For me it is mainly an animal welfare issue. Hunting for food, it seems to me, is much more defensible than going to the supermarket for those tidy little packs. It's better because the animal lived free until it's death. It's better because you take responsibility for it's death yourself.

I strongly suspect most farmers are sick of the corner they have been forced into. Intensive agricultural these days (pigs & poultry in particular) looks like a vision of hell, and while you may deny animals any kind of 'rights', surely no-one would describe them as unfeeling machines. If I remember correctly, in the 18th century or so, there was a group of anatomists who thought just that, and likened the cries of pain from the live animals they were dissecting as no more than noises from a broken machine.

Buy 'organic' where you can - the standards of welfare are much much higher, and you will get a much better, healthier product.

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It's industrialization, just like what happened with manufacturing a hundred years ago. I worked in a poultry plant and it sure was gross. But I didn't see any practices that were dangerous. I'll bet their facilities were cleaner than third-world subsistence farms or boutique subsuburbanites' ranchettes.

The thing I saw (and worked in) that totally grossed me out was in the rendering plant: Wherin the guts, feathers, and heads were cooked and dehydrated and ground with grains and soya protein and converted back into chicken feed. I'll bet that all the offal from slaughter houses gets similarly recycled.

And that maybe why industrial farming uses such huge doses of antibiotics. The protein portion of the feed in feedlots is probably 50% processed offal. They add antibiotics and of course, growth hormone. Excellent reasons for buying organically grown meats. They are necessarily more expensive, pound for pound. It's the price you pay for food not pumped-up with antibiotics and hormones. I think that organically grown livestock is probably equivalent to game as far as safety is concerned.

But in any case, stick with herbivores and don't eat the brain or spinal cord and also thoroughly cook organ tissue and you'll be safe even with industrial meats. Oh, I wouldn't eat the liver either. Bad juju in there, too.

If you are ever in a position where you have to wonder if you will make it to some water before you collapse of dehydration it will give you another perspective on this. People often will eat each other before they die of starvation.

I read that if all of the grocery stores and food factories were simultaneously locked shut and everyone had to live off of the wildlife it would take about four days to consume all of the deer and other wild meat animals in the world.

With the demise of the family farm you are at the mercy of the multi-national food corporations. Most of the people alive today would starve if they had to grow their own food and certainly would not be capable of growing surplus to support livestock.

Now think about everyone trying to heat their houses with wood, similar scenario.

When you hear of atrocities that were committed in military prisons in times of war consider that often there was a balancing act going on trying to feed the citizens and trying to feed the prisoners. Guess who got first dibs.

Basically, if it tastes good, I eat it.

I don't want animals to die a needlessly cruel death, but I don't lie awake at night, or join PETA, or anything like that. Nor do go out of my way or spend more money just to ensure that I'm "buying organic" or "local" or "cruelty-free" or anything.

I agree with Botnst about liver....I've never understood why you would actually WANT to consume the equivalent of the "oil filter" of an animal's body. Yuck. Can't be good for you.... Nasty stuff in there.

Of course I do LOVE "botttom-feeders" like crab, shrimp, oysters, clams, mussels, lobster......I guess some would say that consuming them is not much different from eating liver but...... Oh, well. They taste SO DAMN GOOD!

One of my favorite quotes is from Dennis Leary, during one of his many rants making fun of vegetarians: "Meat tastes like death, and death tastes GOOD!"

Mike

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american food, in general, is pretty sick...all those injections is what i don't care for. i used to hunt a lot and heat my house with wood. the latter is probably about to happen again even though i live in a metro area... i'd imagine hunting will increase too... spring is around the corner so are the veggies from my garden....

cheese making is very easy. it is easier if the milk is not homogenised.. find a farmer and get the milk straight from the cow.. homo milk is also workable but a bit more care needs to be taken.. and you need a few additives..

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I raised milk goats for several years (back in the hippie days of yore) and I made yogurt. Lots of yogurt. It sure was good. Goats are really easy to raise with chickens and a pig. There's an old book that's a useful read for you latter-day hippes, "Five Acres and Independence". When I shut the door on my last nestling, I'm moving to the country and buying some goats and chickens and a couple of pigs. Probably grow and brew my own recreation, too.


Green acres is the place to be
Farm living is the life for me
Land spreading out,
so far and wide
Keep Manhattan,
just give me that countryside.

Bot

I would have agreed too, until I had foie gras for the first time (embarrassingly recently). Oh. My. God. Best stuff ever. If eating goose liver is wrong, I don't want to be right

"EEeeewww-uhh!" Quoting my 12 year-old.

liver and onions! yes.... good stuff. so is the tongue, and heart... mmmm.

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...have that same book. We got rid of our two La Manchas and a Nubian when we sold the 20 acre country estate to move to the log home in the city. I truly love goats, but the two pigs we raised were the last I ever want to encounter in my lifetime--confounded ankle biters. Lady Z has been bugging me to get chickens...I'd rather wait until the kids get a bit older, so they can assume all the chores associated with that clucking cacophony of clattering fowl.

I've had good live and it's fantastic I've had bad liver and I was just short of a trip to the porcelin god. I don't mind tongue but I don't go out of my way to eat it. Heart is very good but most of the hearts I come across have big holes in them

I don't have anything against internal organs of herbivores that are properly raised and cared for. But I'd sure as heck not eat organs from industrial feedlots. You're just asking for a dose of antibiotics and feminizing hormone. I'll leave that right there.

So what's the downside?

Dare I go there?

No, I can foresee no good coming of it.

But if you know any women with a shadow under their noses and along the chin, feed them swine liver. Lots of swine liver.

double lung shot baby...

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