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Our Commitment to Safe & Delicious Meat
It's possible to be a more responsible omnivore provided you make educated choices about the meat you consume. Our meat selection criteria reflect our commitment to providing the freshest, healthiest, and most conscientiously-raised meat available.
Local
We are committed to offering meat from small-scale local producers and processors. We build partnerships with family farms and processors in North Carolina who share our commitment to quality products and sustainable farming practices.
Fair prices paid to Farmers
We have made a commitment to pay farmers a higher price than other retailers because we see them as long-term partners. We want to make sure they can earn a living and keep producing far into the future. In the past, we have lost local meat suppliers who went out of business because it wasn’t profitable enough. Paying a premium to farmers is a necessary starting point as we devised our processing and retailing systems to get the meat from our growers’ farms to your table.
Antibiotic and Hormone Free
We don’t sell meat that has been given antibiotics or hormones. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 70% of all antibiotics in the United States are used in animal agriculture. Antibiotics are commonly added to grain feed to stimulate growth and ward off disease when animals are kept in unsanitary over-crowded feedlots. This over-usage of antibiotics contributes to the increase of drug-resistant bacteria, a serious public health problem. While the use of synthetic hormones in chicken and pork is prohibited, American cattle are regularly fattened using hormone injections. The European Union has banned the sale of US beef due to concerns about the long term safety of these practices.
Grass-fed Beef
When you eat meat from animals raised on pasture, you are improving the environment as well as giving your family the healthiest possible beef. Raising animals on pasture benefits the environment by using less energy, since grazing animals facilitate their own fertilizing and harvesting; by reducing soil erosion, since pasture generates 93% less erosion that row crops; and by slowing global warming, since pasture removes more carbon dioxide from the air than any other land uses, including forestland.
Grass-fed beef has been proven to be leaner and contain higher levels of beta carotene, Vitamin E, and Omega-3 fatty acids as compared to meat from cattle raised on conventional feed. Most cattle are fed a high calorie mixture of grain and animal by-products to fatten them at an unnatural rate. In contrast, grass-fed cattle roam freely, grazing as comes naturally. This diet takes longer for cattle to mature, but results in leaner, healthier meat.
Vegetarian Feed
Weaver Street Market is committed to only offering meat from animals raised on vegetarian diets. It's important to make this distinction as most consumers are unaware that feed containing reprocessed animal tissue is common at large scale commercial farms. There is growing concern that the practice of feeding animal by-products to livestock and poultry contributes to the spread of diseases like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy as animal waste is artificially re-circulated throughout the food chain.
Humanely Raised and Processed
It stands to reason that healthier animals make for healthier food. Humane living conditions and careful oversight at time of slaughter increase the quality of life for livestock, resulting in fewer health problems throughout the lifespan and reduced residual stress hormones in the meat. Animals enjoy high quality living conditions, including the freedom to roam throughout their life span, and are processed in as humane a manner as possible. Farms utilizing local processing facilities minimize the number of miles animals must be transported, which cuts down on both stress for the livestock and emissions from vehicles.
Selection and availability
We are working closely with NC Choices (www.ncchoices.com ), a non-profit project of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, to build a consistent supply from local producers; when local supplies are limited, we fill in with non-local producers who best meet our criteria. We will continue to supplement our local pork and beef with products from Niman Ranch and Meyer Natural Angus, national leaders in antibiotic and hormone-free meats. We are also currently carrying chicken from Murray Farms in Pennsylvania, until we can source poultry once again from local growers after our NC poultry supplier Alison Farms went out of business.
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