My Life as a Meat Packer

This is a selection of food to thaw that comes out of the puppy freezer every couple of days.  Warning, this is a long post.  Many folks think that feeding a dog real food is expensive.  The truth is, it's not -- as long as you're willing to take time for prep.  Our goal is to use every last scrap of food, so this is often the end-step of using up "human" food.  Example: the bottle of "meat slurry," that comes out of processing bones.  An average meal for our dog is a piece of chicken or turkey, along with either an egg or gizzards.  The aim is to freeze in portions to cover a day and a half.

It makes more sense to approach feeding in bulk.  It takes time, space and you've got a lot to clean up after -- so do it once every couple of weeks instead of taking time during the week.  To be honest, this was almost impossible when we both worked.  As a result, we were always scrambling to make sure we were buying poultry or meat as we needed it.  Now we can buy and store ahead.  This haul of meat took about an hour and a half to pack into serviceable portions.

Our dog eats mostly poultry, but it's good to mix in different kinds of protein.  Organ meat is important because it is nutrient dense.  That's why we feed gizzards when we serve poultry.  It's also why we'll grab beef heart, kidney or liver on a regular basis.  This wouldn't be a staple, but it's something we like to give every two weeks or so.  Four meals will set us back seven or eight bucks -- a little more than we are accustomed to regularly spending. 

Having a large baking tray to work on is a must.  This catches run-off and is the best surface for stacking the meat.  Cut the stuff using kitchen shears -- it's the easiest way to go and if you have sub-standard knife skills, it's a great way to keep your fingertips intact!

The two packages produced a lot of healthy beef organ material.  Stay away from ground beef!  When was the last time anyone heard of a beef organ recall?  It's generally ground meat that ends up contaminated.   Think of the extra surface area for bacteria to grow on and the many steps of production.  Beef organs are too rich to feed daily and make a perfect once a week (or every other week) protein boost. 

 If you are not sure how much to portion out, use a scale.  A good rule of thumb is to feed 2 percent of the dog's weight in meat per day.  While the raw meaty bones we normally feed (chicken and turkey) have calcium to balance out the phosphorus (protein in muscle meat and organs), we don't worry about that in our organ meals -- they are such a small portion of her regular diet, so it makes little difference.  If we found Teddy was getting pudgy, we'd just feed a little less.  However, without eating grains and lots of snacks, getting fat is rarely a problem for her.

The chopped up meat is put into one bag after it's been portioned out.  Cut the label off the meat wrapper and throw it in the bag so you'll always know what you're pulling out of the freezer and the approximate date it was sold.  While we use freezer bags for each portion, a regular twisty-tie bag is fine for the whole batch. If the individual bags get somewhat frozen together, drop the hunk on the floor and it will break them apart!

We go through approximately two trays of chicken gizzards a week.   They are put into half pound portions and frozen.  A handful is thrown into Teddy's food bowl once she's finished her main portion (either a chicken part or turkey neck).  We learned that it's important to wait for her to finish her big piece before handling the gizzards.  She'd swallow what she had whole in order to get to the gizzards faster.  Golden Retrievers:  Always sweet, always hungry, and always dumb.  Sorry but true!

Again, sort the gizzards on the big aluminum tray and save the package label.  While I try to rotate the contents of the freezer, sometimes it's hard to keep track of what's in there.  Keeping the labels helps a lot!

It might seem gross, but seal the bags up almost entirely closed, then stick in a straw and suck out as much air as you can.  Rather than considering this a food handling risk, think of yourself as being just as brave as a glass blower...

Big bags of chicken leg quarters are a great raw feeding value.  The trick is to not buy them frozen solid, if you can help it.  If you don't have that luck, then drop the bag on the ground a few times to break apart whatever you can.  This ten pound bag of Tyson leg quarters runs around seven and a half bucks.  One leg/thigh portion is a good size meal for a large dog, or cut in half for a smaller one.

 This will be four meals.  With pieces this large, she'll get the gizzards with one meal only -- or if TBG feels like cutting the thigh/drumsticks in two, she'll get the smaller piece, gizzards and an egg (with the shell, since she likes that so much!).  If we end up with extra gizzards, sometimes she gets a meal of just gizzards and an egg.

Free produce bags come in handy for us.  First, we always bag our raw meat in them before packing the purchase into our re-usable shopping totes.   Then the bags are also used to wrap the meat portions together before putting into a larger bag.  A quart size freezer bag won't hold all four pieces, so we wrap four in the produce bag and cram two of those bundles into a freezer bag.

When it's all done, there are a bunch of portioned packs in larger bags, labelled with the packaging label.  After all this is done, I sometimes feel as if I should join the meat-packers union --  but it's worth it to save money and time in the long run.

And as usual... Teddy is always happy to help with the clean-up!