I can easily tell that's there's a major difference in the uses my family had for a food grinder and what most of you are talking about. It seems that nearly all of the posts in this thread are talking about grinding raw meat, and in some cases, large quantities of it.
I've no doubt that Rox's husband has the right idea if you don't have too much to do at one time.
However, things were a little different for us when I was a kid. We slaughtered and dressed lots of chickens, but then they went to the "locker plant" in town to be frozen whole (a home freezer wasn't in our home until I was 18). We slaughtered our own calves and hogs, but they were skinned, gutted, and cut in half, then taken to the locker plant for them to finish the meat cutting, packaging, sausage making, meat grinding, and freezing. We also hunted squirrels, rabbits, bullfrogs, quail, doves, and meadowlarks to eat, but we didn't have any "big game" in our part of the country.
So I don't even remember grinding any raw meat. Many of you probably know that young chickens make good fryers, but an old hen or rooster would be too tough to chew. However, when cooked in a pressure cooker, they are tender enough to eat, and the cooked meat can be ground up to make chicken salad or to put in milk gravy. The same is true of jack rabbits. So, nearly all the meat ground up in our food grinder was cooked. Of course for chicken salad, or rabbit salad sandwich meat, we also ran hard boiled eggs and onion through the food grinder.
But even more than grinding meat, ours was used a great deal for fruit and vegetables. Every year, we peeled and cored lot of pears, which were then ground up in the food grinder, cooked down with sugar and crushed pineapple, and canned as "pear honey"; a fine preserve on biscuits or toast, or to spread between the layers of cakes, or as an ice cream topping.
Another use every summer was to grind up cabbage, onions, and green tomatoes, which, with other spices and seasonings were canned as "pickalilly"; a relish my parents loved with beans, but which I was never particularly fond of.
Of course, in later adult life, several of us men used to get together and make tamales. Of course, pork was the original tamale meat, but we boiled beef chuck roasts with chunks of onion and salt and pepper, then ground them up with a food grinder for the meat to use in our tamales. Fortunately for us, one of the guys had a good electric meat grinder, but I don't remember a brand or model.
