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Organic meat / good butcher in Kunming?

swopat (11 posts) • 0

Well I don't want to import meat from abroad which is e.g. certified by the USDA, it was just an example for the kind of meat I'm looking for.

It's not only about the taste.
Basically I want the meat from a domestic healthy animal which is not being fed some shit food or medicine.

Ishmael (462 posts) • -1

I can dig that, altho I haven't worried about it much since I've been here, with no bad results so far.

swopat (11 posts) • 0

Since I want to process the meat without heating it very hot I was looking for some "cleaner" meat.

Alright, yeah it might work out, but from smoking cigarettes you also don't get immediately cancer.

ricsnapricsnap (193 posts) • 0

I think you know USDA standards are considered bullocks by Europeans legislators who also believe part of the reason why America is obese is because of those standards... (Probably the same is true for Australian and South African standards)

herenow (357 posts) • +1

@swopat: You might check out Metro and perhaps Walmart on the supposition that they retain some vestige of Western quality control. This is not to say that their meat will be up to your standards, just that it's probably less bad than virtually all other local options.

I don't include Carrefour because there has been at least one report on here of their selling meat crawling with worms.

swopat (11 posts) • 0

I doubt the standard for organic food has anything to do with obesity.

There are some food processing techniques, e.g. cold smoking where you might taste the difference between the quality of the meat. Compared to frying it and putting a lot of spices into the dish.

But it's getting slightly off-topic now.

To sum it up, I'm kind of looking for a butcher who get's his meat maybe from a small local farm where the animals roam freely and are in good health (without adding any drugs).

ricsnapricsnap (193 posts) • +1

We are what we eat, which in turn is what they eat. Even if you wanna take growth hormones out of the equation, anything the animals eat will become us. And that's a simplification, since also their well-being affects their meat.
I reckon organic standards in Russia (which is simply open air farming) are better than Europe, which are better than US. In China is a problem because they usually don't care about the animals' well-being...

JanJal (1243 posts) • +2

We had some a couchsurfing couple staying with us few years ago, who had stayed at a farm (in southern Sichuan, if I recall correctly) advertising with ecological and organic farming. The farm was running some program to invite people to stay and "help with the farm work" in echange for lodging, or ecotourism more generally.

But what they saw, was that only a small area within the farm was reserved for this kind of production (as some kind of showroom), while vast majority of the grounds and work on the farm (and probably income as well) came from more "traditional" farming involving dumping the animals full of growth hormones and little caring for their wellbeing.

So indeed, how can you trust what anyone advertises... especially in China, where investigative journalism is very restricted, and critical thinking probably quite uneducated.

We usually buy meat from Q-Life (or some such) supermarket in downstairs of TongDe Plaza mall close to Beijing Lu/BaiYun Lu intersection. They also advertise with these urban values, but who knows...

It's sufficient for us, and some of the staff has befriended us since I used to buy chicken soup to my wife from there when she had freshly (and organically!) delivered our baby, who they have then observed growing up.

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