Lean Times

[sabertooth]

I have managed through much effort, over the years, to obtain enough fat to make ends meat. From time to time I have fallen on lean times, where the only animals available are not fat enough to supply my needs, and I have to search for quality supplemental fats.

Lately its been like playing find a good source roulette, and now that it is the hottest stretch of the summer many of the prospective sheep I have relied on have gotten lean, while much of the supplemental cow fat I have tried has been less than optimal.

My taste have become so attuned that I can tell the minuet and subtle differences, from different sources, and have thrown a lot of what I have buy to the compost heap because it didn't taste right.

Yet every now and then I will find a beef fat source which is absolutely wonderful, so I think it is possible to use beef as a fat source, but quality is a huge issue?  For the last couple of months I have been unlucky, in finding the "fat of the fat" I often think there may be a systemic ecological quality issue in my geographic area, many of the animals I cut open look like they have some sort issue. Liver lesions are the most common, which "they say" are caused by parasites. Also most of the kidneys from animals in my area look pale, and dont seem quite right?

So I am on the lookout for any temporary sources to get me through until the Jojoba beef connection comes through. They only slaughter twice a year after the rains come in, and wont have any suet until September. The Liver, Marrow Bones, kidneys, Sweet breads, and rib meat I sampled is the best beef I have ever tasted, so I am confident that the fat will be par-excellence.I plan to stock up on all the fat I can get them to save off an animal.

Until then I may try a Slankers order. Ive tried them a few years back and it seemed decent enough...... unless anyone here knows of a better delivered to your home source in the USA?
 

[eveheart]

One of my current fat sources is a busy seafood department in a huge Korean supermarket. I buy long strips of salmon skin that they cut away when they prepare fillets and sushi. I like the melt-in-your-mouth release of fat when you chew. You can size the place up and ask pertinent questions such as "farmed or wild-caught" and get a rough idea of which sea the fish came from. I'm paying about $1.99/lb for salmon skin with a thin layer (1/8") of muscle. The fish come in packed in ice inside huge styrofoam containers, so cold, not frozen.

[RogueFarmer]

Please please please try green pastures farm

They graze on fescue but their management is second to few, they move cattle to fresh pasture as often as every hour.

They are looking for an intern this fall.

[ys]

Please take pictures of the problem meat so we have it as reference.  I frequently get whole liver from the Amish and never seen lesions of any kind.  Sometimes liver does not have firm texture and smells a bit funny.  I have not seen any other issues.


Can you describe less than optimal cow fat?

[eveheart]

YS, if you google images for "liver damage in cattle," you'll see images of all the liver problems, usually on agricultural university websites. I think the images used to teach at the universities are way better than any pic we can take.

[ys]

So I googled it like you suggested.  Most images are showing livers that absolutely no way will pass the inspection.
I would like to see damaged liver that passed the inspection like those SB is seeing.

[sabertooth]

Ive seen it with my own two eyes, on many occasions, next time I will take a picture. The inspectors told me it was a parasite that caused the cyst, and perhaps they are local to certain geographical areas, I know certain parasites are more prevalent in my part of the world than in others. Typically the sores are small hard cyst like pox. When I worked in a processing facility if there were only a couple or so the inspector would trim them off the liver and send it through. Even if the liver was entirely riddled, they would throw the liver out while passing the animal through.

Less than optimal cow fat often has an extreme waxy texture, or has the subtle after taste of moldy grass...I let the first taste from a new source dissolve in my mouth, and if there is any unpleasantness in the flavor, I consider it less than optimal...

Im going to a farmers market today to pick up 10 pounds of suet from a local source to try, and there is an other local prospect that I can try if that doesnt work out, so hopefully I will find what Im looking for.

[RogueFarmer]

Sounds like you are talking about liver fluke infestation which comes about through slugs and snails in wet conditions and a lack of copper and mineral balance in the animals body as well as a lack of anti paracitic herbs.

I think it's theoretically possible to get the same problem from eating salad with slime trails on it.

Liver flukes can be pretty nasty i have experiened it several times in my goats. It could get pretty nasty but it didnt seem to have a gigantic effect on the liver as it appeared otherwise healthy. I believe goats and sheep are much more susceptible to flukes than cattle are and infested cattles quality of life should be seriously in question.

[dariorpl]

Have you tried pork, sabertooth? In my experience, even less than optimally fed organic pork fat is really good.

Also, I've noticed that not all fat is made equal. Even in grain finished cattle, there are parts of the fat I enjoy and parts that taste like pure wax, like you say. It depends on which part of the animal it's coming from and sometimes there are individual differences from one animal to the next.

[sabertooth]

I do remember the first goats I slaughtered had those cyst, and flukes seem like the likely culprit, and the very wet seasons, combined with the limited access medicinal forage, the periodic confinement to barn yards & reliance on hay in the winter, create the perfect breeding ground for such flukes.....

Though on the whole I do not think that they represent any great threat, and have on a number of occasions actually bit into and swallowed a piece of liver with a crunchy cyst...without any known issue..... I believe that when there are only a couple of small calcified cyst on an animal, it indicates that the immune system has been able to for the most part contain and mitigate the parasite, and as long as thee isn't any fowl taste or other indication of poor health then it shouldn't be considered a major issue...even though such a condition isn't ideal.

I did get a very nice Amish animal that had a perfectly clean liver, and the man who sold it to me said that he had begun using some natural copper based wormer, that had taken care of the problems he once had with parasites, though it is still an experimental treatment and may only be effective against certain kinds of parasites

Ive had pork fat from pastured pork that was supplemented :organic Pellets of some kind? I was desperate for fat and so gave it a try and it ended up making me feel ill and I haven't ever experimented with it again.

[dariorpl]

Interesting. I never had troubles with pork.

[RogueFarmer]

There is some kind of calcium copper bolus you can force to a cow goat or sheep to ingest. It adhears to the stomach and slowly releases. Calcium negates the worry of overtoxicity. Copper kills parasites on touch. Raising the animals copper level makes them poisonous to the parasites... There is also the threat of co]er toxicity harming the animal which i have heard is a huge issue in the dairy industry as they need lots of copper i imagine to prevent their cows feet from rotting away.

[ys]

Did it look like this?

This was from the wild deer.  And my understanding they were tapeworm cysts.  I've found 5 of these cysts.  4 on the surface and 1 inside.  This liver was one of the best I've ever tasted with very firm crunchy texture.

[Projectile Vomit]

The cysts you're referring to are, as ys alluded, most likely tapeworm cysts. In newly infected or young animals the cysts are typically soft, but as an animal ages the cysts can become calcified. As far as I know, whether the cyst is soft or calcified (hard) they are still infectious. Whether the larvae will attach to your intestine or whether your immune system will fend it off and it will pass through you and die will depend on a lot of things.

I've eaten a sheep liver that had calcified cysts. I ate a couple of the cysts but was never infected with a tapeworm. Once I got a closer look at one and figured out what it was I cut the rest out. The liver tasted fine.

[Projectile Vomit]

And I would add that the color of the liver in ys' picture looks off to me. If I received a liver that looked like that, I don't think I would eat it. Unless I was just about starving to death and had no other options.

[sabertooth]

Hmm, Ive actually found tape worms on occasion in sheep intestines, and it is prevalent in my area, so perhaps that is the cause of the liver cyst.....

I remember looking it up and finding out that most sheep tape worms do not affect humans, because they need an intermediate host (like grass mites) to develop.

I agree the liver does look a little off, I have seen the outer layer have grayish tent, with off color streaks in it, and have often wondered if it was a sign of some chemical exposure???

At the slaughterhouse where I worked the inspector told me that nearly all the animals where chemically wormed 60 days before processing, this individual also said that the cyst were parasites....which leads me to ponder why it seems that animals that have been wormed often seem to have even more of these cyst than animals that haven't???

[Projectile Vomit]

Chemical dewormers generally treat adult tapeworms that are in the animal's intestines and various nematode/round worms. I don't think a dewormer would kill an encysted larval tapeworm, which is generally in muscle or organ tissue.

I think one issue in this discussion is that there are different tapeworm species being discussed. When you find an adult tapeworm in the intestines of a goat, sheep or cow, it is one of the species that requires mites that live in the soil as intermediate hosts. Basically, the adult ruminant poops out tapeworm eggs, the mites eat the eggs and are infected with larval tapeworms, then the grazing animals eat the mites while eating grass and the larvae can develop into adult tapeworms in their small intestines.

When we see cysts in ruminant tissue, this is a different type of tapeworm that uses ruminant animals as an intermediate host, and uses carnivores or scavengers as terminal hosts. In this case, eggs are released in the feces of the terminal host (a wolf or coyote for instance, or a person), and the grazing animal would eat the eggs in bits of feces while grazing on grass. The eggs would hatch in the grazing animals GI tract and burrow through its gut lining, enter the bloodstream and then migrate to a preferred tissue where it encysts as a larvae and awaits its host's death by predation. Once the tissue is eaten by the terminal host, the larvae finishes its life cycle in the gut of the predator or scavenger and its eggs are pooped out to start the cycle again.

Human beings can also serve as intermediate hosts for certain tapeworms, particularly those that involve pigs as normal intermediate hosts. When a person accidentally eats the eggs of certain tapeworms the larvae can hatch in their GI tract and burrow through the GI wall and enter the bloodstream, where they might end up encysted anywhere. As the article I linked to above shows, folks who carry large burdens of encysted tapeworm larvae can have all sorts of problems. Hence the importance of not eating the feces of pigs or their meat when it's contaminated with feces, or of living anywhere near them really. This can also happen with dogs and other companion animals too, which is a big reason why I'm not interested in keeping pets.

[sabertooth]

I would be the prime beta test case when it comes to determining the susceptibility of humans to ruminant tape worms, having eaten large quantities of infected raw intestines over many years.....Though I insist that the cyst in the livers of ruminants like cows, sheep, goats, and deer, may be from worm species which do not typically infect humans?? or if they do manage to infect a human, it is often a self limited and benign condition which is easily coped with by a strong immune system??

The last lab test that were done three years ago, did not detect any eggs in my feces, though many of us here are skeptical of the validity of many of such medical test.

I must have been exposed, having unwittingly eaten a number of these cyst over the years, and probably ground up whole worm segments into my smoothies,..... but perhaps the primal human immune system, having evolved to live on raw animal flesh, can mitigate these infectious nematodes??? 

[dariorpl]

Or perhaps, like AV said, parasites are your friends and the body uses them to help detoxify certain toxins, and when it no longer needs them, it expels them. Even plenty of mainstream doctors now agree that if anything, most people today suffer from a lack of intestinal parasites, rather than an over abundance.

[Projectile Vomit]

Yes, it is true that some species of tapeworms are very specific in terms of what terminal host they're looking for and if they end up in the wrong one they can't infect it. So if you've eaten infectious tapeworm cysts and didn't end up with a tapeworm, you might have, by luck, eaten one of these species.

[sabertooth]

Perhaps it isn't luck at all??? after a half a million years of scavenging and predating upon ruminating animals our ancestors developed an innate immunity, to many of these parasites, much in the same way that the other apex predictors and scavengers like the big cats, wolves, vultures, hyenas and other such animals have managed too.

I am well aware of AVs theory of parasitic infection being beneficial to immune modulation and detoxification, but would like to broaden the scope to include the view that parasite host relationships are much more dynamic and integral to the health of the entire ecosystem, than is typically thought about. From the view that as is above so is below this host parasite paradigm must be expanded far beyond the world of the microscopic.

Grazing animals are in a way are symbiotic to the health and integrity of the living systems of terrestrial earth, yet if they become too numerous for the land to support, then the Gaian immune response is triggered. When in balance, the ruminating animals move freely and act as an exfoliator and fertilizer for the land, their bacterially active gut ecology terraforms foraged biomass into the perfect fertile substrate for new growth to utilize....yet when there is an imbalance and too many ruminators are present for the land to carry then the unseen intelligence goes to work to bring back balance. Simple grass mites, snales, or other waste devouring organisms which act to break down and reintegrate predigested biomass back into the soil,  are carriers of these Gaian derived inoculation organisms....Ordinarily when possible, areas inoculated with heavy parasitic loads theses would be avoided by foraging animals who after getting one whiff of their own waste would quickly move on to greener pastures....These systems of symbiosis where parasites act as the earths own immune system, evolved in order to keep foraging animals from staying too long in one location so that the land could rejuvenate between being mowed down.....

Typically if for some reason an animal was unable or unwilling to move on to allow the land its period of rejuvenation then that animal would be inoculated with the worms, much in the same way the bodies immune system sends out antigens when inundated with invasive microbes. These inoculations in moderate situations cause the animal to move away from the infested area and seek out medicinal herbs and plants which would help stimulate the purging of the worms and the rebuilding of nutritional balance....but if the healing herbs are not available, and fresh pastures are not to be found then the parasite loads will build until the point the animal weakens, often becoming unable to reproduce or fend off predication....so the other layer of the earths immune system which is the higher order of predictors will go to work to thin out the numbers of the foraging parasites...giving the earths forage the time and space needed to regrow... after sufficient time has passed the eggs and parasitic cyst dissolve and the land becomes lush and open once again to the foragers. Its no coincidence that the amount of time needed for the land to rejuvenate closely correlates to the amount of time heavy parasite loads remain in the soil. This essence of symbiosis is dependent upon parasites and predication as equal partners that hold together interconnected web of life.

Understanding this helps us to see where modern cultivation has gone astray, by overburdening the land with more animals than it was ever designed to support, keeping those animals on the same plot for far too long, limiting access to wider varieties of forage and medicinal herbs, feeding those animals supplemental and processed foods, giving them drugs in a desperate attempt to cope with the imbalances, enabling the weak and unfit to survive generation after generation simply because of profit based motivations.... all of these things goes contrary to the natural order and will lead to compromises in the quality of the final product.

[van]

parasitic death, I have seen, does occur to apex pred. , but usually when they are old or weakened by injury.  tough way to go.

[sabertooth]

parasitic death, I have seen, does occur to apex pred. , but usually when they are old or weakened by injury.  tough way to go.

This is in accordance to natures way, older and weak animals will succumb one way or another to something in the end as life takes its course. At a certain stage in life if the worm doesn't take them something else will. In my own experience with domesticated predators (dogs and cats) I see anti worming drugs as a huge scam and are even in many cases detrimental to health and decrease longevity. Of all the pets I have cared for over the years I have never used wormers or any booster vaccinations.

My first dog an Irish setter mix lived to be 18 years old, on table scraps and "gravy train" kibble, without any treatments other than the mandatory first rabbis shot.

On the other hand you have these mainstream vet going pet owners who regularly de-worm their animals, and treat them with everything that is recommended, along with feeding them kibble based carb heavy diets...many of these animals have kidney problems, joint issues, diabetes and a whole slew of degenerative issues and will die relatively young.

Many of the same rules that apply to grazing animals in living in nature apply to back yard pets...if you keep the animal confined to a small area, where its regularly exposed to fecal waste and fed poor nutrition, then the environmental conditions become conducive for parasitic infestation....what mainstream veterinarian science fails to recognize is that the worms are a symptom of poor environmental conditions that inundate the body with toxicity while suppressing the immune system, and by only focusing on treating the worms chemically without doing anything to remedying the disease pre-conditions, other problems are bound to arise.

[ys]

There was nothing wrong with the color.  In the picture it still has some dirt on it (guts were dumped on the forest ground) and lighting is off.  Like I said before it was one of the best tasting livers I ever had with perfect texture all around. So go figure.

[svrn]

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