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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.

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