Anatomy of a Meat Share

[writerkit]

I require a certain amount of meat in my diet to function, both because if I'm not eating enough red meat I start getting sick (and it does *have* to be beef or buffalo or goat or similar; I've tested it) and because there are so many other things I can't eat that it needs to form part of the thing I can.

I would rather do the meat from local farms; I've established recently that meat not from local farms doesn't taste good.

Walden Local will sell me, for $50 every other month, 5 pounds of meat every other month-- I think at least a pound of that is ground meat and the rest is assorted other things which I would be much less willing to consider had I not discovered the magic of crock pots. (Also it arrives frozen so I do have time to figure out how to cook anything weird.) And I'd need to either check off the "no sausage" box or find a way to query whether their sausage routinely contains fruits or mushrooms.

There's no commitment involved, so I suppose there's no harm in trying it--- especially if I also invest in small tupperwares so leftover roast can be frozen in portion size-- but I'm still mentally going "That is... actually a *lot* of meat..." (On the other hand, I suspect this would actually bring my food costs *down*, since it would have the effect of me buying less by way of snack foods and insta-foods and more of my meals being "wrap leftover meat in tortilla; have done with it." Especially if I got enough tupperware to go back to "make hand pies, freeze" as a viable survival tactic.)

Comments

[siderea]

but I'm still mentally going "That is... actually a *lot* of meat..."

How much meat do you eat that that seems like a lot to you? I would consider that about twelve servings, maaaaaaybe 16. I literally just got done packing up a slow cooker batch of pineapple chicken with veggies, that is probably about a dozen servings, and it used 4.3lbs of boneless chicken. Bone-in meat, of course, goes less far; when we get a 8lb ham on the bone, that's about 10 servings, +/-2. (Dinner tonight: an eighth of a ham, green bean casserole, and roast sweet potatoes.)

As a fellow obligate carnivore (meat 2 meals a day, eggs 1 meal a day), I'm going through about 5-6lbs of meat a week. Do you need a lot less than that?

[writerkit]

When I was in the habit of doing hand pies on the regular-- which I'd like to be doing again, or something similar-- I'd go through a pound of ground meat every 3-ish weeks, but that was with some amount of deliberately stretching it out because I wasn't overall good at feeding myself and I was trying to make prepped food last until I had enough focus to do more prep. (Often the hand pie was the only actual *meal*, as opposed to some form of processed stuff I didn't have to think about, I'd have in a day.)

So some of my views of amount estimations may have to do with that. The smaller, better-tasting chicken-from-someone's-farm-share I had for Thanksgiving lasted me roughly a week; the one from McKinnon's had quite a bit leftover after I felt it had likely gone bad. In both cases I found having a large piece of meat in the fridge I could easily pull chunks off of resulted in me eating more, and more actual food, so meat might last less time if I get in the habit of it. I think I long-term probably do require less meat than you but possibly more than I'm currently eating, which might make the size of the meat share less intimidating.

[squirrelitude]

I was recently trying to figure out how much meat I eat, and it's probably somewhere between 5 and 20 lbs per year. (Wide range, I know.) I eat more than elusiveat does, and she eats more than the kid does. I looked into meat shares last year and decided they were too much. It's probably about right for a lot of people's diets, though.

I mostly end up getting things at the farmers market -- ground bison, ground goat, sausage, salami. I'm still not super confident in my ability to cook things other than burgers and stews. :-P