Brooklyn, New York, resident Sarah Dickinson tries not to eat a lot of meat (due to its heavy environmental toll), but when she wanted to throw a barbeque for friends and family, she decided instead of going meat-free to opt for some more environmentally friendly cuts.

It just so happens that she has a friend who runs a business connecting New Yorkers to the small-scale, family farms in New York State. His Dickson’s Farmstand Meats works with heritage breed, grass-fed and organic farms that reach this baseline criteria:

• The entire supply chain (farm to slaughterhouse to point-of-sale) must be no more than 400 miles long.
• Animal based feeds, prophylactic antibiotics or added hormones are not administered at any point of the animal’s life.
• The animals from which our meat comes must spend their life on the farm – no CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) or feedlots.

In this video, we join Sarah’s BBQ (as friends of hers, we were invited) where she talks about avoiding overprocessed and overmedicated beef, the guests put grassfed to the test, and her brother takes one look at the pictures of the animals they’re eating (something provided by Dickson’s Farmstand) and announces it makes him “more likely to become a vegetarian”.

We also have a video of Sarah’s backyard garden and her indoor/outdoor worm composting condos.