Healthy Aspects of Eating Venison

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Eat venison, and you eat healthy, wild and local. Dave Allen/Fotolia

These days, we put a premium on organically produced meats, vegetables and fruits. Additionally, the locavore movement is sweeping across the nation as conscientious consumers look for ways to buy that rib-eye steak from the farmer down the road rather than take a chance on something they find in the supermarket. But often lost in the shuffle is consumption of a lean meat that’s as local as it gets, and depending on the surrounding farmland, may just approach organic status.

By eating venison, you're eating healthy, wild and local.

As an avid hunter living in southwest Virginia, I try to bring eight or nine whitetails from field to freezer annually, as the major meat source for my wife, Elaine, and me and, when they were young enough to be a part of our household, for our two children. I really believe in the health benefits of eating venison and wild game meat, and in the healthy lifestyle of hunting.

Lindsay Thomas of Bogart, Georgia, is the editor for the Quality Deer Management Association, an organization dedicated to the scientific management of whitetails.

“I feed my family with venison, and I have always felt that venison is the ultimate ‘organic’ food,” he says. “When I see marketing phrases like ‘cage-free’ and ‘organic,’ I wish that the public knew that hunters have access to the most cage-free, organic, chemical-free, natural food in the world. And venison is extremely good for your health.”

To understand deer meat, like anything, you should consider what the animal is eating. Venison is only as organic as the corn or soybean field the deer typically grazes in, but you get the idea. Before modern agriculture brought with it pesticides and myriad chemical sprays, venison would have been totally organic. Today, we’re not so lucky, but when you consider the average deer, it approaches organic. Ironically, true organic venison would come from caged deer that weren’t allowed to graze where they please, and the animal’s life would not be nearly as fulfilling.

Inexpensive meat: processing your own deer meat

Eating venison is relatively inexpensive. Consider the case of the Kansas bowhunter. A good-sized mature doe (the most desirable sex to the meat hunter, as opposed to the trophy hunter) might achieve a hanging weight of 80 pounds. Before you shot this deer, you paid $17.50 for the antlerless tag, $20.50 for the general hunting license, and somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 for the arrow that may or may not be used again. The key to keeping it cheap is to learn to skin and process the deer yourself.