There is a new way of buying meat in Belgium and this is called crowd butchering. Introduced in May, the inventor of ‘crowd butchering’ is a pilot David De Keyser who launched the website Deeleenkoe.be or Share a Cow.
The concept is pretty simple. You commit to buy 10 kilograms of meat from a cow (or pig as there is also a site for selling pork) at 132.95 euros. For this you will get approximately 10 kilogrammes of beef including roast, rump steak, entrecôte, beef for a stew, hamburgers, mince, and shoulder steaks among others, all in packs of one kilo each.
The cow will only be slaughtered once the whole cow is sold. The size of a cow varies but it generally weighs around 700 kilos which means that there is about 450 kilos of meat. The parts which are sold separately are the offal and the fillet because there is not enough for around 35 customers who purchase the cow.
Although this might sound like a new concept, this in
itiative has ancient roots because it was a practice in the past for whole families of neighbours in a village to buy and share a cow. Deeleenkoe.be is now offering anyone from Belgium and the Netherlands the possibility to buy parts of a cow which can be shared by total strangers.
De Keyser, who created the concept said he wanted to sell meat from cows which had a good life, where no antibiotics had been used and no water had been injected into the meat to make it heavier as happens with supermarket meat. The meat comes from cows of a dairy farmer in West Flanders.
We have just heard about the concept and think it is a really good idea so we thought of sharing, particularly for our readers in Belgium and the Netherlands. The only constraint for the time being is the website’s language which is only in Dutch. But we have managed to find our way through it so don’t think it should be an issue.
Ah ah ! Thank you food&wine of reminding me of my early years in Normandy where it was exactly what my parents/grand-parents/uncle were doing. Taking an animal (pork, cow, sheep) from my Grand-father’s or uncle’s farm, ask one of the local butcher to come and share in 2 or 3 and you had meat for the rest of the year….more local than this you can’t find…!