Why Are Restaurants Selling Beef From Dairy Cows?

The American barbecue brisket that popped up on the menu at NYC bistro ACRU was a bit completely different than what one would usually anticipate from a Greenwich Village restaurant. The meat got here from a dairy cow.

“It’s a premium product,” says government chef and associate Daniel Garwood. “The cow has gone via its complete life. There’s plenty of pure marbling. It has an attention-grabbing taste and texture.”

Since opening the restaurant in October of 2024, Garwood, who hails from Australia and hung out cooking in Sweden, has served ribeye, strip loin, tenderloin, brisket, and even mince pie, all from dairy cow beef.

Within the U.S., dairy cows are nearly solely raised for dairy manufacturing. The exception is male calves, bought to the meat business and raised for veal or beef. As soon as a dairy cow’s milk productiveness declines, the cows are slaughtered with their meat, which is commonly thought of of a decrease high quality and makes its means into canine and cat meals and quick meals burgers. In different components of the world, although, equivalent to in Sweden, the place Garwood labored, meat from dairy herds is prized. 

Now, a rising variety of U.S. eating places, together with ACRU, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Gwen Restaurant in Los Angeles, have been exploring whether or not dairy cow meat will enchantment to customers eager about sustainability.  

“Meat from grass fed dairy cows is taken into account to have a decrease carbon footprint than meat from conventional beef herds partially as a result of its footprint is unfold throughout the years of protein wealthy, scrumptious milk the animals produce of their lifetime,”  says Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

There’s an concept that beef from a dairy herd is a extra sustainable possibility, since you are getting extra meals for the sources used. As a substitute of merely simply getting milk or beef from the land, water, feed, put into the cow you’re getting each. 

Sustainability was a giant draw for The Oberon Group, which owns eating places and meals markets within the Catskills and New York Metropolis. They launched dairy beef in 2017, and whereas prospects supported the sustainability efforts, there have been issues round texture.

“The client pushback on the toughness was vital,” says Henry Wealthy, managing associate.

As dairy cows are older when they’re slaughtered in comparison with beef cattle, which normally are culled at six to seven months for veal, or two years for beef, the meat is mostly thought of more durable.

“They typically don’t have plenty of intramuscular fats or marbling that provides beef the flavoring that’s related to it. And all of these issues normally cut back client acceptance. I’d guess eating places are utilizing some fairly distinctive cooking strategies to be able to overcome that,” says Tara Felix, an affiliate professor within the Division of Animal Science on the College of Pennsylvania.

The Oberon Group is targeted on sustainable, environmental eating places with a purpose of carbon-neutrality and zero-waste. As he explains it, they began serving dairy beef in a meat-centric restaurant, Metta, as a result of, on the time, they believed that as a result of the carbon emissions of the cow have been already attributable to dairy, utilizing the cows for meat would have a decrease carbon footprint that cows that have been simply used for meat. The calculation quickly felt a bit off to Wealthy.

“The declare that that they had decrease total carbon footprints is since you’re ignoring the primary nonetheless a few years of life as a result of they’d be right here anyplace. That accounting began to really feel slightly fuzzy for me,” Wealthy says.

There may be analysis that appears to agree that dairy beef has a decrease carbon footprint than standard beef. An evaluation from Our World in Data, discovered that per 100 grams of protein beef from a beef herd had 49.89 grams of greenhouse gasses, whereas beef from a dairy herd was 16.87 grams.

“The problem is that sustainability means one thing completely different to everybody. Is it lowered methane emissions? Is it lowered feed inputs? Is it lowered time on feed?” says Felix who added that it’s a query various persons are at the moment researching regarding the offspring from dairy farms which do already usually make their means into beef herd applications.

Between the shopper response and the dearth of readability over sustainability, The Oberon Group ended up phasing out the dairy beef program after about two years.

Nonetheless, the corporate began and stopped its dairy beef program earlier than the coronavirus pandemic upended life as we knew it. Cooks life Garwood and Barber which have began their dairy beef applications throughout the final 12 months or so have performed so at a time when there may be maybe extra consciousness of the interconnectedness of meals methods, and climate-related disasters such because the wildfires in Maui or extra just lately in L.A., have pushed extra folks to consider the impacts of worldwide warming. Garwood and Barber have up to now acquired vastly completely different responses to their program. 

“The response has been overwhelmingly optimistic. Grass-fed beef and meat from dairy cows has the status of being robust, however a few of our visitors have advised us it’s one of the best steak they’ve ever had,” says Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

Blue Hill began utilizing dairy beef in 2023, however Barber credit the cows on his household’s dairy within the Berkshires for making him wish to experiment with dairy beef.

“Blue Hill Farm, my household’s dairy farm within the Berkshires, had an older dairy cow prepared for culling a minimum of a few times a 12 months. I guess it was my proximity to those distinctive women—spending years, in some circumstances seven or eight or extra years, attending to know them effectively—that made their inevitable destiny of turning into pet food really feel disrespectful,” says Barber.

Barber and Garwood haven’t but confronted any vital unfavorable buyer response. At Blue Hill at Stone Barns, dairy cows forage on grass and hay earlier than being slaughtered.

“The meat from grass-fed dairy cows has this unbelievable, idiosyncratic taste,” says Barber. “However greater than that, the thought is to showcase how scrumptious this often-overlooked meat might be and create a marketplace for it.”

U.S. dairy farmers usually get solely about 60 cents per pound for meat from retired dairy cows as pet food and quick meals hamburgers. If they might get nearer to $6 a pound or extra for his or her animals, Barber says it may assist enhance income for dairy farmers.

Felix agrees that it might be economically interesting for dairy farmers however believes that its success would depend upon the scale of the dairy farm and whether or not or not the restaurant may take the entire animals the dairy produces.

“There are 86 million head of cattle in the USA, and every year we kill 26 to twenty-eight million. If we’re speaking about even eight or 10 eating places utilizing two to 3 cows every week, it is a very, very small market,” Felix says. “To not low cost it, as a result of it will be nice if a farmer may develop a relationship like that, but it surely’s in all probability by no means going to be our major market.”

That isn’t a deterrent for Garwood. Initially, he had bother sourcing the dairy beef. “We had to purchase your complete cow,” says Garwood, who’s sourcing from Ends Meat in Brooklyn, which will get dairy cows from farms in upstate New York, including that he’s had different eating places categorical curiosity in getting primal cuts however not with the ability to deal with your complete cow.

“We actually wish to pursue it,” Garwood says. “We’ll deal with complete dairy cow dinners within the coming months.”