Home home on the range: Grass-fed beef a welcome addition to dining halls

Carolina Dining Services demonstrated its commitment to the health and concerns of University students by deciding to serve grass-fed beef in Ram's Head Dining Hall once a week.

Serving the more expensive grass-fed beef will not take any money away from the University's budget.

Dining services gets its money from vending and student meal plans — it does not receive any money from the state.

But because serving grass-fed beef costs $1.46 per pound more than the current meat supplier's product dining services might have to raise the cost of student meal plans in the future.

However students should not be afraid of an increase at this point said Tony Peele an active member of Fair Local and Organic Foods.

FLO Foods is the student organization working with dining services to make this initiative happen.

Even if dining services served only grass-fed beef every day Peele said there would be only a 37 cent increase per one quarter-pound burger served.

Since grass-fed beef only is being served for lunch one day a week at one dining hall students shouldn't fear an exponential increase in the cost of their meal plans.

And the meat is processed more locally too — the processor is located in a town about two hours away from Chapel Hill.

Normally a massive amount of fossil fuel goes into the process of standard industrialized agriculture.

Animals often are raised on pastures across the U.S. transferred somewhere else to be slaughtered and then transferred again to be sold.

And then there's the fossil fuel that goes into shipping corn all over the country to feed the cows.

Suddenly a two-hour drive to a North Carolina processing plant doesn't seem so bad.

Because of the great environmental benefits and negligible price increase of serving grass-fed beef at the University this is the right move for CDS.