antibiotics to corn (and LOTS of corn I may add, check out the amazing movie "King Corn" for more information). So I was curious to try out grass fed beef and see if I could taste a difference and how it affected me health wise.
Our first challenge at the time was to find a provider. The regular grocery stores we shopped at didn't carry anything remotely close to grassfed, which I am glad to say now is not the case, so we were out to shop at the Keller Farmer's Market. The Keller Farmer's Market is one of the best farmer's markets I have seen in the Fort Worth area. The vendors are very friendly and the people who run the market really make an effort to go for local and whole foods.
Our first venture into the grassfed beef world came through Texas Heritage Beef (http://www.texasheritagebeef.com ). Our first meal with them was a good ol' fashioned hamburger and it was delicious. And the best surprise was for once I didn't get sick. Prior to beginning our whole food adventure, I had recently lost about 30 lbs. on Weight Watchers and beef always made me gain weight and I didn't gain any weight either (score and score). After that we were sold and started buying all of our meat from them at the farmer's market. Unfortunately, the Keller Market runs from May to October so come November we had to go tracking this meat down all over the place. But we did it and it was good. We were also able to convince many of our family and friends to try out the beef and they were all fans of it.
One of the big challenges of buying meat in a non-commercial way is that there are times that what you may want to buy may just simply not be available. The funny thing for us was that when that happened we were okay with waiting. Luckily, since we began this journey you can actually buy grass-fed beef in our local Krogers and Target (score for the whole foods movement) and we have also found another vendor that we love in our area.
When I started reading more and more on my favorite whole foods blog, I found that perhaps I wasn't doing as well as I thought eating only grass fed beef. I was introduced to the idea of grass finished beef. Grass finished beef comes from cows that have been given the opportunity to mature enough to develop fatty tissue and these cows are ONLY fed grass. That's the trick there- often even on some of the brands I had been buying they will say they feed the cows grass as long as they can and then they supplement with grains.
Enter Burgundy Pasture Beef (http://www.burgundypasturebeef.com ) -me and my little family have been making the trip out to Grandview about once a month for the past 6 months to buy from them. We can order online and pick up in Fort Worth but it is fun to go out to their store and have a hot dog and hamburger cooked right on site from their meats. The nice part is that they have a standing store where we can shop year round and pick up what we need. We haven't had a time yet (knock on wood) where we couldn't get what we wanted.
For more information on grass finished meat check out this awesome article from the Dallas Morning News which also talks about some other vendors in the DFW area http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/food-wine/food-wine-headlines/20130611-area-enthusiasts-say-grass-finished-beef-is-a-cut-above.ece
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