How to Eat Wild Game Safely

When looking at the food landscape, it quickly becomes clear to people who want to eat organic that doing so can be a challenge, especially given how loose the definitions are when it comes to applying the organic label to a product. When it comes to meat, though, it doesn’t get more organic than wild game. While farmed game meat is also a healthy option, being lower in saturated fat and calories than meat from domestic animals, the presence of human input raises the question of antibiotics, growth hormones, and other contaminants that the FDA has been notoriously lax in policing.

 

How to procure wild game can be another question: the options range from the convenient but questionably provenance option of purchasing online to the time-consuming task of hunting and fishing for your own. In between these are the premium online meat providers (with premium prices), trusted butcher shops, and hunter connections who supply the (relative to farm-raised) minuscule supply of wild game meat on the market.

 

If you’re going to get meat from non-USDA inspected sources (and if it’s not processed on a commercial scale it probably isn’t) you need to either have a supplier you can trust or have a knowledge of what to look for. Of course, given the unknown steps that go between harvesting the animal and the dressed meat that winds up in your kitchen, there’s a lot you have to leave to trust even if you inspect the meat thoroughly when you get it. Given these considerations, the only real way to be sure you’re getting absolutely safe game is to harvest it yourself. If this isn’t possible, then use only meat from farmed game for rare/medium rare preparations.

 

The safest way to use wild game you haven’t harvested is to cook it thoroughly in low and slow preparations. Another approach is to make it into sausage. The sausage should not only be made with care to avoid introducing microbes into the mince, it should then be given a good hot smoking to make sure the internal temperature reaches safe levels. Canning, if done carefully, will also do, but improper processing can cause growth of the microbes that cause botulism. Jerky has also been known to cause problems when the smoking temperatures weren’t high enough to kill the bacteria.

 

If you have the time and the inclination, the best option is obviously to go out and harvest your own game. This of course assumes that you can efficiently take down your quarry, keep it cool, and dress it either in the field or in a convenient location. Below are some tips for making sure that your harvested meat is safe:

 

Make sure you know what human-affecting conditions there are in your quarry in the area you’re hunting in, and make sure you know how to identify them in the animal while it’s alive and in the carcass. Common sense dictates that a sick-looking animal probably won’t make for good eating.

Try not to get a gut shot. If you do, don’t gut the carcass when you butcher it since the spilled gut contents will ruin any meat it comes into contact with.

 

Wear gloves while dressing the carcass, and separate the innards from the rest ASAP.

 

Cool the meat quickly. It’s better to field dress on site and store in a cooler than drag a carcass any considerable distance on a hot day.

 

Use a separate knife or saw to remove the head. This is for deer and the like. You don’t want any neural matter contaminating the meat just in case the animal had any wasting disease.

 

Keep the meat clean. Cut away any hemorrhaged tissue, try to avoid bacterial contamination as much as possible, and wash the cuts thoroughly after butchering.

 

Lastly, when in doubt, throw it out. And if you wouldn’t eat it yourself, don’t feed it to your pets—remember that they can be affected just as much as, if not more than, you by certain parasites and infections.

 

Brandon Peters is an entrepreneur, writer, lover of the outdoors, and amateur cook. He enjoys the kind of eating experiments that you can live through.

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