Chew the fat: Pt.1

Graham R. Cooper

You believe you’re as clued up as you need to be on the grab bag of processing, grass versus grain fed, omega 3 and 6 ratios, good and bad cholesterol, fat stores of cumulative poisons, poly’s, mono’s, saturated, hydrogenated, trans-fatty acids. You believe those who convincingly confirm your bias. You feed all this into a desire to make healthy choices which work in tandem with self-reliance.

You stop using vegetable oils, reserve olive oil for dressings and for drizzling on breakfast porridge, and from then on in render beef fat, from one of your own cattle beasts, to use as your cooking fat. But to tide you over when you run out before the next home kill, you cook in coconut oil.

You’re consuming lots of saturated beef fat, lathering on the butter and gulping down copious quantities of full fat goat milk and goat yoghurt. You’re buying in the butter, coconut oil, olive oil, and yoghurt starter culture, and supplying the rest from home turf.

Home in on the two of us and there’s self-reliance without the hair shirt. And our health would suggest that the ‘t’ in ‘diet’ is there for a reason – a balanced diet. As far as we are aware, there are no clogged arteries to tip the scales anytime soon. We don’t want Lady Justice to drop the ‘t’ in ‘diet’, tip the scales and render the verdict: “Die!”

That’s all on modern-day homesteading at Little Owl Gully for this week. Next Monday I’ll tell you about the straightforward process we use to extract beef tallow from the mass of organ fat that envelopes and extends well beyond the animal’s kidneys: Chew the fat: Pt.2.

Thanks for your company. Bye for now.