This piece describes where I’m coming from in wanting to make use of the whole animal when we’re butchering. A sort of sweeping overview on the why, not the how—that’ll come later. I go into details that might be a little bit sensitive for some, but I urge anyone who keeps or eats animals to read on. So much that is wrong with our food systems today is tied to a disconnect from the origins of our food and to hide from the things which are hard to see only serves to disconnect us further. Disgust is a learned response that can be unlearned.
We raise our own meat for the connection it gives us to our food. To know our food, how it was raised and everything that went into it. I know I’m not unique in that. I’m sure we all come into homesteading/self-sufficiency farming to deepen or rekindle that connection with our food and the land it grows from, as well as to aim toward a more sustainable and self-reliant way of living. And that way of living requires that we make the best and most frugal use of our resources. For me it’s also about the animals. My animals are the heart and soul of my farm, and I’d keep them even if I didn’t eat them. But what would be the good in that? To farm and live on a piece of land without consuming the product of it? All of the product of it. To buy my sustenance from someone else’s land? That is a rich world’s privilege—a fragile privilege built on the very systems that keep us disconnected. My animals grow here on this hill (where not much else will grow) and so I shall consume and integrate the nourishment they give into my body, thus I, too, am grown from this hill, from the heather and rain and the soil beneath my feet in a cyclic exchange of nutrients belonging to a place, complete in the knowledge that I too, will one day return to the soil and be eaten. And I will waste nothing, because I knew them in life and every blade of grass and summer sunbeam and drop of sweat that raised them.
I will waste nothing because I raised this animal from birth, and I fed it, and I spent my days and care and resources providing and ensuring it the best life I could. Because I knew its name and I held its wet and slimy, precious newborn life in my hands as it spluttered its first breaths and then I held its death in my hands as it breathed its last. I bore that responsibility too, the weight of its death, its life for mine. I felt the moment of transcendence as the light of life that was the soul I knew left its eyes. I watched with silent reverence the last, severed sparks of electricity disperse through its twitching nerves, until stillness descended, and all that was left behind were the flesh and feathers or hide it once inhabited—the flesh I fed and raised, meat rich with nutrients that will now nourish me. And then, I set to work to turn flesh into sustenance, I plucked and cut and cleaned with bloodied hands, carefully, admiring every sinew, every fibre, and my sorrow for the life I took gave way to marvel at the beauty and perfection of Creation. Every part, every glistening organ, delicate entrail and dark muscle dense and rich with colour testifying to the life and health of an animal that lived well. And there is pride in that, a celebration of a life well lived and the richness of sustenance left behind. I know that animal more intimately now in death than I can ever know them in life, and I am filled with an overwhelming gratitude, an awe for all of life, and my place within it.
I will waste nothing because every part is a gift of life-sustaining nourishment—a gift of life for life. Their life to sustain mine. A life taken, a life given. To waste a bloody morsel would be sacrilege.
A few years ago, before we came to our wild, hill land and my focus shifted to sheep and shepherding, I wrote a very short-lived homesteading blog. My farm and flock were a lot smaller then, an acre homestead with a couple of goats, chickens, and sheep that we ran on rented and borrowed ground, and I was training at the time as a women’s health and nutrition coach so my focus was a lot more on food and health, but always bringing it back to the connection to the land, the source of our sustenance, and the animals, the lives we raised to feed us.
We had been raising poultry, goats and sheep for eggs, milk and meat, and processing our own poultry, learning to make the best use of the whole animal for years already, but we were getting our sheep and goats butchered at the local abattoir, getting them back boxed and packaged in neat little bags, with the hearts, livers and kidneys, bits deemed worthy of civilised human consumption packaged up among the chops and roasts. I started asking for the other bits. We started going down to the abattoir late at night to collect our bits fresh as the butcher worked. Skins, hearts and entrails pulled from the carcass and handed to me steaming, the colours of its vibrant life gleaming under the bright fluorescent lights of the processing room. Our butcher was/is always more than happy to give us back all we want from our animals, from their heads to their hooves, because the more we take and make use of the less weight in his bins to be trucked off by collectors to the rendering plant for a pricey fee. The kill-out weight of a sheep (the meat carcass weight) is less than half the weight of the live animal. The rest is skin, head, feet, and offal. Animal waste disposal is costly business. But there should not be so much waste from the animals we raise for food.
I could go on to describe how well these parts of the animal will feed us, the full spectrum of nourishment of a nose to tail approach to eating, the synergism of eating like for like—their collagen for my joints and skin, their bones for my bones, their heart for mine. As though revelling in all of the nourishment an animal provides is not just the way humans have always eaten, the way our grandparents and our great-grandparents and our great-great-grandparents and so on to the beginning of time ate. It’s only in the past few decades that we’ve come so distanced from the source of our sustenance, and so affluent that we can discard the most nutritious parts of the animals we eat.
And not just food, but fibre too. I learned to tan our sheep’s skins because I could not bear to see such a beautiful and valuable resource end up rotting or rendered with the waste. I learned to make use of our sheep's wool, another undervalued by-product of raising meat that is so often left to rot (while we clothe ourselves in plastic). I learned these skills and bred my flock into a dual-purpose meat and fibre flock, and “Wild Irish Shepherdess” emerged as an outlet for those crafts, from that basic desire to make full use of everything left to us by the animals we raised for food.
Because to make best and most sustainable use of our resources, and to truly value the animals we raise, the lives so tightly woven with our own of these benevolent beasts that nourish us and the labour, love and costs that go into them from birth to butchering, to close the circle of life sustaining life, I will use every part.
Here’s that study for anyone who wants to nerd out on the nutrition or needs a reason to eat liver (notice the differences in the vitamin content between liver and muscle meat, and between grass- and grain-fed cattle): Darwish, et al (2016). β-carotene and retinol contents in the meat of herbivorous ungulates with a special reference to their public health importance. Journal of Veterinary Medical Science, 78(2), 351–354. https://doi.org/10.1292/jvms.15-0287
I love this. I'm glad you shared it. I'm sharing it with my wife (and a few good friends).
Beautifully written. I think that, but can’t write it. We also raise our own animals for meat and value the entire process. We don’t always eat all the offal, but the dogs do. I would love to keep the hides, but haven’t gone down that track yet and not sure that I will. What we don’t keep, gets composted so it’s not wasted.