Eating your friends may seem the quickest way to a lonely life, but Mark Cooper of the Rough and Ready homestead in California lives anything but that. He’s surrounded by animals. It just so happens that his self-reliant lifestyle involves killing some of them and eating them.
Cooper pats Friendly the lamb and tells how it is destined for the freezer. “You can’t make everything a pet,” he says.
Slaughtering, he says, is the worst part of the job. However, “once the dirty work’s done and you sit down at the table, you remember the entire process. I remember the day he was born … it makes you so much more in touch with your food source and, I don’t know, it’s just a way of being…
Peak Moment TV, a US community access television show that focuses on sustainable living, takes us on a tour of Cooper’s property in this video, via Treehugger.
The tour also looks at Cooper’s orchard, homemade food dryer, shitake mushroom logs and portable kitchen garden.
It’s half an hour of inspiration for anyone interested in living a low-impact life in the bush.
