Except for minor exceptions most of the meat we eat today come from cattle raised as livestock specifically for their meat. The cow is artificially inseminated with sperm from a bull. This occurs on a ranch and after the calf is weaned it gets a healthy start by feeding on grasses. After a few months the calf is shipped to a feedlot where it is housed with hundreds of other cattle and fed an artificial diet of mostly corn mixed with vitamin and protein supplements, hay and silage for roughage and the antibiotics Rumensin and Tylosin. Angus cattle is the most popular beef today because of the high degree of marbling (intramuscular fat) found in their meat.
Feeding cattle on largely a diet of corn yield some advantages to the industry and the consumer. First, because of government programs to the farmer, corn is very cheap, second it is has a large amount of caloric energy and third it produces the marbled meat that many Americans like. The downside of this feeding process is that corn fed cattle is decidedly less health for humans than range fed cattle. It contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than grass fed cattle. In addition the ruminant of corn fed cattle are poorly adapted to eating corn. Whereas our stomachs have evolved with acid environments, the stomachs (ruminant) of cattle have evolved to have a neutral pH (an acid environment the same as water). Eating corn induces acid in the cattle's ruminant which leads to diarrhea, ulcers, bloating, rumenitis, liver disease and a general weakening of their immune systems leaving them susceptible to pneumonia, feedlot polio and many other immune-related diseases. Thus the need for antibiotics. Most of the antibiotics sold in American today find their way into animal feed. These drugs give us cheap meat but does so by treating or prevent cattle diseases in those very animals we end up eating and of course we eat any left over antibiotics. A less recognized problem is that this massive use of antibiotics is allowing for an evolution of new antibiotic-resistant bacteria which will one day find their way into the human population. Actually, we might already have them.
The old adage that you get what you pay for has never been truer than with most of today's meats. The feedlot method of mass producing meat give us cheap meat but at a cost in health now and into the future. To get our meat protein the health way our grandparents did we must eat meat (beef, pork, veal, bison, lamb, chicken etc.) raised on a ranch and fed on grasses and not antibiotics. This, however, cost a few more dollars. You decide if it is worth the price. As Michael Pollan told us both in his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and at his recent talk at Goucher College, “ You are what you eat eats.”