Seasonal Eating: Meat
Tremendous money and effort is expended maintaining production anti-seasonally, but meat is best in certain seasons, just as produce is. Forage-fattened beef is best in the fall. Once the frost has killed flies and sweetened the grass, cows are more comfortable than at any other time of the year. They naturally ramp up their forage intake in fall to get through the lean, hard winter. On the other hand, spring is when chickens lay lots of eggs, some of which become baby chicks. Seasonally speaking, it makes sense to eat chicken in the summer and beef in winter.
When buying meat from local farmers, you’ll find that eating the whole animal is a related issue. A chicken consists of much more than a boneless, skinless breast. The only way those can be offered in the supermarket is because the industry grinds and reconstitutes the rest into lunch meat and McNuggets, using low-wage labor and high volume to justify the sophisticated machinery. In the supermarket, boneless, skinless chicken breasts require an industrial approach to food preparation, but at home, it’s a different story. You can eat the breast, but also cook the rest of the chicken for casseroles, and freeze the broth for stock.
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