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Comment by firethief | Hacker News Reader

That theoretical distinction makes sense to me, but I don't see how it would be possible to support one kind of animal agriculture and not the other with purchasing habits. When most consumers don't distinguish provenance, demand for animal products is fungible.

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What I did: stop purchasing meat from the supermarket. Stop eating meat at restaurants.

Find a local farmer and source a whole animal to split with your friends. Visit the farm, meet the farmer. A whole beef is a few thousand dollars, and splits nicely into 8ths. We spent, I believe, ~$6.50/lb for organic, grass fed beef.

It's more time and cost up front, but now we have a freezer full of meat to draw from when we need to. If I eat meat, it's from that one animal. We don't eat meat often at home.

Apropos of just shootin' the breeze, could you have also met the animal? I wonder if that would make a further difference. I eat meat, but I put my hand up and say that if I ordered a steak in a restaurant and they brought out the cow and gave me a rock, and I had to beat the cow to death with the rock myself, I think I'd change my order.

I'm not trying to make any points here; just freewheeling in conversation with what I know about myself.

Totally. Not every farmer will let you, but I definitely had the opportunity. (My farmer gave me the choice between three animals.)

I think the 'bashing it with a rock' is sort of the thing I'm trying to avoid. My farmer brings a USDA butcher to his site to kill the animal (the kills are done away from the pasture space). The offal is removed there. If you want the tongue, heart, liver, etc. you show up on slaughter day and cart them away.

The carcass was then taken to a local butcher shop, where it was processed into steaks, ground beef, roasts, etc. at my direction -- how thick did you want steaks, how big did you want roasts, etc.

Being involved in this way is surprisingly intimate -- seeing the animal, being on the farm the day of it's slaughter (though I did not witness the slaughter), and working with the butcher to define how it will be broken down taught me so much more about how my food is prepared than anything you'd get from the grocery store.

That's really interesting, I'd read a blog post about the process.

I've been following this thread and it's gotten me curious. I can't help but wonder - do you have some kind of personal connection to this farmer? How does one source a farmer, let alone one that is willing to let you meet the cow, be there on slaughter day, etc. These are all things that are foreign to most people.

Just googling around, it seems that you can find quite a few farmers advertising such services.

For a more personal connection, I'd start at the local farmers' market.

> For a more personal connection, I'd start at the local farmers' market.

I agree. The farmer's market was my entryway. At ours, local ranchers are present and selling their meats. There is a huge wealth of knowledge about what exists in your area at a farmer's market. Not just for meat, but for everything.

No personal connection at all. I cold called around. My local farmers markets publish a guide of local farmers. [1]

I just put together a spreadsheet with all the farms within 50 miles and visited a few websites/made a few calls. Some farmers had already sold their beef for the season, others weren't grass fed, etc. Eventually I narrowed the candidate pool down to two or three and asked if I could come see their farms. One farmer said no, so I went with one of the others.

[1] http://www.pugetsoundfresh.org/

I once took a survival course and during it I had to kill a rabbit with my bare hands, skin it, process the meat, cook it, and eat it. I definitely wanted to make sure the animal suffered as little as possible, but I was in no way deterred. Most people through human history have killed their own food from time to time. It's not really a big deal.

Not to you. But to some. You're not everyone, and everyone else isn't you.

I've caught, killed, and eaten fish before. It was certainly an interesting experience and teaches you a lot about yourself and the world to experience killing the animal you're willing to eat. I haven't done it with any bird or mammal, but do want to some day; mostly to prove to myself I'm not a hypocrite for being willing to eat meat but not kill it.

Yep. I've killed several smaller animals and processed them, etc. Not a huge deal to me.

I've yet to kill or process a whole cow, though I've broken down primals/subprimals.

I'm not sure how I would do if it was an animal I had raised. If I'm a farmer or rancher with a few dozen or hundreds of heads of cattle, probably no different. If it was a single cow... I might have trouble.

Everyone is different, though. Even some people I know who eat plenty of meat can't stand to look at processed carcass.

I don't mean this as an insult, because I think I would be the same way. I think what you described is a very privileged position of someone who has likely never felt real hunger. I acknowledge I might have the same feelings you describe about raising a single animal for food. Particularly for species that are more emotive. But that's because I too have a historically unfathomable variety of options and privilege.

> I think what you described is a very privileged position of someone who has likely never felt real hunger.

I think that's an excellent point. I suspect that nearly everyone, if faced with actual starvation, would be able to kill their own food.

> and they brought out the cow and gave me a rock, and I had to beat the cow to death with the rock myself, I think I'd change my order.

So would I, but maybe for different reasons. Aside from the method of killing (bashing the poor thing with a rock seems unnecessarily cruel to me), killing my food would be something better done well in advance of mealtime, not once I've sat at the table.

In general, though, I don't think that I'd have an issue killing my own food. That's hypothetical, of course, since (outside of fishing) I've never had to do that.

Food cooperatives are another option, which is what I increasingly use: http://www.lamauve.com/

They taste better than grocery store meat too.

I really admire your efforts, but "Find a local farmer and source a whole animal to split with your friends" is a really tall ask for many people I would argue.

I personally would likely struggle to convince anyone I know to enter some kind of cooperative livestock purchase/kill/process/store arrangement. As a matter of curiosity, how willing is the average livestock farmer to enter into such an agreement with private individuals?

It's not a widespread practice, but it's more common than I expected when I started looking into it. EatWild[1] maintains a directory of meat and dairy farmers that sell directly to consumers, they seem to have most of the US covered. Anecdotally I've also purchased humanely raised meat/eggs through CSAs that aren't listed here and offer smaller amounts than an entire animal. [1] http://www.eatwild.com/index.html

> a really tall ask for many people I would argue

I agree, but I don't think they were doing much beyond stating their own goals and methods. As a guide to what you can do and how you can attempt to go about it, I think it serves well.

> I personally would likely struggle to convince anyone I know to enter some kind of cooperative livestock purchase/kill/process/store arrangement. As a matter of curiosity, how willing is the average livestock farmer to enter into such an agreement with private individuals?

I imagine some butchers might provide cows where you can check the providence, at least in more populated areas. It wouldn't be quite as cheap as a cooperative project, but it would almost definitely be less time consuming, and supporting a free market for this good has additional benefits.

It was trivial? Many of the farmers list their rates on their websites.

With my friends, it was "Hey, anyone want to buy 50lbs of meat? It's $XYZ dollars per 50lbs. 50lbs is about one medium freezer full."

I put out the call to about 20 people, and got 5 very interested people, and about 5 maybe next times.

I have done this for years. Its as simple as 1. Buying a deep freezer 2. Check local forums for ranchers, or use a sustainable ranch that will ship, like corner post meats. 3. Enjoy while being thankful for the life of the animal, the effort of the rancher, and the ethics observed by everyone in the chain.

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