I'm not a huge meat eater, so if I’m buying a steak, it better be good. A couple of months ago, I splurged on some gorgeous-looking grass-fed beef from a grocery store locally famous for its high quality. Cooked it that same night, fully expecting it to be amazing—and honestly, it just… wasn’t. The texture was off, the flavor fell flat, and I was pretty disappointed.
That’s when it hit me: most of the time, when we buy meat at the grocery store, we don’t really know what we’re getting. The label might say "ribeye" or "Product of USA," but that’s about it. How was the animal raised? How long has the meat been sitting there? Was it frozen before it got to the case? We have no idea.
So I switched things up and started buying from a local butcher instead. My thought was simple: if I want to know more about what I’m eating, I should ask the people who actually know what they're talking about. Butchers are specialists—they can tell you exactly where your meat comes from, how fresh it is, even the name of the farm it came from.
And truly, the difference has been huge. Here's why.
