Vibes aside, Ballerina Farm just… sells cheap meat at high prices.

Like most of their offerings, this meat package has cheap cuts- mostly ground beef & stew meat. It's not grass-only, organic, certified humane, etc.

Ballerina Farm won't even tell you how much meat will be in the box!

It's $250.

BF is also open about the fact that they don't raise most of this meat themselves.

That's fine, because raising it all themselves would be physically impossible. They're on 300-some acres in an arid area. That can fit a few dozen cows *maybe.*

So the meat being sold here is nothing special. Ignore the branding. Look for any actual certified marks of quality, organic, humane conditions, etc.

There aren't any.

That strongly suggests BF is just buying & re-selling bog-standard, conventional grade meat.

I wanted to say "it's the same meat you'd get at the grocery store" but then I realized that's probably not even true.

It's quite likely that BF's role in the greater northern Utah meat ecosystem is "selling the meat that the grocery stores won't take, to suckers on the internet."

Why would I say that?

BF's meat is butchered at nearby USDA-inspected facilities AFAIK. But Ballerina Farm's meat appears to not be graded for quality.

(Health inspection is mandatory. But quality grading- for marbling, juiciness, flavor, tenderness, etc- is optional.)

Having a USDA Prime, Select, or Choice seal means you can charge a lot more. That's why USDA offers that service!

If your meat qualifies for it, odds are you're going to get it.

Sooooooo meat that doesn't come with a USDA grade seal... sometimes there's a reason.

This is part of why direct-to-consumer food sales are booming!

Sometimes farms want to avoid grocery stores bc they take too much of a cut.

But sometimes, they want to avoid grocery stores bc they have quality standards & know when they're being overcharged.

The general consumer doesn't.

This also helps explain why places like BF lean so hard on Nice Mommy branding.

If you're gonna build a multimillion dollar business on overcharging people for mediocre product, you need an air-tight reputation management strategy.

"Awww I'm just a hardworking mommy" is about as good as it gets.

As to why go to all the effort of a big high-profile lifestyle blog, a LOT of farms are doing this. And have been doing some version of it for centuries. The farm sector is extremely image-conscious.

Every farmer business conference has at least 1 seminar on how to use social media to sell a wholesome family image.

"Ballerina Farms does the wholesome family branding bc... they're Mormons!" is really not the razor-sharp insight people think it is.

BF's really not unique. They're doing what every other family with land & ambition is doing right now.

They just happen to have billionaire money as well. So they've got an advantage when it comes to building a platform.

Anyway, I promised ballet gossip so here it is.

One of BF's big claims to fame is "I was at Juilliard and left a promising career in ballet to have a family."

Uh...... if you're on track to dance ballet professionally, you *can* go to Juilliard for that? But people don't that often.

Juilliard is a university.

Most professional ballet dancers are *already dancing professionally* when they hit college age.

"I went to Juilliard to train for a career in ballet" is kinda like "I did college gymnastics to train for the Olympics."

Technically possible! But not the usual track, & for very good reasons!

Pro ballet dancers even leave high school early- so they can join an academy or ballet company training corps.

Ballet is hard on the body and it doesn't pay well. Careers can be short.

So spending your late teens/early 20s racking up Juilliard debt? You can see why it's not the main pro ballet path.

But! The Mormon singles scene in Manhattan (where Juilliard is) does help explain this!

Most of the men are there for finance, & most of the women are there for fine arts/Broadway.

The arts are incredibly competitive. Most people trying to make their big break there, just won't.

So you wind up with a lot of single women with highly prestigious arts training, mountains of debt, & nowhere to go.

And lots of men with budding careers in finance & a need for a wife.

A SIL who did law at Columbia reported a lot of single Mormon women she knew struggled for years to make their big break; never did; got engaged; & suddenly their life story became all about how they "gave up a promising career in dance/acting/music to become a wife & mom."

SIL was like.... Promising career in the performing arts? When? You got 1 callback for a yogurt commercial