Meat, isnt dead cow/pig/chicken/insert animal here, the same regardless of what you pay for it?

[charliecat]

Its flesh and its owner is dead. Does it really matter how much you pay for it?
I can appreciate that your going to say free range and not fed, erm, crud, but at the end of the day...isnt it just a bit of cow.
Does it really matter that it was in a field as opposed to in a shed?
Does it effect taste? REALLY. Or has the idea that price effects taste been well and truly sold to us?

cross because the difference in rearing and diet really really does matter. cheap meat is nasty.

see what i said earlier re body fat and taste in animal. imagine this magnified a lot with what they eat and how they taste (sort of like very early marinating)

there are also other issues re being killed, stress and blood but i don't have enough knowledge of that to go any further.

bacon is a good example to compare the cheap produce v the properly reared and butchered. the cheap stuff is injected with brine to preserve (and bulk) it out. so when you cook cheap bacon it oozes white stuff & liquid everywhere. good bacon doesn't.

organic and free range meat is better because the muscle development & overall growth is better than their artificially fattened cousins and diet plays a huge part in flavouring meat as does proper hanging/butchering. but also i don't want to eat meat thats been poorly raised, fed atrociously and routinely given hormones/antibiotics etc.

No, regulations prohibit the use of water to bulk up or plump out meat sold in its natural state. Water may be used in processed meat but that is a different thing altogether and there are still regulations and labelling guidelines.

The important thing to me is the quality of the animal's life before death, not really the taste. If I eat meat it is for the protein, and my body doesn't give a monkey's arse whether the protein it gets is finest organic rib-eye steak or reclaimed scraps from bones and ears etc, it is still the same protein molecules at the end of the day. I don't want to eat animals that have had a miserable existance though.

Dutches in what way is it 'better'? In taste yes, but in terms of protein for your body, it's all the same.

Protein, whether it comes from a Turkey Twizzler or an Angus Steak, an ear or a belly, a liver or a pork chop still ends up as the same series of amino acids in the body. No one is better than the other in this sense. Obviously the amount of fat that go with these things isn't always the same, but our bodies don't care where thes esimple building blocks come from, it is our minds that care.