Because God forbid a definition of anything should contain any, oh, measurable criteria that actually mean something. I suppose I could raise snails in a sandlot and call them grass-fed cattle. Or bacteria in a petri dish, bees in a bonnet, flies on a windowsill, blackbirds in a pie, or snakes in a plane. Apparently the important thing is that I get to call it something that increases its salability regardless of whether it actually resembles what it is I’m calling it.
This is just another example of labelling standards losing their meaning. Terms like “organic” and “free range eggs” are defined so broadly that the consumer often has no real idea exactly what conditions the animals were raised in. The large agricultural corporations aren’t content to have advantages such as economies of scale over the little guy; they want the rules and labels to bend in their direction as well.
The article does offer a possible way out of the mess for farmers who don’t raise their animals in feedlots:
The people with real grass-fed meat could create a new category called “pasture-raised” or something similar, a category that explicitly states that the animals in question have spent their lives outside eating grass.
