seasonal meat

As a proud member of the Ploughshare Farms CSA, I've gotten the hang of eating seasonally to some degree -- beet time still feels like a challenge, for example, and I always run out of preserved summer vegetables long before the last snow shoveling round. But lately, as I've been boosting the number of  backyard barbecues, I've been wondering about a different type of seasonal eating. I began wondering: does meat have a season, too? Here's what I discovered in talking to farmers and a co-op manager: the answer is yes, but also no.

Excellent, short post on Zachary Cohen's Farm to Table blog this week about the seasonality of meat. The post references a seasonal meat article in the Atlantic, noting that, just as produce needs time to ripen before it's ready, sustainably raised, grass-fed animals need time to graze and grow before they're ready as well. Definitely worth a read.