Why Bacon?

(Geoffrey) #61

It is said ruminants eat their food and convert it to healthy protein and their systems will change all of the bad stuff in that food that would affect us if we were to eat it and their omega 3 to omega 6 ratios are at a proper level for our health.
Pork on the other hand, because it isn’t a ruminant so it’s said that it is what it eats. Meaning that it doesn’t filter out that bad stuff that it eats like a cow can and it’s 3-6 omega ratios are out of balance for our best nutritional health.
I don’t care though because I like pork. It doesn’t bother my body whatsoever so I enjoy it.

(Brian) #62

The variations in the digestive tracts of animals is fascinating, rather large differences, and yet they all support their respective animal marvelously.

I have a neighbor who says they have an inflammatory reaction to pork, namely a flare-up in arthritis like symptoms. I don’t doubt him, and have heard Dr. Berry mention on several occasions that some people do have a reaction like that to pork.

I don’t know if it’s the same thing or similar but I tend not to feel so well when I eat commercial chicken. You mention a non-ruminent animal “being what it eats”… the diet of the birds in a commercial chicken house kinda doesn’t look like anything I wanna eat. There is a couple at the farmers market who raises small home type flocks of chickens for home processing and have mentioned that their kids know the difference in taste and won’t even eat chicken when they’re out and away from home. Odd thing is, I know I feel kinda “queezy” (for lack of a better word) when I eat commercial chicken, and tend not to. This couple at the farmers market, their chicken is no problem at all… if you can afford it. They get like $10/lb. Ouch.

I honestly do not know what the current recipe for chicken feed is today. But I do remember about 30 years ago there was an article in Lancaster Farming about a commercial operation that was taking the waste that the chickens were making (yeah, poop, too), drying it, grinding it up, and feeding it back to them with the thinking that they didn’t digest all the good stuff from it the first time so they’d send it through again. I know that’s a lotta years ago but it kind stuck with me. They may or may not be doing that anymore. But… have you ever wondered what takes a baby chick from just outta the egg to a full grown chicken ready to process in 5 weeks? People worry about lab grown meat. I dunno. Maybe there are even bigger things to worry about. (??)

(KM) #63

I shouldn’t jinx it, we stopped at a farm with a sign out, on the way home from hiking, turned out it was Amish. Or Mennonite, more likely, I didn’t ask. Lovely family, and they charged “my people” (their words) $2.79 a pound for pastured chicken. I could also have gotten a kitten for $1. :heart:

It was delicious and yes, I spent a summer on a farm and can most certainly tell the difference between a hand raised pastured chicken and commercial, especially a pre-roasted one. Night and day to me, at best the commercial is just bland and tasteless, but it’s usually worse than that.

(KM) #64

In addition to the lousy taste, the fact that every chicken i brought home from Costco had a broken bone somewhere was the deciding factor for me, even if, for an insane $5, their breasts were significantly bigger than mine. Doing the math … that damn giant bird is $1 per pound with preparation, fully processed and cooked. I can’t imagine the conditions that make this profitable.

(Brian) #65

We have some very “Amish like” families close to us that we spend some time with, buy from, visit with, amazing people that have almost become like family to us. (They look very Amish to look at them but when pressed, they do not call themselves Amish but “conservative Christian”. And I’m fine with that. Very similar lifestyle except they do have a few of them that drive cars and most have electricity.)

I see how they raise their chickens, they’re out running around in the pastures and such, and if they are in a pen, it typically has a good bit of space, they’re not all cooped up in some tiny area. We currently get our eggs from them.

Haven’t broached the subject of chickens for meat, I may do that. I know they do them in batches of 50 to 100 just for their own eating. Will have to mention something to them when I think of it. I’ll bet they’d let us go in with them in some way for a part of a batch sometime.

One of the things I’ve thought I might want to do here is to get a flock of chickens going. It’s definitely NOT a money maker here, though. Everybody and his cousin has a little flock of chickens around here and if a person isn’t in a big hurry, good quality eggs from those little flocks are sometimes available for around $2/doz. They must do a lot of free ranging for that price cause there is no way they’d afford the food for them at those prices. I will add, typical is closer to $4/doz but our usually with the Amish I mention above is $3/doz. Now, if I were growing meat birds, it might end up being a bit more economically worthwhile for us, not sure. It’s something to explore. I do know, though, that I am not a butcher. Some things I just can’t do.

(Robin) #66

@kib1 Alas, no kitten. :pensive:

(Brian) #67

Yeah… I hear ya.

I haven’t shopped at Costco in a long time. There isn’t one near us. We got 2 chickens at Sams Club a couple of months ago. I’m hoping my dear wife doesn’t do that again. We ate most of it, but some of it was so bad that it went to the cats. And you KNOW it has to be bad for me to not only not eat what’s on my plate, but to give it to the cats. It was bad. I typically have an “iron stomach”. But I couldn’t.

Only other thing that my stomach rebels against in a really big way is a fake meat called Quorn. Whatever is in that stuff, I apparently can’t digest it and I’ll either hurl or squirt or both for the next 12 hours or so. Not nice at all. Probably TMI… LOL!

(Brian) #68

LOL!! I suspect if kib1 had wanted a kitten, they’d have probably given it away.

We have barn cats. They come and go. We put a little feed out but that’s it. Most of them aren’t tame enough to pet. But once in a while there will be one or two extremely friendly ones. Right now we have one that’s about 3/4 size, quite small, but sweet as anything. She’ll let you pick her up and hold her and would just LOVE to be somebody’s spoiled rotten house cat. We’ve had kittens that people have come to see that they’d pick out the “pretty one” and turn into a pet. And often, they’ll leave behind ones that have wonderful personalities because they’re not as “cute”. But… they’re barn cats. And they come and go. These never, ever come in the house. They have their “range” as well, have seen them up to 1/2 mile away, likely hunting, which is why I like having them around.

(KM) #69

The Amish family does “processing” of people’s chickens for them. They have the “chicken cones” right out in the yard, so no bones about it, but at least you don’t have to do the deed. I have butchered chickens before, but I wouldn’t have the heart for it if I were only raising a few birds at a time. This would be a pretty good alternative, I think. We did raise chickens for eggs, three of them, and it was really nice to have the fresh eggs but we eventually wound up running an old age home for chickens, not so great.

#70

Maybe I should feel lucky then as commercial chicken here is merely tasteless… That’s why I prefer turkey, that is tasty. (And tiny hens for soup!!!) But fowl doesn’t satiate me so it’s just for variety.
I live on pork, basically. And eggs, some dairy and I have off days… But it’s mostly pork, nowadays over a pound a day. My body is very happy with mere supermarket pork, it’s not like I could get much of something better, the nearby pig farm barely sells any, they make lovely smoked things out of their pigs. At least I can get good smoked pork from various places (my village has a farmer’s market) but my fresh meat, I have not many options for that…

That’s nice. We have here cheap tasteless chicken and super expensive allegedly good chicken (and some in-between too). Even if the latter is tasty and good, I could buy ruminant meat with that money (more than the weight of the chicken and chicken has bones…) and that actually could satiate me…
But when I ate home-raised chicken (my Aunt always was waiting for us with a lot of that when I visited her yearly. she lived in the other part of the country)… That was tasty. 1 kg left me hungry (I did dinner OMAD on those days so my hunger was serious) but it was wonderful :smiley: The other food had red meat so more substantial for me :wink: And I brought my own pork to eat as well.

Apropos taste… I met some totally tasteless supermarket eggs lately. One was in a dessert my SO’s Mom made… I felt NO yolk taste, it was disturbing. She buys cheaper eggs.
The other was supermarket egg but not the usual caged kind, we don’t buy those. There are some great sales lately, it wasn’t the worst kind according to the code on it, we had few eggs at home… So we bought some. Normally we always buy eggs from a house or from the local greengrocery’s, they aren’t caged and always tasty. So the tasteless eggs were very odd and disturbing. Okay, we ate them, it’s protein and it’s less bad when the dish had plenty of other flavors (definitely not good for simple egg dishes - or for anything where the egg taste is important) but where is the usual egg flavor?! I half-lived on eggs for more than 10 years, eggs were the pillar of my diet so it’s very important for me. (Now I mostly live on pork. I need my eggs but not 7-8 a day anymore. Usually. 7-8 is very few, easy to get it even without planning it… :upside_down_face: )

(Geoffrey) #71

I can understand that. I don’t have a sensitivity to that but because we all have a different physiology it’s totally understandable.
I just butchered and cooked one of my roosters today and there is a big difference in the meat of my chickens compared to what I can get in the store. The store chicken will be much more tender and fattier but they have less taste. My chickens have a flock block to peck on but that is not their main diet. The eat bugs, fruit and vegetables.

(Doug) #72

This is a sobering thought.

I think overall Costco loses money on rotisserie chickens, but it doesn’t matter - the principle would be the same if they slightly increased the price. There are some unpleasant aspects to our modern, very-populated world.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #73

Are you letting your chickens hang for a day or two before eating? Fresh-killed chicken is indeed tougher.

(Geoffrey) #74

No I haven’t. I didn’t know that was a thing. I’m going to look into that.
I always just figured it was due to the difference in free range natural chickens vs caged raised chickens.

#75

How many lbs was the cat? It may have been the better deal.

(KM) #76

:laughing: