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I'll be living in northern Oman for the next 3 months and shopping at a store called Lulu. I try to stay as paleo as possible but it's a bit difficult. There is a wide variety of beef to choose from, but it is labeled by country of origin (Australia, New Zealand, India, etc) Not only to the people who work there hardly speak English, they wouldn't know whether the beef was grassfed or not if they understood what I was asking.

Is there a way to tell if its grass fed by the way it looks, smells or tastes? I would assume that beef from New Zealand is more likely to be grass fed, but not guaranteed to be. I've eaten grass fed here in the US, but it I didn't notice any markers that made me know it was grass fed- but I wasn't really looking for them either.

*another note- the beef at the counter is still in VERY large sections. IE a flank steak is still an entire flank muscle. When you want some, you tell them how much you want and how to slice it. They pick up the whole muscle and cut it with a giant knife. So I can see the entire chunk of meat, and I'm always buying some sort of steak.

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Here's something I learnt a few years ago which may be of help to you.

Cows are a sacred animal in India. They use them for milk and believe it or not, for worship. Female (Cows) are never slaughtered, in fact, it is a law in many states in India.

However, bulls are a different story. All male off-springs from cows are either used as a beast of burden, to pull carts or plough fields etc. or just sold for meat. Most of the meat is exported out of India. It is hard to find beef in any city in India, while Goat, chicken and fish are common.

Milk cows are domesticated and well fed, however, bulls are generally allowed to graze in the wild and are allowed to eat a variety of wild things. So, while they will not fall into the category of "grassfed", unless specifically stated, it is quite likely that beef from India is from an animal that had a much greater variety of wild greens in their diet.

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wow. I knew cows were sacred- I always assumed it included bulls. When heating beef from India, should I be concerned about the cleanliness and methods used at the processing facility there? – WayfinderAli Dec 30 2011 at 15:22
Meat exported out of the country, generally goes through an inspection at the processing factory as well as at the country of import - so you should not have to worry about that. – Resurgent Dec 30 2011 at 18:18
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Could you go by the taste?

I made a visit I made to the USA about a year ago. I was buying beef at a supermarket. Just your normal beef that looked really good. But the taste was horrible. Tasteless in fact.

So I switched to (grass-fed) lamb from a chain of "health food" shops. Don't remember the name. Yummy.

I was wondering actually if sheep are almost always pastured...

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