Hussein Muktar does not like eating frozen goat meat from far away. He remembers buying one batch of it at a Maine market – maybe from Australia he thought – that he discovered was well past its expiration date after he’d brought it home. It didn’t smell right, as his wife cooked it. “It was like, black inside,” he said.
This Somali immigrant, who has called Maine home for more than a decade, wishes that Maine’s booming local food movement was producing more fresh goat meat to meet not just his needs but demand from the larger Muslim community.
But it’s a complex picture, both practically and culturally speaking. For starters, not that many farmers are raising meat goats locally. The trend toward adding goats is upward, but still, in the last U.S. Farm Census, completed in 2012, only 305 of Maine’s more than 8,000 farms reported raising meat goats.
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