Animals that eat things that we cannot should be in our diets. We cannot eat soil, so plants that can get nutrients from the soil and convert them to a form that we can digest are also in our diets. Nature’s plan is that organisms must count on one another to share the burden of converting non-living things into living things that benefit it’s neighbors in the food chain. Bees count on flowers, flowers count on bees. The relationship is visible and the benefits to the participants are obvious.

The harder ones to understand are the chemical relationships. What is the nature of the relationship between the tree root and the fungus at it’s roots, whose only visible sign is the occasional springtime mushroom that pops up? Surely the tree is bringing something, like energy from the sun down into the earth, and the fungus is doing some mysterious duty, like metabolizing leaf products into sugars, or digesting something that the root cannot. This would be much the same way that our bowel delivers milk sugars, which we can’t digest to the bacteria in us that can. Our bacteria are in our digestive system, maybe a tree’s bacterial helper is outside it’s digestive system.

One hundred years ago all of the cattle that were butchered for meat were fed grass and hay on the farm. Cattle driven to market foraged as they went on hoof in the drives of legend. There were no long-term stays at any place along the trail where juvenile cattle were fed alien foods, like corn or soy meal. When the meat got to us consumers it contained all of the ingredients put there by nature for the use of carnivores whose bodies could not create the essential oils themselves. Grass-consuming animals create oils from the grasses that we cannot create, we must eat them.

A scientific study, whose results can be found HERE, showed that long term or short term grain feeding regimens before slaughter significantly increased the amount of omega 6 found in beef, no matter which cut. Omega 3 could be found in significant quantities in pastured beef.

Only grass-fed beef reached the target of more than 30mg of long chain n-3 FA/100 g muscle as recommended by Food Standard Australia and New Zealand for a food to be considered a source of omega-3 fatty acids.

Naturally raised meat animals will provide us with the elements that nature intends. We don’t need to find exotic oils to take, far-flung species of fish to eat. We need to find a local source of naturally raised meats and dairy products from those meats.

My own favorite source is a local meat locker north of Smithville lake, in Trimble Missouri. This weekend I went there and purchased a Boston Butt roast, processed from meat from a locally grown hog. I am confident that this meat will provide me with the proper ratio of essential oils that I need. I will be making this meat into sausages that will contain only the additives that I put in. My ingredient list will be short and won’t contain a single item meant to make my sausages last a month on the shelf. What I don’t eat right away I will freeze and vacuum pack for later on. Five pounds of sausages might cost me as much as twenty dollars if I bought the commercial brands. This meat cost me a little bit less per pound than that, but there is a bone in my roast. What I got was priced fairly, what I will make will cost me much less than eating the grain fed and confinement pork

Sometime this week I will be writing about the experience of making these sausages, since I have never made sausages before. I got a sausage stuffer for my birthday, and I am just dying to try it out. If you have any sausage making tips, please help us all out, by dropping a comment in the comment box.