Self Provisioning – All About Meat

When I started writing my next book ‘The Self Provisioning Handbook’, I never planned to write about meat. I was going to call the book ‘Everything but the chicken’ because I think having your own livestock or poultry is unrealistic. Self provisioning is meant to be realistic and attainable – not pie-in-the-sky hippy dippy ‘make your own clothes from plant fibres’ nonsense. Gardening was to be the focus – and still is for the main part.

So how does meat fit into this picture. 

I will answer that question in full. But right now I want you to imagine…

Imagine A World Where Meat is Scarce

Can you imagine that? I can. I lived it for nearly a year. In rural Uganda where I lived for ten months in 2008, there was limited refrigeration and meat was expensive – one kilo of beef was three dollars. This was 4 days wages for a manual worker. Most people never saw meat in a shop. Cattle were butchered early morning at the side of the road and carved up by mid morning to prevent spoiling. It was cooked that day – normally long and slow in a stew. 

Chickens were eaten occasionally – normally when there was something to celebrate. Fish was more common. But what people in my village really waited for was…

TERMITE SEASON.

A couple of times a year, winged termites would swarm. These could be harvested with a lamp and a plastic basin and were then eaten in a variety of ways:

• Fresh – think ‘still alive’
• Dry roasted (pretty good)
• Ground into meat balls (very filling, not so good)
• Made into paste with shea oil (this was considered the food of royalty and with good reason). 

In a place where animal protein was scarce, my neighbours made every opportunity to get their hands on some. 

Meanwhile, back in the western world, we have more meat than we know what to do with. We could eat meat every day of our lives and not think anything about it. Some people even do this – the call themselves carnivores. They probably get a lot of space on public transport too. 

Meat is good and I love eating it. But does our excessive meat consumption come at a cost. If it does, at what cost. 

Rewind back to what self provisioning is all about – being able to provide for some of your needs for some of the year. How could you do this but with meat?

Nature’s Larder

For tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before this book was written, the main way to get meat on the table was hunting. You could hunt deer, rabbits, antelope, boar, bears, wooly mammoths, whales, seals – anything that was edible and could be fitted around a sharp pointy thing. 

Then there was fishing – big fish, little fish, sea fish, shell fish. All could be eaten and often preserved in salt or smoked. 

Imagine if you could get back there – even just once in a while? Fishing or hunting – man against nature in a never ending bid for survival. 

Here’s my approach. I go hunting pretty regularly. I’m fortunate to live where there is plenty of game and plenty of places to hunt. As much as possible, I take home what I kill to eat – it’s my way of thanking nature for letting me take a little piece home with me to put in my freezer. 

Hunting doesn’t fulfill all my family’s meat needs – we’d be sick of venison or rabbit otherwise. But it does augment it. Again this is what self provisioning should be. 

What about fishing? If that’s your thing, great. Sport fishing is a lot of fun but eating what you catch is best (assuming that’s legal where you live). In the UK, freshwater fishing tightly protected but sea fishing is a lot freer. In my opinion the best tasting fish are in the sea anyway.

A few hours with a mackerel rod in late summer could give you enough fish for a whole winter. That’s free protein right there. 

But what if you don’t have access to land or guns for hunting and you live miles from the sea and can’t fish? What could you do instead?

Try this – think more about where your meat comes from. Could you eat more sustainably grown, free range meat less often? Do you know anywhere you could get game meat? Is there a local fish market that sells sustainably caught sea food?

A More Sustainable Approach to Eating Meat 

I’m not going to tell you to do ‘Meat Free Mondays’ or to eat less meat. But shouldn’t we be thinking more about where our meat comes from. We are increasingly disconnected from where our food comes from. If you could re-establish that connection for meat, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

We’ve gone wrong somewhere with factory farming – producing meat as cheaply as possible. Is there a better way?

That’s my challenge to you – don’t eat less meat. But think more about where it’s from.

Neil

P.S. My new book ‘The Self Provisioning Handbook’ is out soon. Click here to sign up for updates.