Lenah Game Meats
We sustainably produce delicious food from the animals which belong here
We believe that our meat is good for you, makes environmental sense and is produced using ethical principles.
Wallaby & Game Meat
LENAH WALLABY
Wallaby is uniquely Tasmanian and it’s the only place in Australia where it’s legal. It produces a much milder and sweeter meat than it mainland counterparts aka larger roos. We knew this and were excited to be the first people to offer this great meat to restaurants and home cooks.'
When we started 30 years ago it was called all sorts of things in that wonderfully unique Tasmanian way. We proudly called it wallaby and now people across Australia select Lenah wallaby as the premium grade of kangaroo meat.
Lenah harvests its wallaby from some of Tasmania’s best grazing land, thus the meat has a consistent and mild flavour. In addition Lenah has developed systems to ensure that only product from young animals is used for our first grade cuts; the rest being made into smallgoods. This helps guarantee a consistently high quality, tender product.
Lenah Wallaby is sold in most states and every territory in Australia. It has featured on many of Australia’s most famous menus and has more than once won the Delicious magazine gong for the best meat product out of Tasmania. It is also available in supermarkets throughout Tasmania and increasingly on the Mainland.
John is fond of claiming that wallaby has been the red meat of choice amongst the discerning Tasmanian dining public for 40,000 years. It’s only the last 100 years or so that there’s been a bit of a hiccup in it’s marketing program and he reckons Lenah is well on the way to turning that around.
POSSUM
When prepared in Anglo style dishes possum has a flavour not dissimilar to rabbit. Several of Australia’s top chefs have used possum and their recipes have been featured in Gourmet Traveller Magazine.
OTHER GAME MEATS
Lenah processes wild harvest venison, rabbits and hare. A strong focus on quality of products and service has seen Lenah mature into a significant player and multi award winning business.
Lenah is a specialist producer of Tasmanian indigenous meat products, specifically wallaby and possum.
Wallabies Don't Fart
Well they do but they don't smell
Methane is 27 times worse than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas (1). Cattle and sheep emit large volumes of methane as a by-product of their digestive system (2). The amount of methane emitted by any one animal depends on a range of factors, not the least of which is their diet.
The concept of ‘embedded carbon’ represents the amount of carbon which has been released to produce a food. It has been estimated that boneless beef from Australian grass-fed cattle has between 19.8-27.1 kg of embedded carbon per kg of boneless beef. However, these estimates can rise by up to 34% when land-use related emissions are included (3).
Wallaby and kangaroos on the other hand emit almost no methane as a result of a completely different digestive system (4).
Below is an estimate of how much our wallaby production contributes to mitigating global warming.
Lenah Game Meats produces approx. 150 tonnes of boneless wallaby meat per year.
Let’s assume every year all of our 150 tonnes of wallaby meat is consumed as a substitute for grass-fed Australian beef.
If we use the lowest figure given for the embedded carbon in Australian grass-fed beef of 19.8 kg carbon/kg beef, without accounting for land-use factors, then the equation is:
150,000 kg meat x 19.8 kg carbon = 2,970,000 kg carbon emission per year saved by replacing beef with wallaby.
What does this mean?
An Australian car typically travels 11,400 km each year generating 3,110 kg of carbon (5).
Therefore, 2,970,000 kg of carbon mitigated by wallaby consumption is the equivalent of taking 955 cars off the road every year.
There’s arguments which could be used to make this figure smaller or larger, but it‘s not going to matter how you look at it.
Our little business makes a decent contribution to mitigating global warming and we think that’s pretty cool.
