Buy Good Food  Free Range

What is the real picture of where your meat comes from? What is the impact it has on the environment and the impact it has on the animals within the factory farming system?

There are many ways to either reduce your meat intake or start to make informed choices when it comes to ordering and purchasing meat.

You can start today and…

• Implement household meat free days.
• Only purchase organic, biodynamic or free range meat.
• Ask your delicatessen or butcher for free range options or start buying your meat from accredited farmers’markets.
• Always ask questions when ordering meat at a restaurant and don’t just assume that because you are paying top dollar, the meat has been farmed ethically.
• Reduce your dairy intake and try to buy milk and cheese products from smaller organic dairy farms and cheese producers. If you reduce your dairy intake by just 2 cups of milk per week, you will save 13,000 litres of water and 250kg of greenhouse pollution in a year.
• Never purchase cage eggs and look for appropriate logos or support smaller free range producers. Even better, buy your own chooks and have unlimited access to happy eggs.
• Look for grass fed options over grain fed because this places less stress on the environment.
• Write to the government or your supermarket to express your views on factory farming. Proof that it works is that Coles supermarket has decided to ban the use of sow stalls on their own-brand pork products from 2014.
• Discuss your purchasing decisions with your friends and family so they too can consider changing.

More from Sustainable Table on:

• The environmental impacts of eating meat
• Factory farming
• Cattle
• Meat or ‘broiler’ chickens
• Egg laying hens
• Pigs