I think it was 4 years ago that we got our first sheep. It was a late summers day with the grass high in the meadows. We knew very little about sheep but wanted to try it out, and we surely needed their help us save the cultural landscape of old oak trees from growing into a thick woodland with no access nor light for the oaks to survive. The oaks we have are very important to a whole range of insects and birds feedings on these insects (many redlisted species), and the grawing of the sheep or cuting of the meadows increased the biodiversity of flowers. We started to love these little sweet animals.
“But how can you eat them if you cuddle with them and give them names?” people often asked. Well to put it out differently. How can you eat animals that get no love and affection from the farmer and no chance to act out their natural behaviour??
Our first sheep getting a first bite of their life to come– and it tasted so good here!
We knew our sheep have had a good life. And the first time I tasted the meat I really felt the difference. My God!! You could really taste the wild herbs they had grazed in the woods and the diverse meadow herbs in their hay – and toghether with that the psychological tastebuds told me the whole story behind the the process of getting this meat to the plate. How much effort I had personally put into it was just so beatiful and really deepened the gastronomical experience! All the industrial meat I had eaten before that just wasn’t comparable in taste. I decided then and there that my days of eating factory farmed meat was over!
An entirely homegrown plate with our own lamb stake together with homemade/grown mint sause ans redcurrant jelly
But lets grab some serious facts here. Everyone doesn’t have access to good, clean and fair meat. And even if they did the organic small scale meat production is just a tiny part of the market and together with wild meat it wouldn’t be enough to feed us all considering how much meat we eat today! In Sweden alone on person eats 80 kg of meat per year, 20 kg more than when I was born in the 1990-ies and probably more than double the amount we ate before we moved to huge cities and started farming industrially. So we eat way to much meat thats for sure. And I think this has something to do with us no longer having a realationship with the food we eat and how it’s been produced.
However eating vegetarian or vegan I wouldn’t say solves the problem completely. As many vegan meat products are made with soybean I Personally didn’t want go that way to promote the growing of GM-soybean on fields that used to be rainforest, heavily sprayed with pesticides that take many human lifes as well as the death of the ecosystem. On new years eve 2012 I decided to do what I could for changing the agricultural system we have today. As i put out in a lecture I held last autumn it was rather politically about voting with your fork. We have one vote a day with every single meal we eat. I decided I would take the first step and start voting with my wallet – from now on I would only buy organic food and food produced on small scale environmentally sound farms!
This lead to me not buying any meat for two reasons: One – it was two expensive to buy organic meat for my student budget. Two – wanted to challenge my cooking creativity and see what I could cook without meat. Also I felt the regulations of organic meat min many ways was having a lower standard than I personally had and it is not always easy to have a personal relationship with the farmer that I think was necessary to know that the animals were raised in a good way. Eating our own raised lamb meat and wild meat from moose, wild bores etc every once in while when I visited my parents felt very good. But My meat consumption actually dropped to eating meat only once or twice every 2 weeks or even down to once a month – whenever I visit my parents.
Moose meatballs and homegrown mashed potato, legumes and jelly..
And hover much I love the taste of our own lambs meat with homemade minth sause and could feel satisfied that the animals had had a good life and the lifestock had a good impact on the local natural ecosystem and even boosting the cultural farm ecosystem with things such as their poo poo as valuable garden soil builder for the veggie patch.. However much I knew that these animals both recreated a diverse flora and fauna by er-establishing the cultural landscape under the old oak trees – I still didn’t miss eating it during the 2-4 weeks periods. I knew how much human labour and energy it went into producing this kind of wonderful tasting meat and realized that eating it everyday just wasn’t fair. So I eat vegetarian 90 percent of the time – I even eat a lot of vegan food! I now realize that the gastronomical diversity with vegan food is just as exciting as with meat and animal products.
So I am not a vegetarian, not a vegan. I do not eat industrial meat but I’m looking forward to eat the meat from our own ducklings!
Our ducklings growing up – In the back two 6 months old starting to look like their parents in size and color
See you next time! Quack, quack..
Related articles
- Gonna Eat Meat? Eat More Lamb (lifesnotfairtrade.wordpress.com)
- Baa, Baa, Black sheep… (swedishcountryliving.wordpress.com)
- Meat…To Eat Or Not To Eat, That is the Question (tracyfick.wordpress.com)
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