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Sometimes I forget what a privilege it is to drive past cows and goats and lambs and chickens, etc. every day. It's hard to imagine a lifestyle where you don't have any interaction with anybody who could connect you to a locally-grown lamb.

Have you asked a search engine for locally grown lambs in your area?

I typed in "locally grown lambs orlando" and "locally grown lambs san diego" and both brought up https://localharvest.org. I have no idea what prices you might find that way.

I just imagined not driving past cows and goats and chickens everyday, and it was a sad thought.

The concrete jungle just isn’t for me, thanks for the timely reminder! :)

I just imagined having to drive every day, and it was an angry thought.

30 minutes to work, 30 minutes back home, 4 days a week! Not a bit of traffic, aside from school buses or tractors! It's relaxing, and a great time to catch up on podcasts, lectures, or just do some karaoke! And the views are gorgeous!

Just earlier today I stopped in the middle of the road on my way home just to stare in awe at the sunset beaming across the sky onto a huge, billowing, fluffy cloud that was kissing the horizon, rolling green pastures dotted with cows basking in the fading sunlight. I really do underappreciate the beauty of rural living!

Takes all kinds to fill a world, I suppose. I don't think I'd like that commute at all. Too long and requires attention so you can't read.

For the curious, that's something like 15000 km, around 2t CO2.

And how about with an electric vehicle?

Still around 15000km, I'd imagine.

Oh nice, though I imagine the CO2 reduces quite a bit as well.

I live in rural America, but agrarian does not always mean abundant or diverse. The lamb at the butcher shop comes from about 2 hours away, as does the cream line milk. My beef comes from a family friend 2 hours the other direction. Could I buy a whole lamb from the FFA kids at the fair? Sure, but I don't need a whole lamb and it is more of a charity "for the kids" situation than a good value. Talking with ranchers in both this country and others, I suspect that some urban markets may actually have better access than we do - because they are targeting sales to specific groups (areas with large Muslim communities come to mind...) that they know want the product.

I live in a rural area, but we have no butcher shops and eat supermarket meat.

There are one or two butchers, but you basically have to bring your own animal.

I recently had the experience of moving to a rural area, where I didn't know anyone for 2+hours away. I worked from home.

Within a month I knew a few people to ask if I wanted to buy 1/4 cow or more. It wouldn't have been hard to find lamb or goat either, but would probably need to call a person that knows a person that knows the farmer. By the second hunting season I had two people bring me jerky from their hunt, and offer bargain prices for game meat. Buying rural meat is about having a deep freeze in the garage and buying in bulk.

Aside from the meat, there are several people near me that have egg stands. They put out eggs by the road and have a jar to collect cash. Similar situation for veggie harvest time.

Once a year some coworkers and I split a cow direct from a farm. The butcher arranges all the logistics. Great way to bring down your yearly food budget and you don't have to think about Tyson's questionable bs.

In the UK, lamb is one of the "big 4". If you have a roast dinner it will be chicken, lamb, pork or beef (probably in that order of likelyhood). It's just another meat that you'd roast and slice and eat with gravy and veg.

I probably know more people who dislike pork than dislike lamb. I don't think many people really regard it as an especially strong flavour.

> I don't think many people really regard it as an especially strong flavour.

For some reason the lamb available in the US is much more strongly flavoured than what I was used to in the UK, which was usually from UK/Aus/NZ.

Different cuts of lamb do differ in flavour. In fact I'm often disappointed when I order lamb and it's not... lamb-ey enough.

I think it also depends how or where it's grown. I've had lamb from Australia that was very gentle and from South America where it was not.

Livestock in AU and NZ is grass-fed almost exclusively. I know in the US they often feed their cattle corn, is it the same for sheep?

Here in Michigan mutton is not overly difficult to get (lots of middle eastern and african immigrants) but it's a hard sell to anyone that didn't grow up eating it.

Lamb (as you said) have a strong but not unpleasant flavor. Mutton takes that flavor dial and turns it way up.

in my lifetime, Americans have been steadily losing their taste for not just gamy but other strong flavors as well. Endives used to be just plain bitter, for people who liked bitter, now you can safely put them in a kid's salad. It's sad. And I think other cultures are and will keep losing their tastes too; I've noticed for instance, that not all Chinese like chowing down on all the weird parts of animals, and Europe has plenty of the same "supermarket cheese" that Americans have.

On the plus side, worldwide people have expanded their palates a lot in a way that increases the range and diversity of what they eat, but in terms of the globalized ingredients we can lay our hands on there is still a general regression toward a very mean mean.

It's sad, I think there's a negative feedback loop of, supermarkets only selling the most common produce, and people only learning recipes that use the produce supermarkets sell.

One of my favorite questions "what does gamey taste like". I've gotten a wide range of answers.

For me it tastes a bit metallic, you can taste it clearly if you eat kangaroo meat.

I'd say it's a strange umami flavor. Tasting something gamey triggers something in my head that says, "oh this is animal scent". Maybe it's more olfactory than flavor?

tastes are pretty much all olfactory, except ... what is it, salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and the "fifth taste", umami? and if i'm not mistaken that means just "sourness", not "sour flavor like lemon vs lime" which is olfactory

but yes, "arrrrr, this is animal scent"

The only sad thing here is how you're trying to generalize a few billion people with high-brow "I like it and if you don't, the you're wrong" assertions.

Here's something that might rile you up: I enjoy spicy food, but sometimes I'll buy mild salsa because I don't always want cry my way through an appetizer or snack. I must be uncultured, huh?

Finally, and this might come as a shock, but maybe your tastebuds have changed as you've gotten older. Endives might not be as bitter to you now due to this change, but they still might be pungent to other people who don't eat them as frequently.

(I really wish HN had a downvote/dislike button. Maybe I need to level-up first before I get that option...)

because I still every so often get served some lamb that is gamy and I can taste it just fine, I feel that I still know what it tastes like. And I can tell the difference between beef, more aged beef, and lamb, and I while I like flavorful beef (don't serve me filet), and lamb and gamy lamb, I don't actually like the flavor of more extreme-aged beef; so since my tasting of things hits some subtle difference buttons, and all the scale buttons I used to, I feel like it's still reliable.

Chicory lettuce (which is now hard to find) and dandelion greens are bitter, and they used to be bitter and I used to and still like them. It is true that children (little boys) don't like bitter and grown men do (more than do women), so yes, taste buds shift, but I showed awareness and acknowledged that by saying "now you can serve endive to children"

> The only sad thing here is how you're trying to generalize a few billion people with high-brow "I like it and if you don't, the you're wrong" assertions.

He does have a point though. Many people, especially older generations, keep complaining that everything has gone bland / tastes the same... the problem at its core is that, thanks to market consolidation and efficiency, there aren't that many different varieties of produce and animals grown any more at scale.

Producers select for predictable amount of weight, fast growth, low variance in taste and especially long shelf life, and so we end up with 30-ish varieties of seeds producing 95% of our food, where 10 companies dominate 74% of the world market [1]. In animals, it's the same - out of 80 domestic breeds of farm animals in Germany, for example, 56 are threatened [2], and even back in 2000 the problem was already recognized for other continents [3].

> (I really wish HN had a downvote/dislike button. Maybe I need to level-up first before I get that option...)

Yup, IIRC it used to be 500-ish points?

[1] https://utopia.de/sponsored-content/saatgut-diversitaet-bedr...

[2] https://www.ble.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2022/220...

[3] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fao-immer-mehr-nutztierrassen...

As people age, their sense of taste literally weakens. Stuff actually does start to taste more bland once you get past 50.

So you can’t really trust grandma when she tells you food used to taste better back in the old days.

Nah, try home grown vegetables vs supermarket vegetables. There's a clear lack of flavor across many of the supermarket vegetables.

I recently cut up a whole Jalapeno pepper into my stir fry and didn't feel any heat! There was a time it would have blown top of my head off.

What have they done? Bred all the spice out of all hot peppers ?

Jalapenos have never been a very piquant pepper. Your tolerance has probably increased. Try serranos or habaneros.

I eat a lot of chillies - from milder Serrano up to the superhots like bhut jalokia. Jalapenos, in my experience, seem to have the biggest variance in capsaicin per specimen. Sometimes you'll get one that tastes basically like a bell pepper, and sometimes you'll get one that surprises you. Colour doesn't seem to have that much of an impact either. Could be you just got a duff pepper

Yes.

The TAM (Texas A&M) and NuMex Primavera (New Mexico State U) varieties were selected/hybridized to be milder for consistency for mass food production - eg use by companies like Old El Paso.

When you buy supermarket Jalapeños you aren’t getting to choose the variety (be grateful you’re at least being told that - in the UK they’re just sold as ‘green chilies’ which could be anything) - so depending on the supplier, and whether they are offloading leftovers from a Taco Bell order, it’s going to be pot luck what you get.

It’s not a new thing - TAM peppers date back to the 1980s. Possibly changes in the supply chains during the pandemic are causing more of the milder varieties to end up in supermarkets than before?

Yeah, where I live lamb comes in tiny shrinkwrapped imported packages and sells for about $40/lb. You can also get similar small frozen packets of camel and ostrich meat in the freezer section. You can not buy mutton anywhere (unless you know a guy). We eat beef, chicken, pork, and turkey all usually in the form of ground beef or grilling steaks, boneless skinless chicken breasts, pork sausages or chops, and whole turkey. Everything else is, as one grocery store clerk put it to my wife, "a little exotic for this continent."

My family jas a wonderful recipe for lamb stew, and it has some strong flavors via tomatoes, garlic, onion, and lemon.

I've never eaten mutton, but I'm wondering if its stronger flavor would be fine in that stew.

Yeah - sounds a lot like the various dishes across a range from the Mediterranean to the "-stans" that I've made with lamb. No reason I couldn't use mutton - if it were available. I've had some lamb that was absolutely overpowering, so having a hard time imaging something more than that.

I've only eaten mutton in heavily spiced dishes and it does go very well in those settings - you need other strong flavors to stand up to the gaminess of the mutton, which might be why it hasn't caught on in American cuisine which tends to focus less on heavy spice profiles and more on just cooking ingredients to present their natural flavors.

> anything they can get that would be local (rather than from NZ or AUS) is even more expensive

This might be key. It might be that your juridiction has trade agreements with other countries and impose that local lamb has cannot be sold cheaper, and if that is the case it would explain why local products are more expensive and lamb/mutton not marketed at all. Talk to local producers to confirm. I don't know about today, but this used to be an issue for lamb manu markets.

I'm cooking a leg of lamb now from my local Safeway. It costs $7/lb, which is the same as chuck roast. But it's maybe 1/4 more expensive due to that big leg bone (which my dog values highly). Still that feels like the price is comparable to beef, but a nice alternative flavor.

I haven't seen mutton for sale at any grocery.

In my location, lamb is closer to $10/lb (at grocery stores - higher at butcher), while I can get (grass fed, super high quality) beef straight from the rancher at less than $4/lb.

Don't forget lamb shank.

And yes, it's terribly expensive, all things lamb, and it makes no sense that it's so expensive.

Of course it's expensive.

You have to put a multi-year old sheep through a 6 month gestation period (and most will only go into heat during certain times of year), out of which you are likely to get only one or two lambs, each of which when slaughtered provides at best 10kg of marketable meat, if that.

Compare with chickens (massive egg output, so you get infants practically continually, or cows which while they have many of the same drawbacks, are far more productive, hundreds of kilos of meat from one animal isn't unusual.

The meat used to be much cheaper (at least local to NZ) when sheep were farmed primarily for their wool rather than meat. Basically each ewe could give you 5 or 6 rounds of lambs that were surplus to keeping the population stable and they'd mostly be timed for spring when pasture was productive enough for the extra livestock.

That makes total sense.

Great example of a product that is only viable because it’s inputs would otherwise just be waste.

Shank used to be cheap but it got fashionable. There isn’t much shank compared to say leg. Good portion for one.