On January 12th, 2016 by way of a small notice in the Federal Register the U.S.D.A’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) rescinded the labeling standard, in place since 2006, for grass fed meat. This was a label that had huge amounts of support from both consumers and farms. The entire text of the AMS blurb can be found on their website here. According to the USDA the reason for rescinding the very popular standard was basically that another USDA agency, the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), must approve meat labels and “there is no guarantee that an USDA-verified production/marketing claim will be approved by FSIS.” Nothing to do with the consumer, nothing to do with the consumers habits. Just saying that two organizations within the same organization can’t get their act together enough to actually communicate about an issue that the end users actually care about.
In the standard which now no longer exists it stated “that grass, forbs, and forage needed to be 99 percent or more of the energy source for the lifetime of a ruminant species after weaning in order to qualify as grass fed.” (Original standard is here) Prior to that, as an unregulated claim, feedlot animals were routinely sold and packaged as “Grass Fed” with USDA approval even though the demand for grass fed animals was much smaller than it is now. Producers have now 30 days to convert their labels to their own private label standard of grass fed or develop a new standard. With a simple memo, “Grass Fed” on a label went from being a claim that had to be proved to the equivalent of “all natural” a meaningless term that tells the consumer less than nothing about their food.
Another fantastic piece of work by your Federal Government, and they didn’t even have to bow to international pressure to do this one, like they did with C.O.O.L.
I can only assume that the real reason lies somewhere within the heart of big industrial agriculture, which I had heard rumblings about not being happy that a significant percentage of consumers regarded “Grass Fed” beef as a superior product both in terms of taste and fatty acid profiles. Only time will tell how this all shakes out, but effectively the “most transparent Administration in history” just took away another bit of information you used to have about your food. Hope you have found yourself a local farmer…
Until next time,
Keep it real and keep it rural
Lee