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Jonathan Bailor & Nell Stephenson: Meat in the Mail (3 of 3)


[Nell Stephenson] I think it is so cool to show everybody that this is how the meat comes. You can see I am holding up — this is not a daunting, hulking thing of meat; this is not a cow.
[Jonathan Bailor] It is one pound.
[Nell Stephenson] Exactly. So like I was saying before, if you had ten coworkers or five family members, it does not really matter, you can all chip in on this together. It is easy to distribute; you do not have to do anything. You just put it in the freezer, and it is such a small portion that — say you wanted to — say it’s a Sunday night and tomorrow you want to make beef burgers. Then just take this out Sunday night and put it in the refrigerator to defrost it, and when you get home from work on Monday, literally all you need to do is make a couple of patties and if you want to throw some seasonings, you can make hamburgers. And if you look at most traditional recipes for hamburgers and meatloaf, they will call for fillers for binding meat, and it’s like panko breadcrumbs, or regular breadcrumbs, or a piece of old bread to bind it together. Really, all that does is take a small amount of meat and spread it out, so instead of the pound of meat making two eight-ounce hamburgers, you can make four eight-ounce things, but it is partly meat and partly filler. And so, when people say, “Well how am I going to make a hamburger, or meatloaf, or meatballs without these binding agents?” It actually works just fine; if you wanted to, you could use an egg, but you do not need flour.
[Jonathan Bailor] And, well, there is so much good in life, it seems like we do not need to set aside space for filler. My mom used to always say — one other thing I wanted to mention to folks is, when we start thinking about eating local, and you start thinking about focusing on food quality, and you start expanding your world-view of food, you might need to do things like talk about ordering meat in the mail, which a little bit atypical, but one thing that is cool is now, the entire world is your grocery store. By the way, this meat came to us directly from the ranch in Missouri, just got delivered to us, and you can see it is frozen solid, which is pretty awesome. And when we talk about focusing on quality, focusing on what is the best for you out there, there is this, it is not a paradox, but we are saying eat natural things that you find in nature, but we also have this wonderful technological age that we live in; for example, the internet.
[Nell Stephenson] Yeah.
[Jonathan Bailor] So even if you cannot go walk down the road and buy some organic, humanely raised, grass-fed beef liver, that does not mean you cannot eat beef liver.
[Nell Stephenson] Exactly.
[Jonathan Bailor] Everyone is on an equal playing field here thanks to the internet and thanks to things like mail-order meats.
[Nell Stephenson] Right. And I think it is important to clarify that – we were talking about this earlier – even if you — this ranch is, you said, from Missouri?
[Jonathan Bailor] Missouri, yes.
[Nell Stephenson] So we are in Washington, so it is not next-door, it is not down the street. So this meat has traveled a short distance, however I think the balance is, you are supporting a small rancher who is doing the right thing; he is raising his animals humanely, he has provided very good, healthy, sustainable product to people, so I feel that outweighs the fact that it has traveled, I do not know, several hundred miles.
[Jonathan Bailor] Absolutely.
[Nell Stephenson] But that is not to be confused with living in Seattle and deciding, when you are out to dinner, when you could have, say, it is Copper River salmon season, and that is fresh and local, that is a better choice than barramundi that has come from New Zealand. So that is taking into context, you know, you want to make sure it is local when it can be, but also balancing it out with making a humane choice. So I would rather have this beef from Missouri which was raised properly, treated humanely, than something that came from a ranch down the street that might have been raised on corn and hormones.
[Jonathan Bailor] And it is all about progress, like you said Nell; there is perfection, which is, we go slaughter cows in our backyard, and that minimizes the — and that is the next video, but there is also — when you think about the difference between here, we are going to eat some beef liver in a delicious fashion that came directly from a ranch where they feed cows nothing but grass, no hormones. Contrast that to the way most of us are put into position to eat right; the number of steps that take place, the number of processing plants this meat runs through, the number of middle men that jack the price up. This is like the highest quality meat that you could ever buy, and this liver is sold five dollars a pound, this ninety percent lean premium ground is sold ten dollars a pound.
[Nell Stephenson] Right.
[Jonathan Bailor] So when you cut out all those middlemen —
[Nell Stephenson] Yeah, and cut out all the junk, there is no reason not to do this.
[Jonathan Bailor] You can save yourself and save a lot of money simultaneously.
[Nell Stephenson] Exactly.
[Jonathan Bailor] Love it.