not only do they roam but they’re yummy too

Posted by Sarah

I may be a city gal born and bred but I’ve spent my fair share of time in the country and along the way I developed a bit of a fondness for animals of the livestock variety. At times it has bordered on obsessive and at various stages of my childhood I begged for a cow, a pig, goats, sheep, a llama and a number of other creatures. I think the only farm animal I didn’t want was a chicken- a hatred resulting from a traumatic encounter with a bird named Betsy- which is fine since they’re not technically considered livestock. Completely unrelated to my agricultural dreams, I happened to fall in love with everyone’s favorite ginormous land mammal: the American Bison, also known as buffalo. I’m not quite sure where this love comes from but while other little girls decorated their trapper keepers with dolphin stickers I perused the library for bison facts. At an embarrassing late date I realized that bison are in fact considered livestock, a discovery that lead to the most unreasonable request I have made of my family to date: I wanted my very own buffalo. As one might expect my family refused to fulfill this request. And then they laughed at me.

This might be a good time to mention that not only do I love farm animals, but I am also rather fond of eating them. I have wrestled with the guilt of this for years but I am weak and I love meat. I don’t eat a lot of meat and I am relatively careful and conscious of it’s source: I’m not a fan of the Monsanto brand of agribusiness and generally do my best to support local growers and buy hormone free, naturally raised meat and poultry (thank goodness for farmers markets). The one exception to this for many years has been bison. Apparently bison meat is better for you than beef and several years ago my father went on a bit of a campaign to get me eat bison as part of his general campaign to get me to eat well and live forever (my daddy loves me!) but it didn’t take. Then yesterday I saw a box of buffalo burgers in the frozen food case at my local Trader Joe’s and decided to give ‘em another shot. After a brief episode of confusion involving trying to figure out how whether frozen meat needs to be thawed before being cooked and me get all up in Meg’s way as she made her own dinner, I made myself a nice little bison burger and some wilted spinach. All in all it was a pretty tasty meal- and healthy too- that I think I’ll be repeating regularly. Which is good since there are three more burgers left in the box.

Also: while performing my periodic search for bison news the other day I found this piece which makes me feel a little bit less evil for eating the pretty pretty buffaloes.

Read more September 4th, 2007