Afraid of meat!!

[JessJoy]

I am not a vegetarian. I do occasionally eat fish and shellfish (always fresh, wild).

I have just started getting into the TF thing, but man, I don't know how I can bring myself to eat meat! Because I do all of my own cooking and I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I could cook a whole bird in a pot, skim off the fat, yada yada.

Any suggestion son how to ease into it?

My fantasy would be to be able to eat only raw dairy, but small amounts, along with small amounts of game, some grains, and lots of raw fruits and veggies and cultured food. Anyone follow this? What makes up the bulk of your traditional diet?

[PreggieUBA2C]

I'm not sure what makes up the bulk-- maybe butter.

We have six + one in our family and we eat on average, in a day:

one dozen eggs
1/2 lb of stone milled oats with raisins and splash of cream (butter and honey to top)
1 1/2 litres of yogurt with berries or as veggie dip (with spices, acv, avocado) and celery, carrots and tomatoes for dipping
1 lb of butter
1 lb leafy mixed lettuces with tomatoes, celery, spring onion, left-over meat bits made crunchy in a skillet (sausage, chicken, pork, whatever)
2 lbs apples
1/2 lb raw cheese
1/2 loaf sprouted bread
avocado, or pears/other fruit, when available
sauerkraut with supper usually and/or fermented broccoli stems or green beans
bone broth made into gravy or sauce
3lbs potatoes
4 lbs of meat- poultry, bison, pork or fish
celery, onions, herbs and spices for flavourings
acv, evoo, and spices for dressing

That's a pretty usual day's consumption. Some days there will be a baked treat too, like baked apples or pears, or some sort of rich and chunky biscuit made with copious amounts of butter. We also go through mustard like water...

We eat all organic, pastured, whole foods and prepare them traditionally. EXCEPT, we don't have access to raw milk presently, so we buy raw cheese and organic milk that I culture and we drink it and eat it as desired. It's the best we can do. I don't tolerate uncultured pasteurized milk, but if it's made into yogurt, I do, and I've tried going milk-free, but even after a long time, I find I really need it. So I make yogurt.

I used to really cringe at the feeling of raw meat, but after a couple of years of wincing (and does anyone else feel like a bird feels too much like a cold, wet baby??? ), and skinning a few animals myself, I am fine with it. I also used to find the smells from meats while they cooked unbearable, but then I discovered pastured meat and wild game, and that stopped being a problem; it turned out that the sour nasty smell from grocery meats doesn't exist in the meats we've been eating since. Also, because we buy from a conscientious farmer and butcher, the meat is properly bled and aged, which also makes a huge difference. I can hardly stand to walk by the meat dept. at the grocery store. Everything smells sour and rank to me. I could spent the afternoon in the butcher shop though!

I got over the feeling part by just doing it and saying over and over to myself, "This is good for my children. This is good for my children. This is full of nutrients. This is full of nutrients...". I also found that the fresh butcher and farm meat doesn't have a slimy feeling like grocery meats- except for fish; it is so much slimier when fresh caught, and I still find it difficult to handle a fresh fish because of that.

So, I don't know. Maybe by the time I'm sixty, I'll be having a conversation while splitting raw poultry joints with a paring knife at my kitchen table, like my grandmother. I remember her seeming not to notice the popping sounds that were very distracting to me while she spoke. I still have a hard time splitting poultry legs off the cooked bird to serve it and I've been doing it for 8 yrs.

ETA: Our ancestry is european, so our diet is too, mostly.

[ursusarctos]

I grew up veggie and I had a fear/disgust of meat too for a long time. Now I'll happily dig bits of meat off the pork ribs I boiled in my pea soup, butter up a whole raw chicken for roasting, and make sure I get all the softened marrow out of my stock bones.

I think PreggieUBA2C is right, you just have to force yourself to do it while constantly reminding yourself that it's good for you, it's good for you, it's good for you... And I agree about the butcher meat being less disgusting than conventional store meat for sure. I hadn't thought of it but yeah, I remember now walking past the meat counter at Safeway as a kid and holding my breath because of the sour, fleshy smell. That smell is absent at my local market hall where there are 3 small butcher stalls right next to each other. So if you have access to a good butcher, go for it!

As for getting used to using meat in your cooking, what I mostly did in my intermediate stage was use a lot of ground meat that I could just dump from the package into the pan and never even have to touch it, and then disguise it in a sauce or soup. If you can get real, good quality sausages (sometimes butchers have them) those are great too because they seem so un-meaty. Eventually you just get used to it and it no longer seems intimidating. It just takes practice.

[tanyalynn]

Not everyone needs meat in the sense of chicken/beef/pork/venison/whatever. I eat a lot, and red meat more than chicken and I don't think seafood would work for me, but I think for some people, seafood's great, lots of minerals, fat soluble vitamins, esp if you eat the weird parts and then make stock with the bones. Or if you think you don't get quite enough, and you tolerate dairy, you're set.

To me, the basics of Price's work are more minerals, and a lot more fat soluble vitamins, which does necessitate animal products, but the type is flexible.

[PreggieUBA2C]

Oh yes! I forgot about how helpful ground meat can be for meat aversions. I could only prepare ground meats for a few weeks while I had morning/all-day sickness because I really couldn't touch any meat without gagging.

We asked our butcher to grind up different parts of the bison, so it wasn't always the standard bison grind we also buy. It surprised me how much difference in taste there was between parts. They would have ground anything we asked for though, so we could have had turkey, chicken, pork, whatever.

I always ask them not to remove the fat and to add in clean offal too. That way I don't lose as much nutrients due to not cooking with the bone.