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Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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