[richlevy]

I just joined a beef club at work. Usually you buy beef in quarters but I found someone to split with so I am buying 1/8th of a cow.

The meat comes from here and is butchered here. This all happens about a 1 hour drive from my house. In my opinion this is going back to the old days when we lived closer to where your food was grown.

So I'm going to be paying for somewhere around 100 lbs of beef at about $2.50 per pound but which will end up as only about 60-70 lbs of meat after trimming and dry aging. This works out to about $4 per lb. A good portion of it will be ground beef or hamburger patties, and $4 is a bit much for that, even though it is natural beef. But I will be paying the same $4 a pound for porterhouse steaks, ribeye steaks..... I have to negotiate with my beef partners over the cutting instructions, and this is their first time doing this too. I plan on paying an extra 10 cents per pound to have the ground beef frozen and packaged as burgers. I will probably have the cheaper roasts cut into 'chip steak', which is what we Philadelphians use in our 'steak' sandwiches.

We're already clearing space in the freezer for the meat, which will be ready in May.

I have already promised Wolf and a few others a bbq invite for the summer. This was made before I went in on the beef order. You can all expect burgers and steak sandwiches at a minimum.