For as long as I can remember, I have always liked the idea of providing food for myself and for my family. As a child, I always enjoyed the idea of gardening… Maybe not so much the actual garden maintenance, but I enjoyed picking out plants and planting them in the garden with my family and it was always fun to see the enormous amounts of produce that we could grow in a small corner of our yard. I also always liked the idea of raising meat, hunting, and fishing, but aside from the occasional trip to the lake to catch trout, meat production wasn’t something that I grew up around.

In college, I started to develop a bad habit of getting super into various interests, mostly revolving around DIY type hobbies. I grew to love brewing beer, reloading ammo, casting bullets, cooking, and gardening. I constantly read about raising meat and hunting. I daydreamed about it all the time, but for some reason it didn’t seem realistic to take the plunge and start actually doing any of it. The closest I came was setting up hutches to raise rabbits before getting too busy with an intense work schedule that went on for years.

In 2016, I needed to make a change with my life. My spouse and I moved across the country from Alabama to Arizona and everything changed. One of my close friends introduced me to small game hunting shortly after we got to Arizona and it was like the urge to provide for myself was suddenly not just a want, but something deep within me that I needed to do to feel complete. The next few years were filled with overly ambitious projects that I was wholly unqualified to succeed in, but it was a blast.

The first animals I harvested were doves, quails, and rabbits while out hunting, but the real change within me began when I set out to fill my freezer with goat meat. The idea of having meat that I couldn’t get in a normal American grocery store and learning to butcher for myself was intoxicating. In what can only be described as the actions of an ignorant city kid wanting to learn what it’s like to be a farmer, I proceeded to show up at a nearby homesteader’s house to pick up two goats. I guess in my head I thought I was going to show up at this farm to find a couple calm goats that I could put in the back of my 4runner, I’d roll the windows down, they’d stick their heads out, and I’d lead them to the place where I would proceed to dispatch them. Instead, what I found was dose of reality… Goats are pretty wild farm animals with strength beyond what you’d expect of any 100 lbs animal. As the seller was corralling the goats he was grabbing them by the horns, throwing them around, and wrestling them into a corral. I stood by in amazement only to realize I needed to get in there and help. I got kicked, headbutted, screamed at… those little goats really gave me a cruel introduction into the world of harvesting meat. Nonetheless, after processing those two goats and learning to cook a new type of meat, I was hooked.

Over the next couples years I spent a lot of time talking with cattle and pig farmers and had opportunities to see a few different operations. I was fortunate enough to participate in a cattle auction and a friend let me keep a steer on his land providing me with the chance to learn about feeding and caring for a cow.

Around that same time, the Coronavirus Pandemic was just starting to have an affect on meat availability in grocery stores and I knew it was time to really take matters into my own hands. I decided to buy 15 Pekin ducks to raise in the yard for meat and eggs. 10 of those first 15 were destined for meat and 5 were kept for breeding and eggs. I also bought a pig to raise and butcher myself.

At the time that I butchered my first pig, that was by far the largest animal I processed myself and it was also the most impactful.

The day after I broke that pig down into finished cuts, I was in the grocery store, walking past the meat aisle when suddenly I didn’t see packages of meat. Suddenly, my brain recognized all those pristinely wrapped plastic and cellophane packages as bits of animals… The meat aisle no longer appeared to be meat, but rather an aisle full of dead animals. It was incredibly uncomfortable to see 30 or 40 dead animals for sale, packaged in a manner that hides what the animal is and that allows us to detach from all of the resources that went into raising the animal. You don’t recognize the sacrifice or the value of the life that the animal lived in that setting. It was even worse to recognize that there were huge pieces of the animals not even being sold. There was ribeyes from at least 4 different cows, so why didn’t they have 8 shanks for sale? What about the tongues, cheeks, tails, hearts, etc.? Suddenly the realization of having lived most of my life thinking it was normal to have steak every week made me feel incredibly guilty that I was contributing to a system where we treat luxury items like an easy access, common commodity while disregarding huge portions of resource intensive meat products. In a sense, it made grocery store meat seem almost pornographic where it’s not actually all that satisfying, it’s detached from the real thing, but it’s quick, easy and convenient for all of us that value instant gratification.

At some point, I started to realize that there was a bit of a disconnect between homesteaders and foodies. It seems as if foodies today really take an interest in where their food comes from, but they dont know much about raising it. It also seems like homesteaders and hunters spend most of their energy raising or harvesting food and never fully dedicate themselves to learning how to elevate their food to a high end dining experience. As my interest is entirely about raising the highest quality food and creating exciting, unique dishes, I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some of my success stories as well as my failures.

As my son has grown, I have come to realize that I want for him to start to learn some of these life lessons from an early age that I took so long to discover. 8 months ago, I made the decision to stop buying grocery store meat and to harvest and process all of our family’s meat on my own and it has been an incredibly satisfying experience.