Rindfleysh

I decided that eating half a bag of sour cream and cheddar potato chips was a good substitution for going to the gym tonight. I'm usually not like this. Maybe it's because I worked through the weekend. Maybe it's because I spent the entire afternoon grading boring papers. Maybe it's because I was hungry and was too lazy to eat anything nutritious. Or maybe I just wanted to.
Whatever.
Before my grading excitement, I taught two elementary school classes, and will teach another two tomorrow. It was cute. They're 2nd and 3rd graders. The 3rd graders were awesome, but the 2nd graders were kind of stupid. Maybe I'm being too hard on them. I asked them to give me an example of a food that's in the dairy group. The girl I called on up front said "water". I'm not good with politely saying someone is wrong. I guess with kids you're supposed to say things like "that's a good try" or "not quite, but thanks for volunteering". I just said "no". I don't think the teacher liked this.

Then I was doing my shpeal about milk. I have them tell me what the mineral is in milk that makes your bones and teeth strong. They say "calcium". Then I ask "where does milk come from". After saying "the store", they say "cows". Then I say "how does the calcium get into the cow?" Usually the kids guess the right answer, which is "by what they eat (grass)". But today this kid said "when babies come out of them". I don't even know where he was going with that.

I feel like a corporate whore for the major chain supermarket I work for and the Dairy Council. I want to go off on a tangent about how cows are forced to live in inhumane conditions in unsterilized facilities in close quarters with billions of other cows which is why they need antibiotics so often and that they don't really eat grass and roam around freely like they're supposed to but instead they eat grain which changes the pH in their intestines which increases the levels of E. coli which not only spills out onto the meat when the cow is slaughtered but also gets released through their crap which gets used as fertilizer or spills into the water supply for crops which is how we get E. coli outbreaks in spinach.

But I guess 2nd and 3rd graders wouldn't understand these concepts.
So your nutrition tip of the week is about meat. The kind that comes from cows. It's about avoiding the inhumane slaughter house meat loaded with bacteria and antibiotics.
Here you go:
#1-The very best is organic, but this isn't readily available in most places so the next best thing is
#2- "Natural" meat. But not everything that says "Natural" means the same thing. They lie to get you to buy it. You also want it to says:
-no antibiotics
-no hormones
-no animal by-products
-humanely treated
-100% grass fed is best, but grass-finished is OK.
(Adapted from: Marion Nestle's "What to Eat").
And when you start complaining about how much it costs to buy organic and natural meat, think about how cheap it is to buy beans and tofu. You only need to eat red meat once in a while if you eat it at all (and really, no one NEEDS to eat it), so spending the extra money once in a while won't break the bank. So stop bitching.
And eat your damn vegetables.

Picture of cows: David McNew/Getty Images (on nytimes.com)