Choice. Angus. Natural. Organic. Humanely raised. Grass-fed. Prime. Wagyu. Kobe. These days, there are more marketing terms associated with beef than ever before, all of which attempt to separate you from your food budget with promises of better quality or better moral character. And it's important to know what those terms mean, especially if you're concerned about greening your meat.

But for most folks, taste is the deciding factor. We might buy prime for the intense marbling, or Kobe and Wagyu for the promise of massaged, beer-drinking cows with intensely tender flesh. Grass-fed beef provides more old-school beef flavor, while organic gives us happier — and possibly more tasty — cows.

We cut through the marketing lingo straight to the meat of the matter by pitting six different, readily available, supermarket steaks against one another: Angus from Sweetbay, choice from Publix, humanely-raised from Publix Greenwise, humanely-raised from Whole Foods, prime and American Wagyu from Mazzaro's.

Each steak, all NY strip, with one exception, was simply seasoned with the same amount of salt and pepper (by size) and each was grilled to medium-rare (although the thickest gave us a few problems). We then assembled a crack team of CL carnivores — foodies and amateurs — to sample the steaks in a blind tasting and rate the meat.

The results surprised the hell out of us. Find out the winner after the break.

This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2009.