Here’s the good news: Harold McGee has a blog.

Here’s the bad news: if you read, say, Nina Planck’s Good Food, and got the idea that grass-fed beef is some kind of omega-3-laden health food, McGee is here to school you.

> The long-chain omega-3s in grassfed beef are present at around 20 milligrams per 100 grams (about a quarter-pound) of beef. The levels in farmed salmon are around 3 grams per 100 grams of fish: more than a hundredfold higher. Even salmon raised experimentally on vegetable oil for three-quarters of their life (to begin to address the issue of sustainability) have 1 gram of omega-3s per 100 grams fish: 50 times more than grass-fed beef. These are huge differences!

In fact, so big that the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in grass-fed beef is nutritionally negligible. I love a good debunking. Oh, also, farmed salmon has more omega-3s than wild salmon.

McGee is quick to point out that this doesn’t make grass-fed beef bad or farmed salmon good:

> Of course this is just one small piece of a large and complicated picture. There is plenty to be said in favor of grass-fed beef, plenty of problems with salmon aquaculture, and there’s more to a healthy diet than omega-3s.

Hmm, it’s been too long since I’ve had a Skagit River Ranch steak for lunch.