Cliff notes sourcing view by animal

Sometimes coming at sourcing by the specific animal makes the most sense. Here’s a quick summary of what to look for when you’re sourcing beef, chicken, pork and turkey.

Beef – Grassfed, grass-finished, lived it’s full life on pasture, with no growth promotants or antibiotics or animal byproducts… that’s the gold standard and if you can make that happen more often in your diet, so much the better. Watch out for sources only operating to the USDA standard for grassfed though because it has some big loopholes. And note that Organic isn’t a great standard in the beef world since a lot of Organic cattle are finished on large feedlots. If you can’t consistently do grassfed/finished, look for signs of a Naturally raised standard – which means still pastured for a hunk of its life, all vegetarian feed, no added hormones or antibiotics.

Chicken – Confirm some basic but important baseline practices - antibiotic free (added hormones are illegal so are already out), all vegetarian diets with no animal byproducts in a cage free setting. Next thing to focus on is room to move around. Here you want to start with well ventilated spaces with natural light, natural bedding and indoor enrichments (perches and other stuff for chickens to be chickens). Beyond these first couple rungs on the animal welfare ladder, it’s all about access to the outdoors with free range meaning a little, and pastured meaning a lot more (though how much more depends on the farm/farmer). Ballparks suggest only about 1% of chicken is raised in a truly pasture-centered way with consistent outdoor living. So again a question of how you want to balance your priorities.

Pork – So much of pork production is a story of antibiotics, slaughterhouse waste for food, huge crate confinement systems and the liquefied manure systems needed to support them. So there are big steps to take here by moving to animals raised humanely without crates, on natural bedding with room to move about, no antibiotics and no animal byproducts. Again the more access to pasture the better to support as Joel Salatin calls it, “the pigness of the pig”.

Turkey – Very similar story to chicken. Certainly get past cages, to all veg diets with no antibiotics and room to move around in ventilated places with natural bedding. Then it’s all about how far down the outdoor access and pastured path you can go.

For more sourcing info browse other parts of our DIY guide or check out the glossary to dig up a term you don’t recognize.