Many land areas do not tend toward good grazing, the geography more disposed to chicken or hog farming than raising cattle. Pork is the most common and beloved meat of China for historical, cultural, and geographic reasons, the same as in the American South. I had some of the most delicious food there that I had ever eaten, reminding me of home in the most profound way a person can be reminded, through their stomach in a hungry moment.
In small urban environments, hamlets, small villages, collectives and such, pigs are a rational meat source as they will eat most anything and can thrive on human food rubbish. They are garbage disposals for any scraps, willing to eat anything edible, requiring little specialization. Of course, large scale factory farming requires a lot of strange things, but we don't eat that on purpose, do we?
Modern hog farms keep their animals clean by washing them with low pressure fire hoses of clean water. The hogs like it. It drains off into hog waste lagoons, an environmental nightmare that has become a wet dream. The waste used to evaporate and eventually become fertilizer, but this took forever, smelled, and was perpetually diluted by natural rain in the lagoons. But a solution has been found to the environmental problem with raising hogs enough to feed mega-cities. They can put a capturing top over them, add bacteria to increase the waste breakdown and capture the methane gas for clean energy, burning it as it is produced and generating steam for turbines that generate electricity. It is an awesomely ingenious solution to the problem.
I like to know where my meat comes from and its impact on the environment. I know it's trendy these days, but I have always felt this way. I grew up near hog and chicken farms. I knew where the meat I ate came from, had tended or lived next to the animals that would appear in the grocery. My grandmother had killed her own stock and I have vague memories of the chickens in the yard and some goats. I have this one picture of her and a cow that clearly shows me what I will look like when I am old and what a service milk cow from the depression looked like when it was old. Both kind of gaunt, bony, and worn out. But still standing!
Recently, eggs were recalled nationally, but the down-town hippie co-op's eggs are local, so no worries. Chicken farming is growing meat with feathers. Those creatures are barely living beings in my mind, virtually meat in a vat. Heirloom brood lines can be intelligent, interesting pets, but the chickens we eat are not that animal, they never get to that point in their lives. I am not willing to pay double to make that happen. Harsh? Yes. Meat eating is like that.
I think you have to value your meat as a scale of diminishing returns. Meat protein has finite value and after that it gets hinky fast. There isn't any veal that can taste good enough to warrent how it is raised considering the potential in the animal being sacrificed for our protein needs. A chicken, on the other hand, is a bird, a residual reptile that would as soon poke your eyes out and eat them as look at you. Like tarantulas as pets, they are only of interest for their novelty. Dogs love you and will not run off if you let them go. Chickens will leave you faster than a cat will scratch you. That is not pet material in my book.
Exotic meats are not worth it for me because the novelty makes them a little too interesting for me. I like my meat fairly sanitized and anonymous. I like the neat packages of lean ground beef in the grocery case. I have taken all of my traditional family recipes and minimized the meat content, changing a whole chicken to 2 breasts, 2 lbs of hamburger to 1/2 lb. I have strong feelings about select cuts and how that is one of the great problems of society, class, and ethical meat production. I think the best service of cattle is to grind it all up, the whole thing down to the moo and have us all egalitarianly eat the same protein. I would gladly eat meat grown in a vat with the same nutritional values of a living animal's flesh. It would suit me fine. I have herbs and spices to make it tasty.
But there is one meat that I cannot, would not do that to, pig.
Pigs are intelligent, friendly, social animals. Fairly easy to maintain, healthy when not mass-factory farmed, and part of natural ecological farm systems providing waste fertilizer, turning waste food material into meat, and generating a great variety of meat product per lb upon slaughter. Bacon, sausage, kielbasa, ham, lardon, fatback, jowls, pigfeet, pork chops, ribs, short ribs, country ham, prosciutto, pulled pork bbq, pork roast...and did I mention bacon? Because that bears repeating.
A pigs life is not misery, as I perceive much dairy cattle life must be. Their lives are not pointless except for the meat production, like the chickens. It is not exotic creating its interest by its novelty, like bison, snake, or gator.
Pigs' lives, slaughter, and enjoyment were part of my community. Every major event was marked by a barbeque, just like out of Gone With the Wind. There was family, fellowship, and a pig, roasted in a portable bbq grill onsite so that the hours ahead of the eating were all enticement with the smell of rendering pork fat and tender pork ready to be pulled. Chickens thrown on at the end were basted in the fat making it crispy like fried chicken without the breading.
One of the highpoints of my culinary history was at a pig pickin' where the pit master was kind of disgusted with the preponderance of northerners and fish-only eaters in attendance. After six hours of effort and sweat, he opened the cooker and was injured when no one stepped up to be first served. He gathered himself and said, "I just cook it, ya'll got to pull your own." And put the tongs there. The agog looks of the northerners, the obvious failure to understand where to begin, and a deep compassion for the heart broken pit master brought out the southern hostess in me.
"He means to just take the tongs and take whichever part you want, " assuming they had never seen a whole animal roasted and that they had no clue of anatomy beyond the square packets they purchase at mega marts.
They had no such clues. The whole pig was layed out in the cooker, on its back now with the interior of the animal exposed so that you could pull your own meat and dress it with the vinegar BBQ sauce over on the condiment table. Part of the pig had been taken and chopped, but that is not what you buy a whole pig for. You can get that at the restaurant. You go to a pig pickin' expecting to see the quality animal prepared and to be able to choose your crispy skin and preferred meat. If you have no preferred meat because all of the meat you have ever consumed came from a little tray at the grocery store...well, bless your heart!
The pit master had stepped back and I could see the disgust in his eyes. When he had opened the cooker, he was proudly displaying a full day of work slow cooking and carefully maintaining a hard wood fire, charcoal, wood smoke and air. It was a work of art, a beautiful artisanal production of real meat presented in its natural state.
So I stepped up, took the tongs and pulled the ribs back exposing the tenderloin, of which there are two on a whole pig.
"This is the best part. Take however much you want, there's more on the other side."
I took some and pulled some rendered cracklin' crispy skin from the back of the jowl and passed the tongs to the next in line, a northerner who took the tongs with two fingers as if I was offering him a bloody hatchet with shit on the handle.
I looked at the pit master, he looked at me. We raised our eyebrows and I offered him a slight shake of the head, as if to say, "Sorry, man, I apppreciate your work here, but I can't account for these people."
He shook his head and stepped back up and said, "That's the best part of the pig. Let me serve you." And proceeded to pick the pig for the people who simply did not understand the food event they had come to. He was a business man, too, and spent the next hour answering their questions generously and without sarcasm. I admired that man and respect his restraint.
Now its possible they did not understand the term "pig pickin'" or "barbeque". I can't fathom that, but ok. The people that tried it left either immediate fans or disturbed and unwilling to deal with it again. I don't really care either way. To each his own.
But it is the sniveling vegetarians that disturbed me at that event. There was nothing served that day that suited some of them. They discovered, if they asked, that the veg sides were served southern style, seasoned with bacon or cured pork. The coleslaw had mayonaise made with eggs. The banana pudding was maide with *shudder* dairy! There was something in every single thing on that spread that someone could and did object to for whatever reason they drummed up to make their and their hosts' lives harder, inconvenient, and unpleasant.
If they didn't want meat, or dairy, or eggs, they should have brought a brown bag and not expected others to deal with their dietary quirks at a pig picking/barbeque. And yet they whined and moaned about the barbaric display. In front of others trying to enjoy their feast of an animal locally grown, not on a hog farm, not from a pack on a rack. This WAS the Micheal Pollen feast of their locovore wet dreams, culturally relevant, humanely killed, and expertly prepared by an artisanal craftsman.
And they spurned it because it had a face they could still see.
They disgusted me with their judgy rudeness and their disrespect for the animal and the hosts of the party. I made notes of the most rude among them and promised to not eat with them again.
You see, I think the fish they freely consume want to live just as badly as the pig that was roasted that day. "Life" is greater than animals we feel empathy for. Taking life to sustain ours is a necessary part of being a carbon based life form. Unless you are a plant, you kill to live, and even some plants violate this rule since protein is such an excellent energy source.
Saying that you will kill one thing but not another is a strange high wire act that I can't buy into. I am a diabetic of Native American descent. I have canine teeth that clearly place me in the paleolithic diet zone. I am meant to eat meat and limited grains, fruits, eggs, and seeds. When I eat too much cultivated grain, my body freaks out and doesn't know how to handle it, including pure sugar, processed sugar, HFCS, and any of the other foods that end in -ose.
Lean meat doesn't make me sick. Carbohydrates do. Non-cooked starchy veg does, too. Thusly, ethical issues about what I am willing to eat get complicated real fast. Add to that a degree in philosophy freeing me of the comfort of self-delusion in the arguments for the ethical treatment of animals. I want to treat animals ethically, in the same manner that I want to live an ethical life with regard to all living things. This too is complicated.
I live at the mercy of big Pharma. Insulin, even human dna derived insulin, is tested on animals. They don't inject people with it until they inject animals first. And I appreciate this as one who must then blindly trust its safety and efficacy when I inject it into my flesh. The animals they test it on are "put into a diabetic state" in order to make them suitable to test the insulin batches. This means that they damage their pancreases to render them diabetic. Without this sacrifice, I would die. So I need to damage and harm animals to live.
Pigs were the original source of insulin that let us diabetics live beyond thirty years or less upon diagnosis, the old rubric prior to injectable "manufactured" insulin. Pigs made it, we took it, refined it, and bottled it. I am eternally grateful for the science and animals that died and die so that I may live. Not eating them seems hypocritical and ethically disingenuous.
That human dna derived hormones in vats are now possible gives me hope for my dream of meat in a vat. It will happen. My friend with breast cancer is currently having her own new nipples grown for grafting and reconstruction. I wouldn't eat them, but I imagine a tenderloin would work a lot like that, too. And if I would graft it onto my flesh, I think I could also manage to eat it preferentially over slaughtered animals. Filet mignon be damned to history for ever and ever, amen.
Yeah. That was a harsh analogy. Meat eating is like that.
My favorite quote is "The price of integrity is eternal vigilance; the reward for eternal vigilance is integrity."
In Part III, I will explain my ethically valid eating solutions and dietary decisions and regale ya'll with a story of how an ambitious potato changed my life.
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fingerlakeswanderer
zanelle
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Comments
I used to toy with vegetarianism. Meat is a very inefficient food source, requiring the production of calories that are produced on lands devoted to plants, to be given to animals on another piece of land, then finally consumed by human beings. Vegetarianism is much more efficient. However, meat simply tastes too good for me to give it up.
I believe anyone who chooses to eat meat should at some point in his/her life actually kill the animal and clean it. Only in that way can one really appreciate the sacrifice involved in eating meat. It's an important lesson.
I knew someone who liked to eat meat but would not touch it raw. Very Marie Antoinette., imo.
I made sauteed portobello mushrooms with gravy over pearl couscous for dinner here at the homestead for Meatless Monday. It went over well.
My husband is a vegetarian but he would never behave that way. It's called manners.
I hope this little trilogy will be a nice set. It would have been way too long as one unit. It would have gotten the dreaded, TLDR, "Too Long Didn't Read", comment.
I will include pictures when I join it all up as one piece.
Bring on the vat meat. (as I wander into the kitchen to make a ham sandwich)
I didn't get to know pigs till the season I spent as a live-in hired hand on a small organic Massachusetts farm. My first day on the job, my boss Bob turned me loose with a shovel and wheelbarrow to clean two pigs' winter accumulation of shit out of their pen in the barn and spread it on the fallow vegetable garden, in summer the pigs moved out to a fenced half acre of woods, we fed them produce hand-picked out of the disposal bins behind a supermarket, they were the friendliest, most affectionate and intelligent animals I'd ever come in contact with, with the exception of a couple of dogs I've known
Bob bred them and sold the sucklings, we also had sheep, geese, chickens, and boarded horses to help with the overhead, sweet corn and strawberries were the main crops, it was a brief paradise for a young man with a reasonably strong back and willingness to work for room, board and a dollar or so a day
your pig pickin' sounds like my idea of a good time