Meat Memories: A Humorous Take on Ranch Life

I might be the wrong person to ask. I was raised a rancher, and that means I love my steak.

Pork – bring on the chops and bacon.

Chicken is borderline, but I will eat it.

Everything else about the animals, forget it. Internal organs like the liver, tripe, heart, brains, and so on. Serve them to me if you want to see me throw up.

But these days I must ask, “Who can afford meat?” I used to buy a five-pound roll of hamburger at Walmart for under ten dollars. Those days are gone.

And that brings me to a story from my youth.

We had a large chest freezer, and about once a year we took a calf in for butchering. For a long time, we were eating high on the hog.

And then there’d be months on end when Mom was buying meat from the store. A potentially unlimited supply of cheeseburgers on the hoof in the pasture and she’s buying meat.

This went on until one day my brother went to find something to eat. He opens the freezer, and it contains wall-to-wall empty.

Out in the corral is the calf my sister was supposed to be raising for 4H. The operative words here are “supposed to be.” She wouldn’t work with it. It wouldn’t lead. It was mean. It weighed in at well over half a ton at this point of the game and ate bagfuls of oats, corn, and pellets every day.

Frustrated, my brother hooked up the horse trailer, roped the calf and took it on a ride to the local packing house.

A few days later, they got the meat back.

My Dad knew nothing about this and is enjoying a thick T-bone that night. He puts down his knife and fork, looks at my Mom and says, “Marge, this is great meat. Where did you get it?”

My mother, who was party to the crime, looked at my brother.

He put down his knife and fork and said, “Dad, you know your prize steer?’

“Yeah?”

“Well, you’re eating it.”

My dad didn’t talk to my brother for a week.

But he didn’t stop eating the meat either.