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You Should Not Have to Wonder if Your Food is Safe!

written by

Ben Simmons

posted on

December 8, 2018

You Should Not Have to Wonder if Your Food is Safe! - Weekly I receive notices of product recalls from the USDA. Here is the latest report I received December 5th -

JBS Tolleson, Inc., a Tolleson, Ariz. establishment, is recalling approximately 12,093,271 pounds of non-intact raw beef products that may be contaminated with Salmonella
Newport.

Dr. Mercola explains Why Contamination Affects Such Large Amounts of Meat

"The answer is quite simple. While many think of a pack of ground beef as being the meat from an individual cow, it's actually an amalgam of meat from many different cows — a single fast food hamburger can contain meat from more than 1,000 animals, and all you need is one sick animal to contaminate nearly unlimited amounts of meat as it all runs through the same processing equipment and gets mixed together in gigantic batches.


It's also important to realize that contamination is far more common than you might suspect — not just from potentially harmful bacteria but also drugs, including banned ones. As recently reported by Consumer Reports, drugs such as ketamine (a hallucinogenic anesthetic), phenylbutazone (an anti-inflammatory pain reliever) and chloramphenicol (a potent and dangerous antibiotic), are all found in the U.S. meat supply.

A recent Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of food testing done by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015 reveals 83 percent of all supermarket meats — including turkey, pork, beef and chicken products — were contaminated with Enterococcus faecalis, i.e., fecal bacteria, and a high percentage had antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Sixty-two percent of ground beef samples were contaminated with drug-resistant Enterococcus faecalis, 26 percent of which were resistant to tetracyclines. Considering the high contamination rate, the fact that more people aren't sickened and/or killed on a routine basis is likely a testament to the efficacy of the human immune system."

You can read his complete article here.

At Nature's Gourmet Farm our beef (and pork) are processed in a small family owned artisan style facility. The product you receive includes the meat (DNA) of animals raised on our farm. Care is taken by the processor during slaughter, aging, processing, packaging, and freezing to guard the health benefits we breed and managed in the animals. All to provide you a safe, nutritious, and healthy product.

CHRISTMAS SALE - many folks like to buy our 10# Ground Beef and give as gifts at Christmas. To help out we are offering our 10# Ground Beef at $60 - this is a savings of $8 or 12%. Sale ends at the Order By Date listed above.

Customer Feedback-
"The best tasting meats around. Loved the bone in rib-eyes, roast and chickens. Now I am in love with the eggs. They make the fluffiest, tastiest scrambled eggs ever. Just got in an order of ground beef yesterday. I taste a great hamburger ???? in my future. My friends claims that the bulk sausage is awesome. That will be my next order.
Thanks to Ben & Beth for caring about healthy foods and making them available to us..” - Julie H

Quote Worth Re-Quoting – “Government is not writing the rules. Business, trade organizations, and lobbyist are writing the rules and they are not written with us in mind" ~Jeffrey Hollender, Co-founder of Seventh Generation

Thank you for supporting our regenerative, local farm.
Ben & Beth


















































































































































More from the blog

Small Farm Republic

Pasture Talk With Our Cows– Tuesday morning I was out checking on our cows and took the opportunity to record a short 2-minute story about the time I saved the life of one of the “pet” cows Number 608. Click to watch here. Small Farm Republic- is a book written by John Klar. A former attorney who contracted Lyme disease, John now farms in Vermont. I spent much of last weekend reading his book. He is very pro-small farms and presented a lot of evidence to support his position. On page 77 he makes a comparison to the number of farms and farmers during the Great Depression versus today. During the Great Depression the American population was 100 million. According to USDA charts

What If Pigs Could Talk

Well, at Nature's Gourmet Farm our pigs may not speak English, but their body language sure says a lot. Notice our pigs! See how content they are napping - they would say how nice the morning is and glad to enjoy the shade in our natural environment. The soft dirt is so relaxing. We have heard that some pigs live in cramped and confined spaces on hard concrete. Why would any farmer treat their pigs like that?

Farm Happenings!

Celebrity Visitor – Tuesday afternoon I had the opportunity to meet one of the nicest guys here on our farm. CJ called me about ten days earlier to ask if he could come and see our farm. Seems his family owns a farm near Bassfield, MS and they were needing to make some changes. As you know, I’m eager to help anyone who would like to farm as Mississippi certainly needs more folks raising food to feed our communities – and since he was interested in Regenerative Pasture Raised animals that was even better.