Hi Tyler,
Thanks for that! I have had some desire for liver and tongue lately but didnt buy liver yet and couldnt find any tongue. Nicola said that you were also living in London. Any suggestions were I can find good quality meats that are pretty cheap here as well as tongue and marrow? I live in East Acton (the area around Hammersmith and Fulhalm). Did you find horse meet in London?
You need to check out the lfm.org.uk website. It's a farmers' markets association which is Weston-Price like in scope(ie stalls offering unpasteurised dairy, 100% grassfed/organic meats, raw wildcaught seafood/wild game etc.) They have a markets map on that website showing the LFM markets nearest to you. They're usually held on weekends(all details on the site, check the markets map for locations etc.). The stalls won't display organs in their stalls(other than liver and kidney), but you can just ask the stall-holders for contact details for their farm and phone them up asking if you can make an order for raw organs like raw tongue for picking up at the next week's market. Also ask them what they feed their animals. Some unscrupulous farmers do feed their animals on grains in winter(as opposed to hay), so make sure the meat is 100% grassfed - not all farmers at those markets offer organic-status animals, because of the huge cost involved in converting to organic status, but they all have to abide by certain rules the LFM assocation demands(ie no hormone-injections and the like). My experience has been that many of the smaller nonorganic farmers in the UK actually have higher-quality 100% grassfed (and cheaper) meats than most of the big agricombines which sell official organic-status meats to supermarkets, for example. The stalls at the LFM markets vary very widely in price. I have seen shockingly high prices for 1 stall selling raw seafood like scallops in 1 farmers' market, while the stall at the opposite end of the very same market offers raw wildcaught seafood at a fraction of the former's prices , with other stalls offering wild game such as a whole wild hare carcasses at almost a third of the price offered for a kilo of 100% grassfed/organic fillet-steak at another stall, and so on.
1 catch:- In the UK, it is phenomenally difficult to find domesticated fowl or pigs which aren't fed on crappy 100% grain-filled diets, this despite the fact that chickens/geese etc. and pigs are natural omnivores. So best to avoid them, even in the LFM markets, unless you find a genuine source of pastured pork etc. You'll just need to ask around a lot re what the animals are fed on. 1 tip:- don't ask them if the animals are fed on grass, they'll just say yes. Ask them what their animals are fed on throughout the year - some farmers have actually foolishly boasted to me that they fed their cows on so-called "high-quality grains", especially in winter, which helped me avoid them in future.
Oh and then there's the phenomenally expensive Borough Market at the opposite end of town. A really horrible tourist trap, but it offers unusual items such as raw wildcaught shark, which are unavailable anywhere else. It's only worth visiting on Saturdays and has the most stalls on the 3rd Saturday of each month.
An easier option that doesn't require a car or having to lug heavy bags of food across London every fortnight is to simply search online for 100% grassfed/organic farms and ask them if they do delivery. Most such farms do not mention on their website/shopping-forms whether they sell raw organs as well, so you'll have to phone them up and ask them if they do. They'll deliver their meats to you, chilled in ice-packs(sometimes they'll insist on only selling prefrozen, not chilled, animal foods such as raw marrow(it decays too quickly if left at room-temperature, sometimes). I've had them sent to my door, and even though I wasn't there to receive them when the courier came, the parcels were never stolen(I usually just tell the farmers to tell the courier to leave them behind a bush near the door or some such instruction.
There ought to be at least 1 good fishmonger's near you as well - the supermarkets may have wiped out most butchers, but the fishmonger's are still around. They don't always offer raw seafood, IMO, as good as what I find in the LFM markets(I don't bother any more in buying raw mussels or raw oysters from a standard fishmonger, for example) but other foods like raw mackerel/raw kingfish/scallops are of the same high quality.
For eating out, try local Japanese Sashimi restaurants. The best are those which have Japanese customers as regulars. The catch is that most of them offer tiny slices of raw fish and charge the Earth. So far, I've only come across 1 decent Sashimi restaurant in the whole of London(they offered me huge chuncks of raw mackerel for 18 pounds sterling) but I'm not sure if they're in the King's Cross area any more.
Re horsemeat:- Horsemeat is illegal in the UK. That is, expensive restaurants can get it imported from France but that's about it. I get my horsemeat when I go on holiday to Italy. They have specialist horse-butchers over there.
Topic: Raw carnivore with questions... (Read 15811 times)