Interesting post. I agree about the cow-milking
part. Most people nowadays don't know HOW to milk a cow....period!
Here we are, raising beef calves, and we don't eat our own meat. WHY????
Because it would take us 5 years to eat a whole beef, and keeping that much meat
frozen for 5 years is a guarantee of freezer-burned and awful tasting
meat. The two of us eat 3-4 oz. servings, when we do eat meat. It's
not a philosophical thing, it's just that our appetites are diminishing and our
tastes are changing. We eat more pasta or ground beef-based dishes that
steaks and roasts. And a whole beef produces a variety of cuts, some of
which we don't care for...such as heart, liver, and tongue.
In the interest of having fresh, not freezer-burned
meat all the time, we do not use our own beef. And, unlike Heidi, the last
mobile butcher here retired ages ago, and I'm not sure there even is one around
anymore.
In my experience, what spoils most of us and keeps us from slaughtering
our own is time and convenience. It isn't as healthy to go buy it from
the supermarket, but the food is tantalizingly THERE, which means I
don't have to milk a cow twice a day, or spend a day cutting and wrapping a
beef, or whatever.
When I was a kid, the neighbor knew how to milk a cow, too, so if we
went away for a few days, it was no big deal to get someone to do
chores. In this day and age, it is tough enough to get reliable help to
just feed horses when we travel--even here in this rural area, finding someone
who could milk a cow in our absence is nigh on impossible. We do have a
mobile butcher, so getting a cow slaughtered and processed isn't out of the
question--although for me, it is still easier to buy a half or a quarter from
someone else. So I don't think my upbringing put me off to any of
this--but our current culture sure makes it easy to fall into the rut of
simply buying food at the supermarket instead of taking the time and trouble
to raise it. (And that is true of vegetable gardens, too--when I was a
kid, ALL our veggies were homegrown as well. LOTS of labor.)
Heidi
Tho our 3
children were raised to a limited slaughter, none do them practice that
today. I even fed them fresh from the cow milk because it was cheaper
than regular milk, but it was real mild. I think i turned
them off to that approach from the time we were going to Disneyworld
for Christmas and had to slaughter 20 chikens or more before we left.
I think that ruined it for them as they don't do the practice of home-raised
meat.
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