When watching movies or reading about famous people, you frequently hear and read of people who are vegetarians by choice. Finding Nigerians who are vegetarians by choice is akin to finding needle in a haystack. You would find I am sure if you looked, but the higher likely hood would be finding people who are vegetarians, either for health or religious based reasons. The closest an average Nigerian would practice for abstinence with meat would be being pescatarian.
Being omnivore dieters of such magnitude, it is important to know a good deal about our animal protein sources and choices, how best to pair with our meals and drink choices, how to store them properly and how to identify clearly and easily good quality and fresh meat, especially given the infrastructural challenge with power supply in Nigeria.
An important requirement for safety reason is to let the blood flow completely out of any animal during the slaughtering process. For the sake of reducing animal cruelty, alternative methods are employed to render the animals unconscious first. Stunning (electrocution) and passing through gas chambers is sometimes used to put the animals in an unconscious state before slaughtering and in some other cases guns are used for bigger animals.
Poultry are domesticated bird meats raised for the purpose of human consumption or in some occasions as pets.
The bird meats usually from Chicken, Turkey, Quail and Guinea fowls. Generally they are regarded as white meats and also called lean meats – due its lower fat and heavier protein content per gram. Eating animal protein is known to help with building muscle mass – as opposed to eating a strictly heavy vegetable diet.
The process of arriving at the meat of poultry starts from deciding which bird to slaughter. Maturity of grown bird vary for each meat type and specie. Commercially raising bird meat in the era of capitalism has greatly reduced the time frame required to grow a bird large enough to qualify as matured.
For societies where the authorities find it difficult to enforce food safety rules, being able to identify by sight a bird that was dressed after it died could be a life saver. For good reason, poultry is called a white meat because the meat bears the appearance – that is it appears white to look at.
Poultry birds that died before being dressed appear darker in complexion and closer to brownish red that white. When purchasing poultry, you are best served to note the appearance of your poultry.
Poultry should be frozen at less than sub-optimal temperatures (< -4 degree celcius) during it entire shelf life preferably not exceeding 24 months, at controlled atmosphere storage. For poultry the optimal controlled atmosphere is hermetically.
