Frustrated with store meat

[Graham Adder]

...the industry tends to treat it like United does with guitars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

[cv23]

Sorry to make the call CV...but:
BS.

No problem Graham.
I know what I've seen and all it takes is a drive up some of the forestry roads up in the Greystokes area or further up Hwy 33 to see it too. And are you saying that there is no hunting and no dumping of garbage or vehicles in these areas? If yes then I'll be the one calling BS.

[Graham Adder]

Sorry to make the call CV...but:
BS.

No problem Graham.
I know what I've seen and all it takes is a drive up some of the forestry roads up in the Greystokes area or further up Hwy 33 to see it too. And are you saying that there is no hunting and no dumping of garbage or vehicles in these areas? If yes then I'll be the one calling BS.

All it takes is a drive up the forestry roads, then find a spot to sit near a ravine polluted by dumped waste where you know hunters will inevitably come out of the bush with game in tow. Now wait...and wait...and wait...and...if you're lucky enough to see a hunter bring their game out of the polluted ravine, jot down a check-mark and then move along...you have to repeat this several times in order to see a 'decent' number of 'like' incidents.

Where did you see in my post that I insinuated anything along the lines of,

that there is no hunting and no dumping of garbage or vehicles in these areas?

???

If you're going to put words in my mouth, at least make it sound like something I'd say.

I'm still calling BS on this:

Not being a hunter myself ...but I've seen a decent number of hunters packing their trophies out of areas ... where humans have discarded their waste down an embankment and into a stream.

I'll give you points for an active imagination though.

I know people dump stuff in the bush.
Most (certainly not all) of the stuff they dump or discard will or can cause significant environmental hazards. The chances of eating contaminated meat is slim I'm sure. As previously stated, much akin to winning a jackpot lottery. That's not to say it can't or won't or hasn't happened...but chances are pretty darn slim.

I've seen the kind of trash tossed down embankments. Some of it is pretty foul.
I'm happy to know we have stewards in our province in many corners of nooks and crannies keeping a close monitoring 'eye' on our water supplies. Until those 'in the know' release information of concern, I think it's safe to say that wild meat is by far...perhaps even exponentially more safe and of better quality than anything you can buy from any meat factory.

[cv23]

All it takes is a drive up the forestry roads, then find a spot to sit near a ravine polluted by dumped waste where you know hunters will inevitably come out of the bush with game in tow. Now wait...and wait...and wait...and...if you're lucky enough to see a hunter bring their game out of the polluted ravine, jot down a check-mark and then move along...you have to repeat this several times in order to see a 'decent' number of 'like' incidents.

Now who's putting words in who's mouth?
I stated I have seen hunters bringing their game out of areas near dumped garbage. Fact ,whether you want to personally believe it or not. I never said anything about a seeing this many or lots of times. I said a "decent" number of times , that being more than the rare occasion over the years that I have spent hiking and camping in those areas. Just how do you think hunters get their game home if not by taking it to their vehicles which are usually parked on or near a road and is the Greystokes not a fairly popular hunting area ? Please note the question mark as again this is a question to you not a statement.

Where did you see in my post that I insinuated anything along the lines of,

that there is no hunting and no dumping of garbage or vehicles in these areas?

???
If you're going to put words in my mouth, at least make it sound like something I'd say.

If you check back you will see I asked the question "are you saying that there is no hunting and no dumping of garbage or vehicles in these areas?", which again is a question (note question mark) not a statement and certainly in no way putting any words in your mouth. I give you a full 10 out of 10 for over active imagination and for taking things out of context.
Now let me try:

I know people dump stuff in the bush....the stuff they dump...will..cause significant ...chances of eating contaminated meat.

Those are your words aren't they Graham? Again please note this is a question. I guess when someone takes snipits of statements, sometimes out of context, they can make it seem like anything was said by someone else can't they?

[Graham Adder]

mkayyyyyy
alrighty thennnnnnnnn

[fvkasm2x]

A few days ago I picked up some steaks from Costco (first time purchasing them there). Combined with my superior BBQ skills, this was the best steak I have ever eaten. No kidding. The cut was phenomenal (in terms of fat, texture, etc...) and my wife said the same thing before I even started commenting about dinner. Not sure if I got lucky or if they are always that good, but like I said.... phenomal meat!

[Gone_Fishin]

A few days ago I picked up some steaks from Costco (first time purchasing them there). Combined with my superior BBQ skills, this was the best steak I have ever eaten. No kidding. The cut was phenomenal (in terms of fat, texture, etc...) and my wife said the same thing before I even started commenting about dinner. Not sure if I got lucky or if they are always that good, but like I said.... phenomal meat!

Enjoy the huge set of man-boobs you're gonna grow from eating that estrogen-laced crap.

[motorhomebabe]

A few days ago I picked up some steaks from Costco (first time purchasing them there). Combined with my superior BBQ skills, this was the best steak I have ever eaten. No kidding. The cut was phenomenal (in terms of fat, texture, etc...) and my wife said the same thing before I even started commenting about dinner. Not sure if I got lucky or if they are always that good, but like I said.... phenomal meat!

Enjoy the huge set of man-boobs you're gonna grow from eating that estrogen-laced crap.

Much prefer Wild Game, but if eating Costco meats causes big boobs I should look like Puffy, and for Store bought ,Taste and tender wise cant beat it

[StraitTalk]

I'm surprised there isn't more demand for local free-range beef/poultry. Having it all done on a massive scale thousands of kilometers away from the dinner table makes no sense to me when you can have a local animal put in your freezer. Especially considering most of the meat you buy in stores is grain fed which is completely unnatural and is only done because it is cheap with massive repercussions to our health and our ecosystems. In-fact, the grain used to feed all the livestock is literally taking food out of our mouths. We're losing more than we're gaining. (Water / land-use)

Big business these days.

[BoB76]

I'm surprised there isn't more demand for local free-range beef/poultry. Having it all done on a massive scale thousands of kilometers away from the dinner table makes no sense to me when you can have a local animal put in your freezer. Especially considering most of the meat you buy in stores is grain fed which is completely unnatural and is only done because it is cheap with massive repercussions to our health and our ecosystems. In-fact, the grain used to feed all the livestock is literally taking food out of our mouths. We're losing more than we're gaining. (Water / land-use)

Big business these days.

Thought you liked pepperoni and Jalapeno chips from the gas station. Yes I know the J ISN'T silent Ricky.

[justmyopinion]

I'm surprised there isn't more demand for local free-range beef/poultry. Having it all done on a massive scale thousands of kilometers away from the dinner table makes no sense to me when you can have a local animal put in your freezer. Especially considering most of the meat you buy in stores is grain fed which is completely unnatural and is only done because it is cheap with massive repercussions to our health and our ecosystems. In-fact, the grain used to feed all the livestock is literally taking food out of our mouths. We're losing more than we're gaining. (Water / land-use)

Big business these days.

Do you sell free range?

[Rwede]

A few days ago I picked up some steaks from Costco (first time purchasing them there). Combined with my superior BBQ skills, this was the best steak I have ever eaten. No kidding. The cut was phenomenal (in terms of fat, texture, etc...) and my wife said the same thing before I even started commenting about dinner. Not sure if I got lucky or if they are always that good, but like I said.... phenomal meat!

Enjoy the huge set of man-boobs you're gonna grow from eating that estrogen-laced crap.

[StraitTalk]

I'm surprised there isn't more demand for local free-range beef/poultry. Having it all done on a massive scale thousands of kilometers away from the dinner table makes no sense to me when you can have a local animal put in your freezer. Especially considering most of the meat you buy in stores is grain fed which is completely unnatural and is only done because it is cheap with massive repercussions to our health and our ecosystems. In-fact, the grain used to feed all the livestock is literally taking food out of our mouths. We're losing more than we're gaining. (Water / land-use)

Big business these days.

Thought you liked pepperoni and Jalapeno chips from the gas station. Yes I know the J ISN'T silent Ricky.

My diet is pop, chips, and a bar.

[Rwede]

A really good read from the NY Times.




The Urban Deerslayer
By SEAN PATRICK FARRELL
Published: November 24, 2009
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va


THE call to forge deeper connections with the food we eat has pulled thousands to the nation’s farmers’ markets, sprouted a million backyard seedlings and jump-started an interest in scratch baking, canning and other county-fair pursuits.

Now add hunting to the list. Novice urban hunters are forming classes and clubs to learn skills that a few generations ago were often passed down from parent to child.

Jackson Landers, an insurance broker by day, teaches a course here called Deer Hunting for Locavores. Mr. Landers, 31, started the classes earlier this year for largely urban adults who, like him, did not grow up stalking prey but have gravitated to harvesting and cooking their own game.

He tailored his course to food-obsessed city people with lessons on deer biology, habitat and anatomy, and rounded out his students’ education with field trips to a firing range to practice shooting and a session on butchery and cooking. One of the last lessons covered field dressing a freshly killed deer. As the students gathered around, Mr. Landers produced a hunting knife and explained its gut-hook feature, which promised to open the deer “like a zipper.”

“I’d never fired a gun before,” said Michael Davis, 44, a graphic designer and a student in the class. “I grew up in Southern California. We surfed, we didn’t hunt.”

But Mr. Davis, a self-described foodie, said he needed to understand what it means to hunt for food.

“I think going through my life without at least experiencing that most primal thing of hunting would be cheating,” he said.

It was a taste for wild boar that spurred Nick Zigelbaum, 26, and Nick Chaset, 27, to form a hunting and dining club in San Francisco that they call the Bull Moose Hunting Society. The society, founded in 2007, was designed to appeal to young urban residents looking to expand their horizons.

The club now has roughly 55 dues-paying members, many of them in their 20s and 30s, who hunt for boar, pheasant and waterfowl together. They share local hunting knowledge and the spoils of a good day in the field at semi-regular events they call boar-b-ques and wild food dinners.

Mr. Chaset, who is now attending graduate business school in Washington, D.C., recently established a chapter of the club there. The founders hope that someday they’ll have a chapter in every major American urban area.

Nationwide, the number of hunters has been in decline for decades. The country’s shift from rural to urban life is the main reason, said Mark Damian Duda, executive director of Responsive Management, a survey and research firm that specializes in natural resources and outdoor recreation issues.

According to his firm’s research, only 22 percent of hunters now say they hunt primarily for food. Most say they do so for recreation or to spend time with their families.

“Thirty years ago it was about half the hunters who were hunting for food,” Mr. Duda said.

The connection never completely faded, though. Some American chefs who grew up with rifles in their hands have long been passionate about wild game, even if the law forbids them from serving it in their restaurants. The subject has also been taken up recently by the writers Michael Pollan, who shoots a wild boar in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and Steven Rinella, who chronicled his quest to kill a wild American bison in “American Buffalo.” But until recently, tree stands and Mossy Oak camouflage were rarely mentioned in the same breath as, say, heirloom tomatoes.

Anthony Licata, editor of Field & Stream magazine, said he wasn’t surprised that a new generation of eaters was discovering what traditional hunters have known all along: “There’s nothing more organic and free range than meat you hunt for yourself and your family,” he said.

Mr. Licata, who is 35 and lives in New Jersey, said he thought interest in hunting among young urban locavores was bound to grow. “When you do hunt and if you’re lucky enough to fill your freezer with venison and feed your family, it’s a powerful thing,” he said. “They aren’t going to want to stop.”

Mr. Landers, who tries to take Virginia’s full limit of six deer a year, agreed. For the cost of the necessary licenses, $36.50, he said he can stock his freezer with nearly free protein.

He also argued that for the environmentally conscious, hunting is fairly carbon neutral.

“If you can shoot a deer in your own backyard, butcher it there, that’s zero food miles,” he said.

A recent convert to hunting, he became interested in wild game a few years ago when he inherited his great-grandfather’s hunting rifle. He read up on deer management, queried his in-laws, many of whom are lifelong hunters, and was soon putting venison on the table.

Like many people, he’d also become concerned about large scale agricultural methods, the use of antibiotics in livestock and the ethics of raising animals in tight quarters. Hunting seemed like a good alternative.

“I felt bad about meat, but not so bad that I was willing to give it up,” he said.

Before founding the Bull Moose Hunting Society, Mr. Zigelbaum and Mr. Chaset wanted a closer connection with their food, but finding information about hunting in the Bay Area was daunting.

Mr. Chaset recalled searching for a suitable wild boar hunting weapon at a gun shop in the Mission District of San Francisco. The staff tried to convince him that a pistol would be fine. He left with the shop’s only rifle, a .308, which he used to fell his first boar in the hills of Mendocino County, an experience he described as “an epiphany.”

“I got this strong sensation of the cycle of life,” he said. It didn’t hurt that he thought the taste of the boar was amazing.

Mr. Zigelbaum said the meat, which tends to be darker and denser than domesticated pork, was “lean, but tasted like bacon.”

He’s heading to the south of France soon where he hopes to study traditional charcuterie methods. Wild boar prosciutto, he said, would be “awesome.”

Their club, named with a nod to the hunter and conservationist Theodore Roosevelt, is as much about rural foodways as it is about environmentalism. Mr. Zigelbaum, who is a consultant to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group, noted that the wild boar is an invasive species whose rampant rooting has caused considerable damage to California rangeland.

In Virginia, and across much of the East, the white-tailed deer population has shot up dramatically, causing fatal auto accidents, damaging crops and gardens and out-competing other animals for food and habitat. State game agency officials have supported Mr. Landers’s efforts to introduce new hunters and they plan to supply him with deer to demonstrate field dressing and butchery even after the season.

Few of the 20 students who have signed up for his class, which he advertised on his blog and a site for local news, had firearms experience or had ever gutted a deer. But all were lured by the idea of harvesting wild food from nearby woods and providing it for their friends and family. A few thought they were missing a part of the human experience, and others saw road kill as wasted meat littering the sides of the highway at a time when many are struggling to pay grocery bills.

On a recent Saturday, Mr. Landers convened a half-dozen of his students for an impromptu class on proper field dressing.

Mr. Landers is a fan of quick basic field butchery, which he says reduces the gaminess usually associated with venison. He also favors a large cooler to transport meat back to possibly squeamish urban areas, especially for those who don’t have a truck.

Soon the students, working in tandem to clean the animal, began to see the progress of their work.

“It really began to look like meat pretty quickly,” said Brian Donato, 43, who helped to gut, skin and break down the deer into quarters, loins and scraps for sausage.

For Ted Peters, 77, hunting seemed like a natural solution to an overabundant deer population, which had begun to impede another local food pursuit.

“They eat my garden, so I thought maybe I should eat them,” he said.

The deer was the centerpiece of a dinner held the next evening at the home of one of Mr. Landers’s students. In a graduation of sorts, they balanced glasses of local wine and plates of homemade spaetzle with slices of spice-rubbed, pinwheeled and beer-braised venison backstrap, a prized cut that runs along a deer’s spine.

Eddie Harrison, 16, the youngest student in the class, who attended with his father, declared the meat “some of the best I’ve ever had,” and compared it to a dish from Mas, a popular Charlottesville restaurant.

In a corner, Scott Swanson and another student made plans for post-graduation hunts. Two weeks later, Mr. Swanson, who keeps a version of the popular bar video game “Deer Hunter” on his iPhone, managed to get “a nice little doe,” which filled the trunk of his car with about 50 to 60 pounds of bone-in meat.

“From the time I pulled the trigger and the time I had it my trunk was just under two hours,” said Mr. Swanson, 31, a technical project manager at a Web development company.

He said he was planning to slice the backstrap into medallions to marinate and roast them over his grill.

For Nina Burke, 50, a systems administrator, who made the two-hour drive from Fredericksburg, Va., to Charlottesville to attend Mr. Landers’s classes, it was about the flavor.

“I really like venison,” she said, explaining she’d often exchanged baked goods for the fine-grained low-fat meat.

“This class was the chance of a lifetime,” she said. “I always thought that the only way I would get a deer was with my car.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/dining/25hunt.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1

[Queen K]

I can't say I've had bear meat.

But take heart, bear meat is still "on the table" as it were.

"There are an estimated 15,000 grizzly bears in B.C. Each year, about 250 are killed by hunters. While the trophy hunt will end, hunting for meat will still be legal.

In the fall, Donaldson said government will meet with First Nations and stakeholder groups to figure out next steps.

"The key elements of that strategy will include dedicated funding for wildlife and habitat conservation and a collaborative process in developing short- and long-term plans for wildlife resources," he said.

So cool to find a thread that goes back to 2010