I’ve added meat back as a way to gain weight for my surgery to fix adhesions and also I’m having problems with my pyloric valve since my laporatomy. This is causing gastroparesis to further complicate things. Anyways, im doing liver for nutrients because I have absorption problems and don’t like supplements. I’ve posted a bit about the grass-fed bison liver and no matter how hard I try it’s pretty tough. It seems to do a little better in very thin slices. I’ve read that lamb liver is soft and milder as well. Some part of me feels bad for eating young animals however. Anybody else face this feeling? I prefer to eat old animals. I think they taste better, as well as feeling better they lived a long time. But if the lamb liver digests better maybe I should try it.
Eating young animals
I don’t think we ever eat old animals (well there are rare cases I suppose), just adult ones but I am pretty selfish. I have complicated feelings and I wish to do what I can (sadly, it’s not very much 
) - but if I need to choose between harm of an animal and harm of me, well… I don’t think about it much.
I can relate a tiny bit but isn’t it better for my food to suffer shorter? It has no good life. As my food is usually not from good sources at the moment. At least it’s usually big so less animal suffers for a meal of mine…
I better don’t think about it as I can’t change my ways without seriously harming myself.
I don’t seem to be particularly sensitive to the differences between lamb and mutton, or veal and beef. The reason not to eat veal is that many calves are treated badly in order to produce the type of meat the producers think the public desires. But many beef animals are just barely out of puberty, in any case, because it makes no economic sense to keep most animals past the point where they are marketable. The exceptions, of course, are milk cows and bulls kept for breeding purposes (there are complications here that I’m omitting).
I’ve never seen lamb’s liver in the supermarkets near me, though you can find both calve’s liver and beef liver. If you can find it, give it a shot. It might work for you. But in any case, I find that the key to palatable liver is not to overcook it. Just barely done is about right. Even beef liver is delicious if not overcooked.
thanks for your thoughts. The lamb liver is something I’d order online. grass fed and finished from the same place that sells the bison.
I’ll narrow in on the ethical part of the choice…
How an animal is treated would seem to me to be far more important than how long it lived.
A long miserable life is far less “humane” than a short well-treated one. Of course, this presumes that merciful slaughter are involved in either case.
The ethical treatment of animals for consumption is a complex moral issue that dates back many millennia. E.g., kosher rules found in Leviticus (from the “Old Testament”) explicitly prohibit boiling a kid in its mother’s milk out of a sense of ironic cruelty.
Clearly, neither the slaughtered goat nor its mother would be aware of such food preparation, but the act would still feel “inhumane” to people concerned over animal treatment.
This prohibition still serves as the primary basis of the modern day kosher prohibition against mixing meat and dairy. Even mixing cow’s milk with chicken’s meat is prohibited, to ensure the principle of humane treatment prevails (including not using a slaughtering blade with any nicks on it, approaching the animal from behind, not letting other animals see the slaughter, etc.)
The idea of treating animals ethically is still with us and, sadly, modern factory farming methods leave little comfort that the food industry cares much about such concerns.
It’s not about how long one lives, it’s all about how well one lives and how well one dies. I know it’s a shock to survivors when someone dies young, but the animal or person who did die has no such thoughts. What matters is the quality of life, while one is there to experience it, not so much the quantity.
Besides, we stopped a long time ago eating old animals. Used to be you could buy “soup chicken”, and that would be an old laying hen. I haven’t seen one of those in decades. We eat animals as soon as they have reached the most profitable weight stage.
That was part of my hesitation as well. It says the lamb comes from small farms near the area and are taken to same place that owns the bison. (the bison by the way are field harvested by being shot it appears). I would like all my meat to be harvested in a similar way. I don’t like them to be driven around. I don’t like to think of them being led into some facility.
A lot of small farms still have a butcher who comes and shoots the animals, usually point blank since they have not been scared. We used to have one come for our pigs. It is the most humane.
Try “Force Of Nature”. They do sell venison and wild boar. Not sure about offal offerings or the precise ethics of their wild animal harvest but it does seem like a level up.
Another ethical issue is the sheer number of animal lives taken or disrupted when a field is ploughed for crop-raising. How many birds lose their nesting sites when they are destroyed? Not to mention the staggering number of small mammals who are caught and killed in the machinery. How do their lives weigh in our ethical calculus?
It appears that the human diet inevitably involves taking animal lives, no matter what we eat.
My cousins’ grandfather was half Delaware, and he was relentlessly opposed to sport hunting. In their part of Pennsylvania, the beginning of deer season is a public holiday. Grandpa Ralph went out hunting, and all the deer he killed were used to feed his family. He had a reverence for the lives of the animals and would thank them for the sacrifice that enabled his family to live.
He usually felled a deer with a single shot, and he insisted that if you shot at an animal and wounded it. you had a moral duty to hunt it down and put it out of its misery, no matter how difficult the animal was to track.
Everything eats other life in this world. Plants do too, they eat critters that live in the soil. That doesn’t seem to matter at all, since the critters are tiny. Where does one draw the line? It is how our world works. I try to draw the line at a good life and a good death. That’s the best anyone of us can ever hope for.
They are food. It doesn’t matter their age except when it comes to taste. I personally slaughter my lambs at around 11 months. They are much better tasting at that age before they mature.
Cattle are nice when they are around 500 pounds so that makes them young also.
When I hunt wild hogs, I prefer them a little to the younger side. About 150 pounds is about as big as I care for them. Same reason, taste.
Now deer on the other hand don’t seem to matter too much. Young or mature they taste the same to me so I prefer to only take mature animals. This is for conservation purposes.
I just meant there’s a possibility the op could get “wild caught organs” from this company but I know nothing much about them or their hunting / farming practices. I’m definitely not opposed to properly done animal hunting, as your grandfather did it.