What is "natural beef"?

What is "natural" beef?

After I reported to a friend that the Cheeburger Cheeburger restaurants use only natural beef in their burgers, she asked, "Isn't 'natural beef' one of those terms that basically means nothing?" A little research uncovered the sad fact that this is true. Whereas, the Department of Agriculture has strict standards for beef that wants to call itself "organic," USDA requires only that "natural beef" be minimally processed and contain no artificial ingredients or preservatives.

USDA leaves it to the companies that market "natural" brands to define and regulate their own standards. If you're in the supermarket looking at a package of meat labeled "natural" with no other information given, you will need to call or consult the Web site of the particular producer.

The story has a bright spot, however, Many of the leading natural brands exceed USDA's bare-bones standards. For example, Cheeburger Cheeburger's natural beef is provided by Naturewell, a subsidiary of the National Beef Co. Naturewell prohibits the use of antibiotics and added hormones during the final 120 days of the animals' feeding, which, according to the company, "delivers beef free of antibiotics and added hormones."

When you start poking around the natural-beef corral, you find producers trying to outdo one another in terms of purity, and you frequently hear the phrase "never never never," which means that a producer never uses antibiotics, never uses hormones and never feeds the animals anything but a vegetarian diet.

Certified Angus Beef's "Natural" brand is "never never never" (plus the meat apparently meets 10 other "scientific specifications"). I asked company spokeswoman Melissa Brewer if there was any third-party verification of these standards. She said that in the absence of a USDA monitoring system, Certified Angus relies on a paper trail of sworn affidavits attesting to the cattle's treatment from conception through slaughter.

John Tarpoff, vice president of beef for Niman Ranch (one of the country's leading natural-meat producers) lamented USDA's lack of leadership. "A year ago, it looked like they were going to come up with a true natural standard with some teeth in it," he said, "but it never happened." According to Tarpoff, Niman Ranch's protocols "are the hardest ones to meet." Niman Ranch does not use ionophores (additives that behave like antibiotics but, technically, are not) or urea (a synthetic supplement) or milk or whey in its animal feed. "We take 'never never never' a little bit further," he said.