Too hard up to buy meat

I guess the cost of living is getting dearer and dearer.  I seem to spend a lot of time window shopping at the meat counter.  It looks good, very good but I can't afford to buy any.  Sometimes I buy something that is reduced.  It is never steak though and never lamb.  When I was younger lamb was the cheapest cut of meat.  We used to feast on huge great legs of lamb with roast potatoes, pumpkin, carrot, onion and mint sauce every Sunday. The good old Aussie roast dinner. For those of us who could not always afford lamb we bought hoggett.  Hoggett came from older sheep.  It may have been a little more chewy but it certainly had plenty of flavour.  I wonder why we can't have hoggett these days?

 Once upon a time chicken was a luxury.  Most people could only afford it at Christmas and now it is one of the more affordable cuts of meat.  I remember watching Mum pluck chickens on a Sunday morning.  I doubt if she actually killed the chicken but she did dip it into very hot water and then strip of all the feathers.  Every part of the chicken was used.  Even bought chickens had giblets left inside, but now you just get the chicken. 

So now we get back to me trawling the meat departments of supermarkets.  I look, I like, I don't buy.  I am thinking of borrowing on my pension to be able to buy a nice bit of steak or a leg of lamb that would cost say twenty-nine dollars.  My biggest meat purchase is a few sausages or sometimes, sometimes I buy some mince. My diet seems to consist of bread, muffins, crumpets, cereal and fruit. 

I have just realized that sometime down the years that museums will showcase meats.  Old people will take their grandchildren to the museum to see actual meat.  They will tell long boring stories about how they once ate a sausage or on some special occasion had dined on a chicken leg.  Our Museum might be called the Authentic Meat Museum of South Australia.  

My stories will start, 'When I was a girl."  I will go on to wax lyrical about all the meat I used to eat and just how good it was.  Come to think of it, I can do that already.  When I was a girl I used to eat porterhouse steak.  Steak, amazing, who would have thought?