Let’s face it – man has been “processing” food from the first time meat was cooked over a fire or added salt to preserve to eat later without it spoiling as rapidly.

Processing used to simply be used to preserve food for consumption beyond a product’s normal shelf life or place where it was grown. I still have the documents my grandparents filled out in the 1940’s that calculated how many quarts of fruit preserves, vegetables, jams, jellies, bushels of potatoes, apples, etc, were necessary for their subsistance on an annual basis. These documents were required to obtain the loan to purchase their farm. Until the industrial revolution, food production remained rudimentary; people generally ate what they or others living nearby could produce and preserve. In addition, food production employed a very large proportion of the population.

Today, the food industry is totally different: a very small percent of the population produces three-quarters of the nations’ food. The rest is imported from all over the world.

The success of food processing is dependent upon the quality and safety of the finished products. While the food industry follows many rigorous internal quality assurance procedures, there are many others involved before it ever gets to your table including suppliers, transporters, wholesalers and retailers. That is a lot of people to depend upon when it comes to safe food.

Making Sausage

On Fasching Farm, rely on ourselves to ensure that the food we eat is safe and nutritious. We purchase as few groceries as possible (for example, we have not purchased beef in 22 years or dairy products in 4 years). We minimize the processing of our food and only to the extent that is needed to preserve it for consumption later. So, when the first day of spring rolled around we thought it a great time to begin our annual sausage making. Making your own sausage products from the meat we raise or hunt is closing in on being considered “a lost art”. Yet, it was not too many generations ago that making sausage was mainstream. As a child I remember butchering and freezing chicken annually. My family also had a huge garden and fruit trees and froze, canned, dried, or placed as much food in the root cellar as possible so that it could be eaten later. This was necessary simply because grocery stores only carried fruits and vegetables seasonally, not year around like they do now (imported from all over).

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Now, all that is left to do is package, label, and freeze. Oh, and eat – YUM!