One of our customers sent us a question about meat through this site. She’s a longtime vegetarian turned omnivore who wants to know what meat she should purchase.

We think the best answer to that is found in the sage advice of Michael Pollan, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Remember when steak night was a really big deal? Probably not, but it used to be something people really got excited about.

Back in the olden days of the 1950’s, and right on up to the 70’s, families didn’t eat beef all the time. The weekly menu ran the inexpensive, but filling, gamut of tuna casserole, Shake n Bake chicken and Hamburger Helper. Cheap ground beef made it to the dinner table much more often than sirloins and roast beef, so when those expensive cuts appeared it was reason to celebrate.

There’s a lesson there, and it’s not that we should eat more cheap ground beef.

If you buy really good quality food then you probably won’t be able to justify the grocery expense of ethically raised beef, pork and poultry on the table as often as has become the norm in the past twenty years.

How do you know it’s ethically raised? Look at the price tag, if it seems a tiny bit shocking to pay that much for a chicken, then you’ve got yourself a bird that saw sunshine and grass instead of concrete and antibiotics.

Try going without beef completely for a week, then take the money you’ve saved and pick up a really nice $15 or $20 steak and let me know how it tastes.

The more you value what’s on your plate the less gravy you need.