It has been about 17 days now and all the meat is still great. It is nice to be able to just slice off some meat for a meal anytime. Tastes very good with slices of my home-made raw milk cheese. Cold cuts. I discovered that the cheese I make every week responds to the air drying & salting preservation also. I can leave it out on the table for weeks no problem, if I put it in a container in the frig it get moldy.

Things went so well I started another batch. This time I used a 5.5 pound top sirloin roast and a couple of two pound chuck arm roasts. The top sirloin is a fairly tender cut of beef while the arm roasts are one of the toughest cuts. Conventional wisdom says the arm roasts can only be made edible by moist heat cooking for a couple of hours. Not true. The natural enzymes pre-digest the meat for me so my own enzymes can take it easy. There are scientific studies out there that claim when our own enzymes get used up or worn out is when we start to die. I'm 59 and feeling younger and stronger every day. Never get sick.

The only thing that is a problem is that the beef is not grass finished. However it is fresh cut and not the "up to 12% salt water added to enhance tenderness and flavor" crap that most supermarkets sell. I will move to grass finished beef as finances permit.

I used to take dried beef to work for my lunch, but now I cut off a thick slice of dry aged meat and cut into bite size pieces. It stays good in a baggie for at least 8 hours.

I use two Nesco fd-75pr dehydrators with extra trays. A Google search brought up a lot of merchants with prices of from $47 used on Ebay to $70.

The ground beef is beef ground with fat attached. Depending on the cut of meat it can range from 30% to 10% fat in the stores. My butcher mixes the heart in with it when he grinds it. The higher the fat content the less the cost. In feedlot finished cattle the fat is bad for you so order lean. If it is grass finished beef the fat is good for you so order the less expensive fatty grind. Heart is very lean so it brings down the fat %. I tried coarse grinding my own with a lot of extra fat once but did not like it much.

My last purchase I paid $2.49 per pound for grass finished ground beef and $1.00 per pound for the heart. I am in the Kansas City, Kansas area. I have to drive out to a small town in the country to get to this butcher so I stock up and do a big batch of jerky. I also eat the ground beef just warmed up with salt & pepper, tastes great.

The jerky will last a year or longer if you dry it all the way to crunchy. I dry mine about half way while it is still soft and store it in the freezer, removing a day's supply at a time. In the freezer it will last a year also. If I vacuum sealed it, it would go a couple of years or more. If I don't dry it completely and store it in the frig it will get moldy. The mold is probably not bad and it does not smell bad.

For the jerkey gun, look on Amazon for: Metalware Open Country Beef Jerky Works Kit. It is also branded Nesco. Sells for about $15. I tried a similar larger plastic product once which did not work so I trashed it. I see on Amazon they have a big metal one for about $50 that looks interesting. I also noticed Amazon has 3 different models of Nesco dehydrators. Nice.

They did not name breeds, I assume it would be all the beef breeds like Angus. I have never seen yellow fat meat in a grocery store. The only time I saw it was from a dairy cow.

I'm not an expert on this but I do know they can rapidly breed animals for all kinds of characteristics like meat color, flavor, fat content, muscle size, etc. They pull breeding stock from all over the world. Artificial insemination makes it easy.

It has been six days now. All 3 roasts doing great, each one getting more tender and flavorful as time goes on. No off flavors, odors or colors have developed.
The meat is still a dark maroon/brown color. I like the rump roast the best, it has some fat but not so much as to be overwhelming. The roast in the frig at 50 degrees with the fan is drying out more than the others which I like, however they are all still very moist inside. I put the roast at room temperature in front of a fan for a day to firm it up. The dryer meat has a better chew. I can put the sliced meat in a baggie and snack on it throughout the day.

Keeping all surfaces dry is the key here I think. Even the cut surface stays nice.  If I put it in a bag or on a plate it would get moist, slimey, discolor, and smell bad.

How long will it last? To be continued......

This is a quotation from the book "Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity": "Fish are put into a hole and covered with grass and earth and the mass is allowed to ferment and decay. I learned, to my utter astonishment , they would eat those rotten poisonous foods and thrive on them. Lest the reader might think that the cooking process would destroy the poisons in their vitiated foods, I wish to say that in only a few instances did they cook their food. The usual customary method was to devour it raw." Written by Garber who lived a number of years among the Eskimos in northern Alaska.

Food for thought.

There are more bacteria in a healthy human digestive system than there are cells in the whole body. If we have been eating the right foods these are beneficial bacteria and yeasts that help us digest our food and provide us with vitamins and enzymes necessary for survival. If these bacteria are destroyed because we don't eat live foods, take antibiotics, or drink excessive amounts of alcohol. The white film on the surface of organic fruit is beneficial bacteria. Cabbage plants have a lot of the good bacteria which quickly multiply to make sauerkraut. Raw milk from grassfed cows has good bacteria which will turn the milk to yoghurt if left at room temperature.

Unfortunately bad bacteria do exhist. They produce toxic substances that can make people sick and even die. Those who are most at risk are young children, the eldery, and people with comprimised immune systems like the person who started this discussion. A strong person with good nutrition and healthy digestive flaura would probably have temporary digestive distress and soon recover stronger than before. Humans have good immune systems that can learn, adapt and build defences.

If we lived somewhere where there were no tourists and we hunted animals in the local environment and we butchered them ouselves we probably would not get sick even if the meat was infected. However in our modern society the meat we acquire is raised anywhere in the world, under who know what kind of filthy conditions, butchered in possibly filthy disease ridden processing factories, and cut and handeled many times by possibly diseased people. There is a hugh risk here if we let the meat rot with whatever it got from wherever. Kind of like Russian roulette.

Our ancestors learned this lesson a long long time ago and took steps to control the spoilage of their meat. They used salting, drying, cooling, smoking, and by introducing lots of good bacteria before the bad ones can get established.

You may benefit from consuming high meat. Your neighbor may end up in the hospital. We constantly hear about meat recalls that are causing death and disease. Please use caution. I personally avoid rotted meat and get my good bacteria and yeast from home-made raw milk yoghurt and home-made fermented garden vegetables and vinegar at every meal.

Best of luck to you and have a happy raw Thanksgiving.

I am at the start of a test run right now. My premise is that uncut meat has the natural antibiotics of the animal keeping the bacteria down. The cut surface of the meat is where spoilage occurs. The natural enzymes in the meat will act as a tenderizer. Bacteria will not thrive in a salty or dry environment. Black pepper is an antibiotic.

I took 3 roasts, a 4 pound lean rump roast with a 1/8 inch layer of fat on one side, and 2 usda choice chuck roasts each a little over 2 pounds.

I rubbed each roast with fine sea salt, as much as it would take. I then rubbed as much fine ground black pepper into the meat as it would hold.

I put all 3 roasts on racks and put them in front of a fan to hasten initial drying. After 12 hours all the roasts had a dry crust on the outside. Slicing into all 3 roasts produced a dark maroon meat that was very tender, had a nice firm texture, and the taste was excellent (the salt and pepper added a lot to the flavor). The fatty areas of the chuck roasts were tough and grizzly. After eating about 8 ounces of thin sliced meat I felt really good.

On the second day (today) I put the rump roast in a refrigerator that has no internal fan and is set to 38 degrees. One chuck roast went into a refrigerator set at 50 degrees with a small circulating fan. The other chuck roast is sitting out at room temperature of about 65 degrees F. The cut cut surface of all 3 roasts was left open and quickly dried to a dark red. All the roasts are on racks and uncovered.

I plan to sample them daily for 2 or 3 weeks. So far very good results. 

I reccommend the book "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon. Transition by gradually ignoring the grain and bean recipes and info. A lot of good information here.

Also read "Pottinger's Cats". It illustrates the immense importance of evolutionary adapted nutrition.

The WP study was good in that it attempted to cronicle civilizations that were becoming extinct and had no contact with VERY RECENT civilizations. These people were still civilized and suffered because of the human modified food they ate. If WP could have studied  back about 3,000 years instead of a few hundred it would have been much better.

The "Pottingers Cats" book described how the processed food diet caused a decrease in secondary sex charisteristics in the cats. The males hung out with the males and had no interest in the femails. Normal sexual appearance traits disappeared. The femails could no longer bear children. The book even makes comparisons to humans and shows pictures of young adults from behind. Doctors could not tell the difference between the boys and girls. The girls are losing their hip structure necessary for childbirth.

Price went into detail about how easy it was for indigenous women to give birth in the US Pacific Northwest. In the same populations on western diets the women now need hospitalization and the death rate has increased.

First I put in a reverse osmosis (RO) filtering system which gets pretty close to distilled. I even have a meter that shows total disolved solids (TDS). RO water like distilled does not contain any minerals however. We need minerals for strong teeth and bones, among other things. So I took mineral supplements.

The Brita filters and others like them use activated carbon to filter the water. This removes foul taste, organic compounds, and odor but leaves the minerals. In theory.

After researching and experimenting I ended up with a whole house activated carbon filter that uses standard filter cartridges. You can get these at hardware stores and even Wal-Mart. I hooked the whole-house filter up to a single water tap for just drinking water. This allows the water to slowly go through the filter and so it takes a long time to use up the carbon's filtering capacity and is more effective. This system is way less costly than Brita and way more effective. It is also what most bottled water companies use.

I bought some beverages in glass bottles and re-use these for my daily water supply while out and about. Makes nice tea too. The minerals give the water a pleasing taste.

Grains have been highly modified by man in the last few thousand years. Not so much with roots. I enjoy a lot of raw beets, turnips, carrots, radish, etc. Don't think they are altered much by cooking but still like them better raw.

This forum seems to emphasize the RAF raw animal food aspect and push omnivor to the back burner.