While I can appreciate the fact that as communities we are lacking the slaughtering and processing facilities that we need to have functional local food systems, I also have reservations about systems such as mobile slaughterhouses. For some, these units will allow new opportunities, but for others, those of us hard-scrabble, back-woods practitioners, it also represents the USDA finding another way to edit our food production stories.

On account of their size, lambs lend themselves for use on the farm more readily than do other farm animals. They can be consumed in a short period of time and for this reason are not generally cured. Also because of the fact that mutton is a drier meat and does not contain much soft fat, it does not lend itself to curing as well as do other meats.

I had seen the truck running around locally with a sign on the side which said CUSTOM MEAT CUTTER and a phone number so I called. It was a small family-owned business thirty miles away. They told me straight away that their facility wasn’t federally inspected. I didn’t care. (In my rustic, hardscrabble, farm and ranch community, federal inspection was a joke – an extra fee you paid to get a stamp of approval with no one really inspecting anything.)