Do you have a younger kid who hunts? Here’s a great way to teach them how they can provide for the family. When our son shot his first deer at six years old, we wanted him to understand the impact of his contribution. So, we calculated just how much food he put on the table.
Here’s what we did:
As we processed the deer, we used our kitchen scale to measure how much meat we were yielding and wrote it down:
Tenderloin – 12lb
Backstrap – 5lb, 4oz
Roasts – 14lbs, 8oz
Ground – 6lbs, 12oz
Heart – 12oz
Scraps for the Dog – 2lbs
That’s a total of 30 pounds of meat!
If you take your harvested animal to a processor, you can easily get this figure when you pick it up after it’s processed. Or you can weigh the boxes on your bathroom scale when you get home. Don’t be concerned about exact numbers! You’re just looking for an approximate here.
Once you have the number of pounds, you’ll want to convert the total pounds to ounces.
There are 16 ounces in a pound, so the 30 pounds of meat equaled 480 ounces (30 pounds x 16 ounces per pound = 480 total ounces).
Then divide the total ounces by an average portion of meat for your family. We used a 6 ounce portion as the average for our family, but you can adjust this based on what your family would typically consume per meal.
Going back to our example, the 480 ounces of meat equaled 80 portions (480 ounces / 6 ounces per portion = 80 portions).
Finally, take the number of portions and divide it by the number of people in your family to calculate the number of meals you’ll get from the harvest.
For our little family of 3, those 80 portions gave us a total of 27 meals, easily! (80 portions / 3 people in our family = 26.66 meals)
To help conceptualize this for our son, we placed all of the packages of meat in front of him and told him that his harvest would feed us dinner every day for a month. What a huge accomplishment for such a small person!
Disclaimer: I realize the 2 pounds of dog scraps was included in the calculation to find the number of meals for our family. We’re keeping math really simple here, so I’m not concerned about being technical.
After we shared the total number of meals with our son and explained the impact it had on our family, we decided to take it one step further:
We wrote his name on every package of meat before it went into the freezer. And anytime we used the deer he harvested in a meal, we were intentional about letting him know we were eating HIS deer.
Then came the most important part … as we were eating our meal, we thanked him for providing for our family.
It was important for us to teach him that he could contribute—he could provide for our family—even at his young age, and this was just one of the ways to help him grasp that.
Shared By: Jackie Bednara
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