If you want suet just go to a butcher and ask for it.  The butcher will
know exactly what it is.  Your local supermarket may not have it, though
it's worth a try--just ring the bell and ask the people behind the counter
for it.  (By the way, it's pronounced "SOO-it").  If the supermarket can't
help, just look in the yellow pages for a "Meat Market" and/or "Butcher"
and you should have no trouble.  You will also find the stuff comes quite
cheap; people generally don't want the stuff because of the fat-phobia that
still runs rampant in the U.S. but butchers know what it is and some older
folks still order it.  I can get it for about 50 cents a pound and that may
be expensive.

As for the suet itself being contaminated or containing poisons: I'd like
to know what kind of evidence there is beyond vague philosophy that that
modern beef fat actually has toxins in it.  All meat animals eat foods that
the human digestive tract cannot handle.  One of the primary benefits of
using these animals is that they take food which is inedible to us, and
convert it into food which IS edible to us.

If you want, however, suet should be easily available from "free range"
buffalo and other cattle.

As for the dangers of suet from modern cattle: Arachidonic Acid is one of
the essential fatty acids necessary for health.  Barry Sears is the only
person I've seen who generalizes about this stuff so broadly aside from
vegetarian advocates.  The way I would address this is to ask myself what
the specific claim is that this stuff will do to you, and then see if your
body responds in the predicted manner.  If it does not, you have to start
wondering.  My cholesterol certainly did NOT get worse after I vastly
increased the amount of AA in my diet.  I've never seen any strong evidence
that AA is an actual danger (although I'm willing to be shown it if it
exists--I'd appreciate hearing about any references in the peer-reviewed
literature); even Barry Sears has backed down lately (not in his books but
on his web site and in his public statements) saying that saturated fat
doesn't turn out to be the danger it has so long been thought to be. (And
of course any saturates he's talking about would be the supermarket kind.)

If the fear is of saturates in general, it remains that after two decades
of research the idea that saturated fats (which all have AA of course) are
a significant health hazard no longer has any meaningful scientific
credibility, and there is a growing body of evidence that avoiding
saturated fats is a health hazard.

The saturated fat of suet is not substantially altered chemically by
heating; saturates are very, very stable even when heated (unless heated to
burning of course).  Pre-agricultural peoples have been rendering fat for a
long, long time.  Although I assume they probably put up with more of the
crunchy cartilage and veins stuff in the food than we do, filtering the
largest chunks out is quite easy with no more than a stick or simple spoon.
To render fat you need no more than a smoldering fire, a pot of some sort,
and a spoon.

Pemmican is good, healthy, high-energy food.  If one of you knows of an
extensive chemical analysis of suet that shows it to be full of toxins I'd
really like to hear about it, and what precisely they are, but otherwise
I'm rather skeptical that there's any sort of problem.  Injecting animals
with hormones may be unnatural but the hormones themselves are not.  I also
don't see any reason to believe giving an animal antibiotics translates
into making the meat dangerous to me.  And the fact that they're eating
foods I can't naturally digest is irrelevent; they're ruminants, I'm not,
and as a predator I see their whole reason to exist as being to turn
inedible foods into yummy, edible meats for me.

So that would be the other side of it, the way I see it anyway.  :-)  I'm
interested in free-range meats as I feel they will be more natural and more
environmentally responsible but I'd like to hear more evidence that the
non-free-range stuff is dangerous.

 -=-=-

Once in a while you get shown the light/
 In the strangest of places if you look at it right   ---Robert Hunter

http://www.syndicomm.com/esmay