Chipotle caves

My area is 60 percent Mexican and/or Mexican American, so the clientele of every restaurant includes Hispanics.
I've got nothing against Chipotle. I eat lunch there once in a while when someone else wants to go there for lunch. My only real knock is that it's often too crowded and not worth the wait.
Most of the employees are Hispanic.
I like brown rice.
I still consider it white people's Mexican food. Doesn't mean it taste's bad.
But I always prefer the little hole-in-the-wall tacquerias and taco trucks. Of course, you're not guaranteed antibiotic-free meat at the places I eat.

 

The relatively small (200 or so head of cattle) family farm I grew up on was pretty typical of farms and ranches throughout tornado alley. We couldn't claim the cattle were "100 % grassfed" or "organic" because we did bring them down out of the pastures during the winter and feed a mix of grain (small amounts of corn, but mostly milo) with bales of hay and grass. Baby calves get sick all the time and are treated with antibiotics. I can't think of more than a dozen times in my life a full-grown cow was injected and when it was it was a dire situation.

Yes there are factory farms that overfeed corn and use antibiotics that way, but I don't think that is the kind of beef Chipotle is "resorting" to using.

 

I saw the thread title and thought that sponsorships had finally jumped the shark.

 

Every time I drive home from LA, I go past Coalinga and the Harris Ranch feedlot -- home to 100,000 head of cattle, each of which has about as much room as your average caged bird -- and I spend the next half-hour swearing off beef.

Then I get home and have me a nice steak.

 

You don't know this is why they are gaining more than normal. It could be because of the lower strikeout rate or unscrupulous drug testers.

 

Or they're just lazy cows who don't want to exercise.

 

The grass-fed steaks I've bought in the past had almost no marbling and had to be doctored with butter to make them even approach the taste of grain-fed steaks. And I paid about 30 percent more for them. That ended my experiment in buying grass-fed beef.

 

The USDA estimated in 2010 that about 30 percent of all beef raised in the U.S. came from factory farms. That number was estimated to be between 75-80 percent for imported beef.

In 2010, there were 26.4 billion pounds of beef consumed in the U.S. Only 2.3 billion pounds were imported. Again, USDA numbers. So if you go with the high estimate of 80 percent of imported beef raised on factory farms, you can estimate that in 2010 about 34 percent of beef consumed in the U.S. was from a factory farm.

 

I do both. I consider them different things. Chipotle is easily the place I eat at most. I even used to eat at Chipotle much more often than I ate at home, though I'm eating at home more now. The hand-held, perfectly filling burrito is just something unlike the tres tacos de lengua or whatever I'm ordering at the truck.

 

Ragu, I'm just saying that if Chipotle can't get its "all natural" beef it can purchase beef of equal quality from thousands of farmers in plains states that doesn't fit the natural or organic definition. Organic beef and beef raised on your typical Kansas or Nebraska farm is really no different even though a small percentage of the cows in the herd may have had a shot at one time in their lives. And it is a lot cheaper because the process of getting your beef certified organic is incredibly expensive and time consuming.