Year of No Sugar (25 page)

So, I got to live out my Laura Ingalls fantasy, at least for a morning. Too bad my 1840s-era house isn't
quite
old enough to have had a cooking hearth of its own. Sally tells me that during that time period, they likely used a cast-iron stove. (Hmmmmm—I wonder what
that
would be like?)
⁶⁰

All in all, it's safe to say I have a moderate-to-severe case of food curiosity. Not the kind that would secure me a spot eating pigeon feet or yak eyeballs on the Food Network or anything, mind you, but still.

This wasn't always the case, however, which brings me to the story of the time I didn't eat goat.

It was just before my husband and I were married and my mother had given us the incredible engagement gift of
a week's safari in Tanzania. I know, right? Steve and I and nine other travelers bumping along dirt “roads” and taking four million snapshots of elephants and zebras. It was unlike anything I had ever done before—or have done since.

I felt
incredibly
young, which at the age of twenty-six I certainly was, especially compared to all the other participants on the trip. To make matters more interesting, I was the only person on the trip who, at that time, didn't eat red meat or poultry.

Our camps were primitive enough that we slept in tents and our bread was baked in a pot buried in the ground. Nonetheless, our tour leader, Justin, somehow made sure that I—the lone pescatarian—had a lovely little plate of fish and vegetables to eat every night at dinner. Then one night, several of our tour companions were feeling bored and restless. They felt we weren't getting an “authentic” enough experience and requested a meal that would've been eaten by the locals: goat.

Consequently, a day or two later, a live goat (shall we call him Fred?) was purchased and tied up near the dining tent where we listened to it lowing and bleating throughout lunch. To my sensitive, vegetarian ears, it sounded as if a doomed soul was mourning its impending fate—although in retrospect I imagine it was just as possible that it simply didn't care to be tied up in the hot sun.

Later I was told that the goat was killed in traditional fashion, using a blood bowl into which the goat's slit neck emptied, after which it was roasted and served in a traditional saucy stew. Fred Stew.

I was trying very hard not to think about that anthropomorphized goat I had conjured up in my head who, I was sure, had hopes and dreams and a family of twelve to support
at home. I was irked at my traveling companions for initiating such a violent endeavor for the simple purpose of their amusement, and even more annoyed when they were unimpressed with the novelty of the meal. To me they seemed like spoiled Roman noblemen who were miffed that the gladiators hadn't died in an interesting enough manner.

That was fifteen years ago. It's amazing how much a person can change in that time. Given the same scenario again today, I would surely be the first in line to watch the ritual goat slaughter. I would be excited to try the cassoulet du goat, and who knows? Perhaps I would even be persuaded to try a sip from the blood bowl—the Massai ritualistically mix the blood with milk and drink it, you know.

At any rate, I would be fascinated, and it surely would be the high point of a pretty amazing trip, rather than a low point. (I left lunch early that day, feeling queasy after listening to the crying goat and the laughing Roman noblemen for twenty minutes.)

So why the drastic change? Have I lost my compassion? Do I no longer feel empathetic for animals? No, I still have a deep and abiding respect for animals and believe that they have real emotions and feel real pain. What changed for me is twofold: first, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, I realized how much healthier and stronger I felt when I was consuming meat—a hard fact to argue with.

Second, I read an interview with a philosopher who talked about the nature of life—the very process of being—as inherently destructive on some level. The only way to ensure that our existence creates
no
harm in the world is…not to exist.
Whoa
. There was more to it than that, but that was the gist: I kill stuff (whether actively or passively), therefore I am. For
the first time in twenty years of meat avoidance, I wondered: Is abstaining from meat more hypocritical than helpful? Was I pretending to help the world while denying the fact that my very existence caused, by extension, the death of animals, plants, insects, and microorganisms all the time?

Another of my favorite writers, the farmer-philosopher Joel Salatin agrees: “The most inhumane perspective is the one that denies the life-death-decay-regeneration cycle. Everything is constantly eating and being eaten.”
⁶¹

I decided that I had no plans to benefit the universe by jumping off the nearest cliff, thank you. The alternative was to come to the realization that nature had it right: living, and in particular
eating
, involves some degree of violence by definition. We can deny that fact and limp along, sucking on wheatgrass and feeling lousy, or we can embrace it and handle our animals in a manner that is healthy, kind, and respectful.

Currently I feel that the greatest act of respect we can have for animals is to let them
be
animals—whether wild or domesticated—for whatever the duration of their life may be. As a born-again carnivore, what that means to me is trying to eat only meat that had a pretty happy life, which means no feed lots, no living in a cage in the dark, no animals hopped up on pharmaceutical cocktails. Unfortunately, this is not very easy and often not terribly cheap either. But I think it's the right approach, the ethical approach, and, not coincidentally, the approach closest to what our ancestors have done historically.

There it is again—that idea of food history, which seemed to keep cropping up. If the problem of sugar had increased as a result of the pursuit of “progress” (industrial production,
convenience foods), then could it be that the sugar antidote was to be found in looking backward? What, I wondered, would that look like? Probably a lot like the traditional family farm.

Although the idea of the self-sufficient family farm is something of an anachronism these days, I have some friends who attempt it with the help of the modern-day convenience of a chest freezer.

Randy and Annie are the friends I mentioned earlier who, amazingly and single-handedly, raise and slaughter fifty-two organic chickens for their family's consumption every year.

As it happened, one summer day, Annie mentioned that they were going to be “processing” (the appropriate euphemism) their birds the following weekend. So I asked what, for me, was the next logical question: “Can I come?”

Annie left the decision up to Randy, who is the one who does the majority of the processing on the appointed day. A few days later, I caught up with Randy, but at first he seemed a little tentative.

“If you don't mind my asking,” he said, “
why
do you want to do this?” Funny, my husband asked me much the same question, and with a very odd look on his face too, come to think of it. Was it
that
bizarre a request? I wondered. It wasn't as if I had proposed we take a school field trip to the local funeral parlor or anything. (My husband actually did that as a child. Fun! Is this where they keep the embalming fluid, mister?) I mean, honestly, how bad could it really be? Was there something I was missing here? I wondered if I should reconsider my request.

Would slimy chicken parts be flying everywhere? Blood spurting, cartoon fashion in every direction? Would I beat a
hasty retreat back to vegetarianism, ruined forever after for any appreciation of fine poultry? Would I sob uncontrollably/be scarred for life/suffer terrible, flailing-chicken nightmares? Would I (and this was important) lose my lunch?

It is definitely interesting to see the spectrum of reactions one gets in this day and age—even in Vermont—to the idea of voluntarily killing a defenseless animal. Hunting, of course, is a similar topic, and the few hunters we know are noticeably shy on the details, feeling out whether the person they are speaking to will respond to a hunting story with sincere enthusiasm or wide-eyed horror.

Perhaps then, raising birds for meat and dispatching them methodically holds even more potential revulsion. I mean, at least the deer had a fighting chance, right? After generations of being bred to be docile, sedentary, and fat, the meat bird is…How shall I say this politely? None too bright. There ain't no fight-or-flight going on here, people. Mostly it's just sit-and-stare.

So, Randy agreed to call me when he was down to the last batch of chickens late Sunday. That afternoon, I cleaned the kitchen and waited for the phone to ring. It was a weird feeling, this aimless waiting, as if a baby was about to be born when, in fact, it was really quite the opposite situation.

Then again, I thought, something
is
being born today: food. Real food—not that ersatz stuff they try to pass off as food at the gas station or even the supermarket, but the real McCoy, the way our ancestors knew it for generations. Food that is the result of your own work, by your own hands, that doesn't attempt to deny or obscure the essence of what it is: a dead animal.

It makes sense that the more honest we are about this, the better. The factory farm industry is more than happy to
take advantage of our modern squeamishness and our collective cultural agreement to suspend our disbelief. (We all
know
it is a dead animal—buuuut let's pretend it's not!) If you haven't been to one, let's just say there's a really good reason they don't have school field trips to industrial chicken farms. (Pretty much the same reason they don't have school field trips to funeral parlors: too many nightmares.) In the interest of the all-important bottom line, Big Food systematically tortures, drugs, and abuses meat animals, acting as if they weren't living beings at all, but mere products, like toasters or Tic Tacs. In so doing, they are not only behaving in a morally bankrupt fashion toward our fellow living beings, but they are putting the health and safety of the customers who ultimately will eat these animals at great risk as well—and that's us.

When the call finally came, I dropped everything and raced over to Randy and Annie's, afraid I'd arrive too late for the sending up of the final four. But I was right on time and Randy was calm, tired, and sweaty after a day that had started at six in the morning and wouldn't end till six that night. He wore a yellow rubber apron and giant black rubber boots and looked every bit the part of a man who'd been sending chickens to meet their maker all day, all for the sake of a healthy, sustainable diet for his family.

After drinking a tall glass of iced tea, he drove the tractor down to the coop where the chickens had lived the entirety of their ten-week lives. For only ten weeks old, they looked
enormous
: eight pounders most of them, with beady, wild eyes and muddy, reptilian, three-toed feet. One by one, Randy escorted the last four into the pull-behind trailer where—using his best black sense of humor to diffuse the tenor of the day—he had installed a handwritten sign reading: “Meet the Colonel
[meaning Colonel Sanders]—book signing today!” Then off we drove to the killing cones.

Killing cones are a little like upside-down traffic cones, except they are made of metal. They hang from a framework, as does a flexible wire that is used to wrap the bird's feet, subduing it and reducing struggling. The day was searingly hot, and the flies buzzed about the blood that had already stained the dirt underneath each cone. After Randy slit the throat of the first bird, I was greatly relieved. I
could
do this with no crying, no lost lunch, no fainting. Phew. I was astounded to realize I was actually completely fine. Slowly, the blood drained out of the bird, and you could almost pinpoint the moment when the bird ceased its struggle and life simply left—almost evaporated. It was perhaps the quietest, most peaceful death a chicken could hope for, really.

Then Randy asked me something I hadn't expected: “Do you want to do one?”
Oh
. Hmmm. Well…Why not? I mean, who knows when I will ever get this chance again, right? And that is how I came to be the last earthly friend of chicken number 52.

The first time I slid the knife across its gnarly little neck, I knew immediately it hadn't gone deep enough. Panicking, and quite sure I was going to end up torturing and/or mutilating this poor creature, I quickly slid it again with greater force, as if I were slicing a nice roast. This was better, if not perfect, and the blood began to stream down the way I had seen the other chickens' do. Hanging there in its aluminum cone, it took only a minute or two to bleed out.

I wondered why I wasn't upset. I wondered if I should be
worried
about the fact that I wasn't upset. (I'm a monster! A conscious-less chicken murderer!) Meanwhile, Randy was
pulling the muddier feathers off the already deceased birds and laying them back in the pull-behind, while I watched number 52 intently. After some moderate flailing, he (she?) curled its head up suddenly in a question mark shape, staring directly at me (or so I thought). I imagined a quizzical look in its eyes that surely was not actually there and then—as if a switch had been flipped—its mouth yawned open at the same time as its neck relaxed; a white film came down over the chicken's beady eye. Even a neophyte like me could instantly recognize the aspect of death, and respect it, even in the small, awkward end of a chicken.

After Randy kills the chickens, there's still a fairly elaborate process to go through: he scalds them in 180-degree water (loosening the feathers), runs them through the feather picker (a Dead-Chicken Tilt-A-Whirl!), spinning the chicken bodies around in a rather startling, clumsy fashion while black rubber nodules remove most of the hard-to-pluck feathers. Then, on a carefully bleached counter, he eviscerates the bird, snipping off the head, feet, the scent gland above the tail, and then removing the internal organs one by one (intestines, liver, heart, windpipe, and lungs).