15 April 2009

A Buffalo Experience: Meeting My Meat

I eat mostly vegetarian, consuming perhaps 5 lbs of meat each year. My cats on the other-hand, eat about 5lbs of meat each week combined.

It's been a few weeks now since I participated butchering and hand-processing a 1000 lb. buffalo. Being who I am today, I've known I would eventually experience killing an animal for food. I just figured it would be a chicken first.

The experience was incredible, life-affirming and not at all a gruesome task, but a real opportunity to appreciate at a different level where our food comes from. Compared to the literal nightmare of how most animals are raised, slaughtered and processed in our industrial system, this animal was respected and the killing & processing was a gentler, sacred act. There is beauty in all things, something I saw even in this animal we slaughtered. From the beautiful shapes and twists of his internal organs, to the artwork of the clean, open body cavity displaying the white inner-skin and red shadow of muscles & ribcage, he was a beautiful creature. In the end, it took 16 of us all day to process the buffalo into steak & stew quality meats, of which we each took home 14 lbs. of buffalo. As much as the animal was saved for other uses as possible (aside from the meat).

In a follow up workshop over 2 days, I learned to preserve the meat in a variety of ways. I made hard/aged smoked sausage (including smoking & cleaning the small intestines for the casing), corned buffalo, scrapple (with the organs), rendered fat into buffalo lard and learned about preserving meat with salt. Here are the recipes.