I love Stew Leonard’s.  LOVE IT.  For those who don’t live in Connecticut (or Westchester County, NY), Stew’s got its start as a dairy store, and is now a grocery store that pretty much defies description.  As someone who grew up in Connecticut and has had family members who worked at Stew’s, I have undying brand loyalty and am a Stew Leonard’s cheerleader.  They have the best of everything: the best dairy products, the best baked goods, the best meats, and (so I’m told) the best seafood. Simply put, it is a Connecticut institution.

Stew Leonard’s is the only place I will buy steak.  It simply tastes better than the steaks you find in regular grocery stores.  This weekend I stopped by Stew’s with the intention of only eating at the Hoe Down (Stew’s outdoor restaurant) and getting a pistachio frozen yogurt for dessert, but the aisles called my name, and I ended up walking out with some Naked Beef.

Naked Beef was launched in 2007 with much fanfare.  It is, as the press release indicates, “branded Naked Beef because it is from Black Angus cattle that have never been given hormones, antibiotics or steroids, and are fed completely on grass and grain.”  When I looked for a non-Stew’s source for info on Naked Beef, I was able to dig up an old Chowhound post:

They run a ranch in Manhatten Kansas, but they really are a feed lot for the beef cattle in question. According to them, they receive their beef cattle from many different ranches in the MidWest, as few as 75 head to 1000 head per ranch. Each ranch signs affidavits that their calves are grass (range) fed. Each calf carries a computer chip detailing its age, treatments etc. No calf is given any antibiotics or hormones unless they get sick. In that case they are treated but separated and disqualified from the “naked beef” program. They go to the feed lot at about 12 months. At that point they are given grain pellets made up of 60% corn, 30% silage and about 10% corn by-product (by-product of ethynol extraction). The feed is not treated, but it is still a little unclear to me if the corn had been treated with pesticides during the growth period. I believe they said they did use fertilizer, at least partly animal marure from their ranch. The cattle are slaughtered at about 20-30 months. They are not tested for mad cow disease because the disease apparently does not develop in cattle under 30 months of age, and this practice is acceptable to the Korean and Japanese markets which are quite picky in this regard.

You’ll note that as someone who used to work in the evil (ha) agricultural chemicals industry, I really couldn’t care less about use of pesticides on corn, so the lack of clarity on that issue is pretty meaningless to me.  Stew’s Naked Beef sounds like it’s on the up and up, as far as I’m concerned.  I think it’s great they gave customers the opportunity to talk to the ranchers who are ultimately responsible for Stew’s beef cattle, which indicates to me they don’t have much to hide (they are, after all, naked).

I will be serving up one of my new steaks on Wednesday with a side of green beans and red pepper.  I can’t wait!

— jerkasaurus