Free range meats are typically leaner and a bit tougher - which, depending on how you cook it, can mean drier, tougher, and a taste you don’t like.
Most people I know around here who have hens also plant marigolds where the birds can get at them. Hens, being hens, will peck at the flowers just as they peck at everything else. Result: very yellow yolks.
A label saying “free range” or “organic” actually guarantees little to nothing in the US, but hey, marketing, right? Next up: carrots labeled “gluten free”. Nevermind that carrots don’t naturally contain gluten anyway, it lets the seller get away with charging a bit more for the same thing.
I was in northern Europe this summer, and all the eggs had orange yolks, but no special flavor. The neighbor eggs had remarkable flavor as well as color.
I bought a free range turkey last year that was noticeably tougher and leaner than a conventional bird, and didn’t taste very different. Not buying another from that vendor. Maybe it got more exercise but regular turkey chow.
When we raise pigs, they aren’t ‘organic’ because I really don’t believe it matters one whit to the pig whether the corn in its feed is grown with Roundup or not, nor do I believe it changes the quality of the meat.
What does matter is what the pigs eat. Mine live on a large pasture. They eat what they root up, along with a special feed that my local feed mill and I concocted that includes peanuts, corn, oats, etc, but absolutely no soybeans or lysine. They also eat acorns and walnuts when they fall out of the trees.
When you buy bacon at the supermarket and the fat turns all runny and soft from sitting on the counter for 5 minutes, and you can’t peel the slices apart because the fat is melted together, that’s from feeding pigs soybeans. When your pork chop is spongy in texture, that’s because lysine makes the muscles grow faster than they should.
When I’m watching a network TV food competition and Nigella Lawson and Anthony Bourdain are arguing about whether a particular meat is chicken or pork, that’s when I know that no one in this country knows what real pork or chicken taste like anymore. Not to mention that in the supermarket they’re both brined and injected within an inch of bursting their cell walls.
I just realized I sound like an angry old man in this post. Kids today!
To be clear, deeper-colored yolks do not require hens eating marigolds, or necessarily any yellow or orange foods. Yolk color (and flavor) comes from a complex of things in the birds’ diet. Marigolds do have xanthophyll carotenoids, but other sources like dark-green leafy vegetables and mixed pasture plants are better for the ultimate flavor and nutrient profile.
My mom gave me a bag of Himalayan salt that proudly proclaimed itself to be gluten free, and the back blurb on the packaging told me all about the evils of “regular” salt, amde up mostly of this strange, possibly cancer causing CHEMICAL (OMG!!) called sodium chloride! Quick, anyone have any dihydrogen oxide, I hear it’s so strong it dissolves that stuff!
It was nice and chunky salt, almost like Kosher salt, so I like using it on roasts
I find it interesting when people/sites promote the pink salt’s trace minerals as health boosting, but fail to mention said 80+ “trace minerals” (which some might call “contaminants”) include such yummy things as uranium, polonium, thallium, and others usually regarded by the health crowd as deadly poisons.
On the upside - they really are in trace amounts, small enough they are unlikely to have bad effects. You might as well worry about the trace radioactive potassium in organic bananas.
Have you found non-organic beef that cost $9 per pound and compared that? I’m generally in favor of organic, free-range, pasture-fed all that good stuff, but there exists the possibility that a good chunk of your different experience wasn’t whether they used organic or inorganic pesticide on the plants the cows ate, but just that they used an overall better process and created a better product.
I’m sure that’s exactly what it is. Pastured meat is the better process and product. But part of that is that the animals are healthier throughout their lives, so there’s no need for antibiotics, hormones, or insecticide implants (industrial meat isn’t just about junk put in the feed), maybe even no supplementary grain at all, organic or otherwise.
I’m in favor of free range because I like happy animals. Also because I like happy animals, I am against organic meat. I understand that to get that sticker, the animal can’t be given antibiotics. While I don’t care so much for the large amounts of antibiotics pumped into intensively produced meat, I do want sick animals to be cared for.
Uh… I think you have a basic misunderstanding here. Nobody just lets a sick steer or hog stay sick to keep their organic eligibility. That risks not only losing the whole investment in the animal but also infecting others. Organic animals that get sick will get separated, treated, and sold as non-organic (but possibly still grass-fed) meat. If a pasturing operation is run well, whether certified organic or not, animals shouldn’t get sick very often.
On the other hand, industrial animals, destined from the beginning for unnatural grain diets, confined spaces and filth, are pretty much expected to be sick their whole lives–or to be on the edge of sicknesses held at bay only by continuous prophylactic antibiotics.
This spring I had to process one of my pastured chickens, one I had raised from a chick, as it turned out to be a mean rooster
It was a pastured Easter egger, about 5 pounds, a “dual purpose” breed, however there was little meat on it, nowhere near a meat bird, the meat that was there, however was absolutely delicious, tasted rich and moist with an almost turkey-like flavor
I’ll pay extra for beef or lamb that was more humanely reared, and I avoid most industrial pork, because the conditions hogs are raised in seem too unnatural and inhumane. But I have to confess that I don’t care a lot how chickens are turkeys are raised except to the extent I can taste the difference. There is some pastured poultry I’ve had that was far better than supermarket birds, and some that isn’t any better than the better brands I can buy easily.
Oh, and yeah, if a bird in an organic flock gets sick, (or a mammal a herd) it is promptly removed from the flock so as not to infect others. Depending on what is wrong with it, it will be killed or treated, and the meat either discarded or sold as non-organic. No one intentionally keeps sick animals around on a meat-producing operation.
5 pound live weight is going to be about half usable meat at best, meaning 2.5 pounds of eatable chicken distributed about the carcass. Unless you also make use of things like organ meat, gizzards, and the like you’re looking at maybe a pound of food at most? Is that about right?
This is, of course, why people used to re-purpose the various bits they didn’t roast/bake/whatever to eat (bones and such) for making things like stock, to get more out of the critter.
