Since last summer, I’ve been periodically updating you all on the progress of Lauren and Brandon Sheard, an amazing young couple from Seattle, Washington. They founded their company, Farmstead Meatsmith, with the goal of laying one more step on the path to a new food culture by reviving the traditional practice of homestead meat provenance.
That’s right … proper butchering right in your own backyard or that of a friend or local farm the way it has traditionally been done!
Most consumers have sadly never even met a real butcher, someone responsible for the respectful slaughter and traditional meat processing of locally raised livestock. USDA approved slaughterhouses have put an end to all that with the processing of animals located as far away from the consumer as possible so that the horrific practices of factory farming of animals can be kept hidden.
Livestock harvesting is clearly a missing link in the chain of sustainable agriculture as even organic and locally produced meats are required to be processed at USDA slaughterhouses which can effectively negate much of the health and nutritional benefits of local sourcing of meat!
Through Farmstead Meatsmith, Lauren and Brandon Sheard aim to change all that and I am excited to let all of you know that the second in a series of free butchery instructional videos has recently been released and is featured below: On the Anatomy of Thrift: Harvest Day.
On a side note, Lauren and Brandon Sheard have been invited to speak at the upcoming Wise Traditions Conference 2012 in Santa Clara, California this November, so many of you who will be attending this exciting event may have the opportunity to meet and get to know them personally! Lauren and Brandon have a few wrinkles to iron out before it is a definite go for them to be there, but fingers crossed that it all works out!
*Click here to view their first film: On the Anatomy of Thrift: Side Butchery.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
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{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
just beautiful. i love what they are doing. the production is amazing. i want to hang with these people…..AND EAT! thanks for posting, sarah.
emily duff\’s last post: The Art and Joy of the Sandwich
This video is excellent !
Ditto…makes me want to go to WA and learn more from them.
They are awesome!
This is great!
It used to be that you could see a side of beef hanging in the butcher shops .. or a whole pig dressed for someone’s backyard luau sitting behind the glass window. Now grocery store meat comes so uniformly packaged and you NEVER see what a carcass looks like. We’ve had home butchered buffalo … and buy our meet from a local little farm that has a mobile butchering operating … and we use a ‘neighbor’ that butchers at his home.
Mrs. Mac\’s last post: Souper Supper
Don’t think I will be eating blood sausage after watching this video. I found it a little strange actually.
Wow! This is great! Nothing is wasted; that is a very efficient and economic use of resources. The food looks delish as well. It brought back memories of my childhood and eating Spanish style blood sausage. Very tasty on the grill!
I think I’ve finally figured out why I dislike these videos. The cinematography, and especially the music, give the videos a creepy tone. The idea of slaughtering and eating animals does not disgust me in the least. I’ve seen it firsthand many times in my life. But these videos make it seem like a horror movie.
When I was 13 or 14, a neighbor asked me if I wanted to go help kill hogs that Saturday. I said, “Yes.” We killed three hogs and ate all we wanted, I can still remember the tripe, good stuff. This was an all day affair with a medium sized family. I didn’t know, at that time, this was a dieing tradition. I have thought about that day often in the forty some years after that. The good years!
terrific!
terrific!
He has managed to turn something that I would imagine to be a disgusting process and food that I would never eat into a beautiful experience done with love for his family and respect for the animal. Great video!
Informative and thoroughly entertaining. I really enjoyed the ‘Food Whole’ jab.
This makes me excited to be a future homeschooling mom.
These groups of people better start paying attention to what the govt is doing under the terms “sustainability” whichis code word for kicking people off their land by any means possible, even death – shutting down their farms, seizing their bank accounts, killing off their livestock & bringing in Agenda 21..it is happening all over..there are countless articles and real life horror stories going on everywhere about this..we don’t have anything without our God given freedoms..which is why this country was founded..big govt = slavery.
These groups of people better start paying attention to what the govt is doing under the terms “sustainability” whichis code word for kicking people off their land by any means possible, even death – shutting down their farms, seizing their bank accounts, killing off their livestock & bringing in Agenda 21..it is happening all over..there are countless articles and real life horror stories going on everywhere about this..we don’t have anything without our God given freedoms..which is why this country was founded..big govt = slavery.
a real butcher, someone responsible for the respectful slaughter and traditional meat processing of locally raised livestock
Oops, that comment wasn’t complete… I wanted to say, I love your definition of a real butcher: someone responsible for the respectful slaughter and traditional meat processing of locally raised livestock.
This is so important. We have been buying meat locally and it is hard to find skilled, ethical, respectful butchers. It might be a career path to consider for young people who have the heart for it. We are learning to harvest our own chickens. Not easy for me to do, but it means so much to me to try to do it properly and humanely. Thanks for this. I look forward to viewing the videos.
USDA inspected facilities are optimized for large scale, trans-regional operations: feedlots. To my thinking, local economies should be ‘under the radar’. As a kid, I remember a mobile butcher coming out to the farm when we had a steer ready. I would think that locavore producer/consumer enterprises can police themselves.
Ciao, Pavil
Word of the day: Abattoir. A place or means of butchering. A mobile butcher would be an abattoir.
Ciao, Pavil
I took a class from them at a beautiful farm on Vashon Island, it was amazing. I learned so much. Can’t wait to take another one!
I enjoyed the videos and their sense of humor. Poor Wentworth finally got up the nerve to ask his favorite cashier to eat a bacon sandwich and then spilt the bacon on the floor. I am nearly 59 years old and I can remember when my grandparents butchered their hogs every year and every member of the family helped in some way. I also remember the local butcher shop in our small farm town. Those things have passed away except in small pockets of resistance and the government really trys to keep the populace dependent on them and the major food companies instead of pushing interdependence.
These videos are great and encouraging to those who are physically able to butcher their own animals and help others in a sense of community, like it used to be.
I have been trying to find some leaf fat to render into small quantities of kettle rendered lard, but have been unsuccessful so far.