The Moos Room™

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Dr. Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. This is Dr. Joe, and this is a windshield episode. It's been increasingly difficult to get together as the OG three to get an episode recorded. As the weather gets nicer and we're all getting back outside and back on farm to look at things, it's just more and more tough to get together. This week, I thought I'd pick a topic that surprised me recently and I hadn't really paid a whole lot of attention to. Got a question from somebody that just put me off guard. A friend of mine, we were out at a restaurant together and he asked me a question and I wasn't quite sure how to respond immediately. Knowing that I have run this podcast and that I'm the cattle production system as an educator, my friend asked me if I eat a lot of beef, and the truth is no.
I couldn't honestly say yes. Now, I do eat beef, but I can't say that I eat a lot of beef at home. I'm an avid hunter. I love to hunt and my freezer is always full of wild game and things that aren't beef. In some ways, I like to think that I'm contributing to the beef industry by taking a few deer out every year and keeping beef farmers from having to feed them as well. We do go down to Oklahoma every year and we hunt wild pigs down there, so I like to feel like I'm contributing to the beef industry in Oklahoma at least by taking a few of those pigs out of the system, but in reality, my freezer is full of wild game. It's not full of beef, and I grew up that way as well.
My dad has hunted his whole life and we always had venison in the freezer and we just didn't eat a whole lot of beef because that was what was available. It's a tough question to answer and one that is strange for me to think about too much. Now, on the dairy side, I have no shortage of cheese or milk in my house, especially with a two-year-old at home. We go through plenty of milk and I only drink whole milk as well. That's what I have in my coffee every morning. We have cheese for days at my house. I support the dairy industry and I support it every day, but on the beef side, to be honest, yes, I don't eat a whole lot of beef at home.
Now, I do have a group of friends and we get together and it's called Burger Club. It was a little bit of a response to book club. My my wife is in a book club with a lot of the spouses, a burger club. We do get together once a month and we travel around the Twin Cities looking for the best burger in the Twin Cities. I eat my beef there on a regular basis, and if you are going to press me for my favorite meal, my last meal, if I had to have one, it's going to be a rib-eye that's grilled to perfection, medium rare when I'm going to eat the whole thing, I leave nothing behind. All that gristle, all that fat, that is my favorite part.
Yes, I don't have beef in my freezer. I don't eat a whole lot of beef at home, but I do feel like beef is ingrained in my soul and it's not something I'm going to get away from anytime soon. There's still nothing better than a perfectly cooked beef burger or a perfectly cooked beef steak. There's no doubt that it tastes better than any of the other things that I have in my freezer, whether it's venison or elk or wild boar or whatever it is, beef is so much taste here, but it's just not what's in my freezer on a regular basis.
Don't be worried though. My two-year-old eats beef as well, and that's actually the reason that we started buying beef again because I insisted that he be exposed to beef and be exposed to beef early. One of his first foods was beef meatballs that we made him, and he loves beef, loves it, so don't be worried. I am making sure my kids grow up with beef in their lives and they know how to appreciate it.
That question caught me off guard. I think my friend had a good laugh because he knew the answer ahead of time, but wanted to ask me that anyway and put me in that position to have to answer. I knew that he knew because he had just a grin on his face as he asked. If everyone wants to know, that's the truth. I don't have beef in my freezer because it's full of everything else. Now, I think like a lot of Americans out there, beef still is the go-to meat for special occasions.
At Thanksgiving, I push to not have the turkey on the table if we can help it. I'd much rather have a big piece of beef on the table. At Christmas, it's the same thing. A big beef tenderloin is much preferable to any of the other things that we would eat traditionally at Christmas. Birthdays are still full of beef steaks, we do plenty of our beef burgers during the summer when we host barbecues, so beef isn't absent from my life, it's just not in my freezer, and it's not something I eat every day.
I don't think that's that dissimilar to a lot of what other Americans are doing out there. Beef is special and I think a lot of people see it that way and they save it for those special occasions. Now, I mean, would it be better for the industry if everybody ate beef all day every day? Yes, but I also think it's important to realize that beef holds a special place for a lot of people as that food that is a special treat or something that they have occasionally and it's their go-to meal when there's a special occasion. I think that can be embraced just as much as the every day beef consumption.
Like I said, I'm making a point in my child's life to have beef be introduced and be there from an early age. I think that's another thing that's happening across the country, and one of the things that our Beef Council is pushing for is to incorporate beef at a younger age and to make sure that it is included on the lunch menu when we go to schools, and that it is an important piece, the nutritious piece of how we fuel a growing person. Especially making sure that we develop that connection with the sports world as well, with how good beef is at helping you recover and providing the protein you need to perform. For many of you out there, it might just be sounding like Dr. Joe's making a bunch of excuses about why he doesn't have beef in his freezer, and that's okay. That's fine. My freezer's full of everything else that I like to do when it comes to hunting, but I still eat beef and I seek it out when I'm out and I'm at a restaurant, when I'm out with friends and we have a special occasion and we have that backyard barbecue, beef is at the center of all those things.
With that, if you have comments, questions, and especially scathing rebuttals to this episode, please send those to themoosroom@umn.edu. That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M at U-M-N dot E-D-U. Visit our website extension @umn.edu. Check us out on social media on Twitter. We're @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety. If you want to see what Brad is doing up at Morris, jump on Instagram and go to @umnwcrocdairy. Thank you everybody for listening. We will catch you next week.
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