Ok, yes, I accept that not everyone has the same interest in livestock that I do, not everyone has made it their business to gain intimate knowledge of the wonderful world of ruminant creatures. But for the love of god, didn’t they go to kindergarten? Are farm animals simply not covered in kindergarten anymore, or only in some schools? I am continually stunned by the way many of the adults I have encountered since beginning this endeavor have collapsed “sheep” and “goat” into one being. At least every other time someone asks me about the farm, they ask, “how are the goats coming along?” when these people, my friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, all very smart, savvy people, all of whom have been told that we raise sheep, can’t seem to separate sheep from goat. I find this troubling. Honestly, I have no bias here. I’ve got nothing against goats. I love goats. I plan to keep a goat or two as a kind of farm ambassador for people who want to visit the farm and pet the critters. Goat milk is lovely. Chevre, a fresh delicious goats milk cheese, is a large part of the reason I want to make cheese at all. The first cheese I ever made was a goat cheese. Goats are great. Sheep are super. I make no distinction between them on merit. I do make a distinction, however, between species. Make no mistake, I would not begrudge someone mistaking a baboon for a mandrill the same way I wouldn’t begrudge someone for not knowing the difference between a standard TIE-Fighter for Darth Vader’s TIE-Advanced X-1 Starfighter (though, those of you who know me well might argue otherwise!) Given that we live as members of the Western World, not central Africa or a galaxy far far away, these distinctions are pure esoterica. No, what is troubling is how very, very disconnected people have become from the very animals that have assisted us in our pursuit of civilization for a millennia. So clear was the division of sheep and goat in the ancient world that St. Matthew saw fit to use the distinction between the two species as a metaphor for the separation of the blessed and the damned!

Are we so far removed from our agrarian ancestry that our brains no longer see the difference between two similar, but altogether different species? Indeed, two species that have shared our history and have helped to form what we are today. It used to be that everyone knew the difference between a white oak and a red oak. Now you’re lucky if a person knows the difference between an oak and a pine. Are our livestock going the same way? Will chickens and ducks soon be collapsed together? To put a very contemporary spin on it, I feel like it’s as if Paris Hilton were being constantly confused with Ivanka Trump, only, blonde, celebrity, socialite heiresses are not fundamental to the bedrock of human civilization. Who knows, maybe, at the end of the day, the distinction is just as trivial. Frankly, I’m over it already, but I can’t help but wonder if perhaps this indistinct perception between sheep and goats is a larger reflection of how our lives have become ill-defined and uncertain; we can no longer make fundamental distinctions; perhaps lines have crossed and blurred on some greater, cosmic level. Or maybe, just maybe, we all would do well to spend a little more time outside, paying attention, and giving attention to the creatures that give us what we eat. But that is just my totally biased opinion.

]]> http://www.thedirtyway.com/2010/01/19/sheep-go-to-heaven-goats-go-to-hell/feed/ 0 http://www.thedirtyway.com/2009/07/13/what-cheese-am-i-eating-now/ http://www.thedirtyway.com/2009/07/13/what-cheese-am-i-eating-now/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:53:37 +0000 rebecca http://www.thedirtyway.com/?p=163 Eureka! I’ve had an idea. In my attempt to become an ever-more educated cheese-maker I also am working to become an ever-more educated cheese-eater. Given that I have the great benefit of having an excellent cheesemonger here in Atlanta to provide me with a wide and ever-changing variety of cheeses from both near and far, I am starting my first series on this blog: what cheese am I eating now?

In this series of posts, I will let the folks at home know what new cheese is in my fridge, where it comes from, any history or interesting features I can dig up, and of course, how it tastes. This endeavor will also let me practice describing the taste of cheese, which is more difficult than it seems. Just so you know, when I describe something as baby barf or wet hay, I’m not making it up. I’m using a flavor wheel for cheese aromatics. It’s a bit of a pseudo-science, since it depends so heavily on the individual taster, but it’s good to work within a framework of agreed-upon terms rather than to just make something up.

Additionally, I will give the cheese a rating. I cooked up this scale a couple of years ago when I first started journaling cheeses, and I like it:

0: truly awful, why oh why did anyone ever make this? (pre-shredded, store brand, or generally poorly made: too much salt, too ammoniated, too propreonic, etc.)
1: Reasonable, overall unpleasant, but has some redeeming virtues, what I call “sandwich cheese” (a mediocre version of a standard cheese: Tillamook, etc.)
2: I don’t like it, but I can see that someone else would. (Lumiere)
3: Good, solid standard D.O.P. cheese, par for the course, what you would expect (Parmigiano-Reggiano, Roqufort, Gruyere, Emmentaler)
4: Excellent, a very good, very nice cheese with unique and overall pleasant qualities, few complaints (Constant Bliss)
5: Supurb, really exceptional cheese, once I start eating, it can be hard to stop, great affection, no complaints (Bonne Buche, Green Hill)
6: Out of this world, mind-blowing, perfect in all ways, in line with personal and universal harmonies of flavour (Cashel Blue, Roaring Forties Blue)

Again, this is just where I put things. I claim no universal cheese-tasting knowledge nor exceptional abilities. This system is just a tool to communicate what I like.

Our debut cheese is Sampietrino:

When I was visiting Star, Tim (my local, wonderful cheesemonger) presented me with a huge, square brick of cheese. He suggested building a house with it. It’s brick-like structure is where this cheese gets its name. Sampietrini refers to the cubic pavers used in typical Italian roads.

I am always entertained at how the Italians name foods after the appearance of commonplace things. I’m thinking of cappuccino, the coffee drink named for the Capuchin monks, who wore a brown robe with a white hood, called a capuccio. The visual analogy is clear in both cases. Indeed, there’s nothing fancy or pretentious about these names. They just happen to be old and foreign and in need of a bit of context. I often quote Tim, who says, “it’s just cheese!” Part of what makes him such a good cheesemonger is the fact that he does his part to divest us of any misconceptions we may have about cheese being an elite food. The other day, Tim was lamenting the fact that a local cheesemaker gave one of their cheeses a German name. The farm is not in Germany, it’s not a German-style cheese, and the cheesemakers aren’t German. It’s pretty much a way to make the cheese seem fancier. As Garrison Keillor writes in this month’s National Geographic, “nothing that is farm oriented or pigcentric is even remotely upscale.” It’s preserved milk, after all, and the process comes with all the dirt and grime and body fluids (after all, what is milk but a body fluid?) that comes with raising livestock. Cheese is about place, it’s about where it’s made and the folks who live there and who got to eat it first. If your cheese looks like the bricks used to pave your local streets, why not call it that? If it smells like the pigs who live at your neighbor’s down the road, name it after the neighbor. But I digress.

Tim cut in and let me try a few thin slices. It was fantastic. The texture is really beautiful. It’s a semi-hard aged cheese, but its cross-section looks like a bloomy-rind: creamy near the rind that becomes dense and slightly crumbly towards the center (the picture does not do it justice). It’s a combination of cow and sheep milk, so it’s got a lovely, super-creamy mouthfeel and is quite complex. The rind is nutty and strongly grassy with quite a bit of barnyard and some ammonia. The cheese itself is sweet, mildly salty, and lactic in the center, and becomes more complex in the creamier outer areas where there are flavors of cooked cabbage and leather. It’s also got some pretty serious umami going on. Very, very delicious. (4)

My favourite frames in the piece:

and,

The image of the chart made my heart skip. Here was some sort of proof that Jefferson was a farmer that linked to me. I too have this chart, torn from a local organics magazine, posted in my kitchen. It’s not hand drawn, and it has colours and graphics and an all the trappings of modern printing, but it’s fundamentally the same: seasons were the same for Jefferson as they are for me. A stones’ throw into history and there it is, people eating asparagus in April, melons in August, eggplant in October, and carrots almost year-long. Jefferson bothered to make a chart of what was at market and when. This was important information that somehow we have collectively forgotten to take note of until very recently, and it’s only the smallest handful.

The second image, the one of Jefferson’s daughter, gets me at a very personal level. I think it amusing that Jefferson outwardly seems to deplore idleness in this quotation, considering the fact that it is only by idleness that he was able to accomplish so much. The best teacher I ever had regularly quoted Cervantes’ address to his audience in the prologue to Don Quixote, “Desocupado lector, ” idle reader. For my teacher, idleness was an incredibly important idea. Only the idle have time to read. Idleness, in essence, my teacher defined as time not spent in the pursuit of survival. He interpreted this idea slightly differently than I do. For my teacher, idleness is created when we don’t have to hunt or gather or farm or make clothes; it is the work we do when there is no work that we must do. For my teacher, idleness is the product of a refined society that allows for “idle pursiuts” such as reading and writing, inventing algebra or triple-sash windows. Of course, this idea begs the argument that the whole reason we have people who can be idle and who can engage in idle prsuits is because others cannot afford to; that there are some who must always be working in order for others to be idle. Let’s use Jefferson as an example, who, despite his intellectual passion for agriculture, had slaves to work his fields. Because of their lack of idle time, Jefferson had an abundance of it, in which he could walk and wonder at the world and do things like make charts of when things were growing. In essence, the reason some can is by the fact that others cannot. This is a problem. Yet, if we had no idle people, we would not have symphonies, epic poetry, the calculus, film, newspapers, iPods, indeed any of the great and small creative endeavors that make us human.

I would therefore, like to posit a slightly different philosophy of idleness. In essence, it is this: Only when we as human beings become fully competent at what we must do to survive can we fully create and enjoy the things we must do in order to be human. I often consider the moment in Masonobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution when he describes how he found bits of poetry tucked into the walls of his old farmhouse; he exposits that the farmers of the past did not toil endlessly in the fields, rather, they had time for poetry as well as time for the growing of crops. Fukuoka suggests that in our contemporary effort to make agriculture more productive, we somehow make the work less efficient for the farmer and his or her quality of life suffers tremendously as a result. When a handful of farmers work all day and all night so that others do not have to work the soil at all in order to eat, their time for idle pursuits is co-opted. Fukuoka shows us, however, that it does not have to be this way, he thinks, as do I, that there is room for both, indeed, there must be room for both.

Jefferson would have undoubtably loved Fukuoka. Indeed, when I am asked what historical figures I would like to have dinner with, it would, without question, be these two men; mostly because I believe Jefferson would have been fascinated by and learned tremendously from Fukouoka. The way Fukouka learned from the land, the way he watched and mirrored nature in order to let her do most of the work of farming, in essence, the way a little bit of very hard work and careful observation and interpretation of nature could yield plenty of food as well as plenty of time, time that allows for both survival and idleness, without the moral uncertainty that plagued Jefferson (at least in this one respect) would have be a marvelous discussion to overhear.

Fukouka, and those precious few farmers out there like him are fully competent at what they do, have time, time to write books, give lectures, cook meals, teach their children; they have time to consider new inventions that will make their lives a little easier, they have time to walk, time to participate in politics, and as Jefferson exhorts, time to think and time to wonder at what they do all day. The fully competent farmer must know how to do a bit of absolutely everything. We have sadly relegated farming into the realm of specialization, but specialization, we are wisely told, is for insects. There is nothing that can’t be learned through farming for it keeps us “always doing.”

Armed with copies of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” the article tells us, internship-seeking students offer farms little more than the educated and impassioned where what the farmers really need are “farm hands”. I take farm-hands to mean folks who know how to work hard and fast with little complaint and whose intentions are to do a good job for a day’s wage. Conversely, it seems, these liberal arts students are interested in pursuing a Pollanesque ideal. Clearly, the article sets up a certain tension that looks like there’s a world of “real farmers” and a world of “wannabe farmers”.

It’s true: there are many saber-rattlers in the organic/local/ethical food movement who have raised the battle cry for good food and who have made eating into a political act (and rightly so). The present young and educated, like their 1960’s counterparts, are perhaps the most prone to answer this call. But, the fact of the matter is that farming is more than politics and ideals. It’s a lot of sweat and sleepless nights. People like Michael Pollan and Barbera Kingsolver are not farmers. They are writers. It is their job to use words to convey ideas and ideals that are meaningful and important that fall into our logical framework and that pull strongly at our own pathos. And yet we wonder why English majors are suddenly attracted to food and farms?

But I also wonder about the farmers themselves; those folks who break their necks making ends meet. . . the folks who get sweaty and dirty not for the experience, but because they have to; because it is their lives and livelihoods (to say nothing of the success or failure of this movement towards sustainable agriculture) on the line. But are these farmers not themselves idealistic? Something the Times article simply does not address is how is it that the farmers themselves came to farm. Sure, many farmers inherit their farm, they grew up doing the work, and maybe for some it was the only option. But not all. Some folks choose to farm. Indeed, every farmer out there made the choice to do the work he or she does on some level, and no choice is ever purely practical. There is inherent, incontrovertible romance in the desire to farm. If there weren’t, why on earth would we keep doing it? We would all own vast acres of corn and soybeans in Nebraska if it was simply about putting calories on American tables. Put plainly, it would be a job. I don’t believe that farming is just a job. No good farmer would ever tell you that. It’s a vocation, it is something that must be done for our survival and so a desire, a calling to do it must occur.

It seems from the increase in interest among the young and educated that Pollan has propagated, that there are some who are being reacquainted with this fundamental call. And yes, “these are kids who are not used to living in a small trailer or doing any kind of work. . . most of them are privileged and think they want to try something new. They need structure.” Indeed, they need to be taught. They need to learn what it is to work hard and get dirty and, moreover, they need not “trade poetry books for sheep.” Liberal arts students, perhaps, are better prepared to be farmers than the agro-economy student. These English majors have minds that are prepared to make the link between poetry and that which creates poetry: experience. These students need to learn how to use their understanding of poetry to better understand sheep and worms and poop, sweat and sore bodies. They need to be taught the hardest lesson; that poetry comes from suffering, it guides us and shows us how to do things better and helps us to understand why we do them at all. Once a student can marry the suffering of life with thinking about the suffering of life, the world will get a worker and a farmer more willing and more capable than any merely working for a wage.

It seems that some farmers who hire interns expect free labour. But you get what you pay for. Students are passionate, but unskilled. If a farm needs farmhands, hire farmhands. Pay them a good wage and expect them to work hard and achieve results with little input. But an intern is a different thing all together. It seems that some farmers think that the work itself will provide the experience. It will, but not without creating tension on the farm. It is the job of the farmer who puts interns on his or her farm to turn the students’ desire for experience (perhaps born as much from the poetry they read as from the saber-rattlers) into a desire for education, and then to fulfill it.

I worry that this lack of distinction between “farm-hand” and “intern” is driving a wedge in this new agricultural movement. There is a tendency to shun the young and enthusiastic intern who would, “report her organic farmer for using antibiotics on sick sheep” rather than to teach her and to use her passion for the benefit, rather than the detriment of sustainable farming. Indeed, if education is how we best preserve our culture, and we, as farmers and as eaters want a world with good farms and a culture that values our work, we must use the flames that Pollan has ignited and direct that passion (and sometimes cool it down a bit). We do this through teaching.

I know this all sounds like one more thing farmers have to do; teach a bunch of spoiled, inflamed kids about farming; but honestly, the work of the farmer is just this. Farming is about more than the cultivation of crops; seed to table, though an ambitious and difficult goal in and of itself, is not enough. It is about the cultivation of people. Farming is not only science, it is not just botany, biology, chemistry, and economics; it is an art. It is the interplay of all disciplines of knowledge and is a singular tool for teaching and learning. And these interested young, willing workers with their liberal arts degrees are a valuable crop too few farmers are cultivating.

Well, it seems that Dairy Today has caught on:


Hello, and welcome to the 21st century. Welcome to a world that has the ability to appreciate art and aesthetics, which, by the way, farming has a stake in. Look at this cow! She’s beautiful, she’s got personality, she’s got her tongue in her nose! And check out that typeface and setting. Wow. I love that the dot on the I of Dairy is the dot in the dot com of the website. How very edgy. Hell, I would pick up this magazine regardless of the articles. What do you see in this cover? Whimsy, maybe. There’s something about the baby blue here with the cow and the big Dairy at the top that makes me think ice cream cone. Plainly, this cover is sexy. It plays on eros: our desires. I desire this cow. I desire dairy products. I desire food. I desire to slip off the cover of this magazine and see just what’s inside. And hopefully, just maybe, I desire to look under the skirt of agriculture and see just where and how food is made. I mean, how different is it to ask how babies are made? Everything in agriculture is sexy. Come on, udders? How do you think those udders got so big and full of milk? Well, little Johnny, when a mommy cow and a daddy cow love each other very much. . . you catch my drift? Farming is all about reproduction, regeneration, and recreation. There is such joy in being a party to that process, such joy in being in a position to assist in and engender that process. Farming is not inherently unattractive, it is inherently attractive. This new cover is more telling of what farming actually is than the old one. And why not bring the inherent sexiness of farming into the bright light of day? We’ve been doing it with cooking for a good while now. Hell, my copy of Nigella Lawson’s cookbook Forever Summer depicts the author, beautiful and busty offering up a gorgeous clutch of round, red, ripe tomatoes. Food, not sexy? Huh? If there is an art of cooking and an art of eating, God Almighty, why not an art of farming? Look at that tongue!

And so, I return to my question. Why would a pair of urban intellectuals want to go into farming? It’s self-evident.

For more on Dairy Today’s new look and an awesome video of how to art direct a cow, check it out.

But unfortunately, even as a member of the species that claims to be wisest of the wise, I can’t claim that we are above such singlemindedness. Names and faces have been changed to protect the innocent: Recently Rebecca and I had the opportunity to observe the annual winter meeting of the West Timbuktu (ahem) Farmers Market (WTFM). Several things are wrong to begin with: the member farmers of the market, who govern it, only meet twice a year; the market schedules its meetings on the same day the weekly market occurs, that is to say after a long, hard day of work; and the market has no formal decision-making process other than a show of hands. The result is an agenda with a dozen major points of discussion on it, none of which can possibly be resolved in a single meeting. The attempt to do so without any organizing principle for the meeting leads to three hours and change of meandering discussion, arguing, bickering, and outright misconstrual.

Members of the market divide themselves into old-school and new-school. The old-school marketers tend to be truck farmers who grow a great variety of vegetables in their back yard and go to the market for enjoyment and supplementary income. The new-school are folks, such as the farmers I work for, who derive their entire livelihood from the land. These folks are interested in running the market profitably but fairly. The WTFM has been around for 25 years and was founded by the old-school. They think of the market as a convenient place to make a few bucks on a Saturday. The new-school sees the market as a community forum, a cooperative business venture, and, to some, a platform for social change. The new-school would like to see the market expand gradually but substantially. The old-school is a priori opposed to change.

The new farmers know that, to expand, the market needs a dedicated manager to enforce rules, work with the press to promote the WTFM, and take care of general secretarial duties. In the present arrangement these tasks are handled by member farmers who, during market season, hardly have enough time to tie their shoes. The new-school wants to hire a part-time, passionate young person to book advertisements (“Vine-ripe tomatoes available next week!”), hire performing artists (“Steel String Theory appearing next week at the West Timbuktu Farmers Market!”), and manage the market’s general business (“Wow, we really have $1000 left over in the budget!?”). The old-school won’t see the logic in this and argues that the only people who would apply would be, like themselves, looking to pick up a few extra bucks on the weekend. Obviously they’ve never heard of Slow Food, WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), the organic or local food movements, or militant veganism. I can think of at least six people, just among my own friends, who might cut off a toe to get a job like this one; forget being paid for it; forget that Asheville is full of underpaid, over-motivated neo-Aquarians

The controversy between new- and old-school is mainly over money. The current fee structure requires member farmers to pay $25 per year in dues. Do the math: that’s 7¢ per day, two bucks a month. Day members, who have access to five slots on a first-come, first-served basis, pay $5 per day and stop paying after 6 visits, which means they effectively pay the same as permanent member farmers without getting a reserved space. This allows the market to pay for insurance, about three newspaper ads per season, and six mentions on the local NPR station. The new-school would like to raise the permanent member dues to $50 per year and day member fees to $25 per day with no maximum. Day members make an average of $400 per market day; some make over $1000. That alone justifies the increase in day member fees; they simply haven’t kept pace with inflation, and I don’t think that they have changed since they were set in the mid-80’s. The old-school argues that “no one would come” if the market raised day fees. As for permanent member fees, $50 per year amounts to about $4.00 per month, less than a gallon and a half of gas. The old school argues that the increase is too steep and many people stated that it would be a financial burden on them that might prevent them from taking part in the market. I don’t know the economics of their lives, but I do see how much produce they sell on a Saturday.

So, the meeting went on for three hours and nothing was decided. We pigs butted heads and compared snout lengths, but got no closer to the other side of the fence. I may be frustrated with the perspective of the old-school, but the new-school shares no less blame for the lack of progress. These folks badly need to learn the meaning of consensus. The embittered stubbornness over $25 per year is the reason so many old farmers were driven out of business: a complete unwillingness to adapt old ways in order to preserve them.

Sean is an interesting guy. He’s tall, lanky, and his hair is balding but for a horseshoe of black ringlets that give him the slight appearance of a Hasidic Jew in carhart overalls. He believes in the most insane conspiracy theories, his wife is a bit of a Jesus-freak (but in a good, not-at-all-scary way), and I later found out that that pistol his five-year-old son, who was running around with his two-year-old sister playing cowboys with, was real. Despite these unnerving characteristics, Sean’s a cool guy. He has a couple of Milking Devon’s and Jersey’s, both heritage breeds. When we got there, Sean was milking the Devon who was red, horned, and bad-tempered. Milking Devons were the first cattle brought to North America by the pilgrims. There’s only about 400 left in the world. Sean sees the importance of preserving the genetics of an historical breed, so he raises a few. By the time we finished milking and had a cup of coffee, the scalder was hot enough to begin slaughtering and butchering.

Jamie, our fearless and very experienced leader, started the process. He grabbed a turkey by its feet. It flapped around for a minute. Really, I couldn’t help admiring how beautiful they are in this contorted position; arching their back and neck in this lovely “S” shape, wings outstretched. He gently put the bird, head-first into a silver cone and reached in to coax the turkey’s fleshy head out the bottom. With a knife I wished were a bit sharper, Jamie found the artery in the bird’s neck, just below it’s head, and slit it open. Jamie really was a master at this. The bird flapped and struggled minimally, and stayed fairly clean. Kirley went next. She had slaughtered chickens before, but was more intimidated by the turkeys. She wasn’t altogether sure of herself, but bravely (and now I think I understand where the turn of phrase comes from) took a stab. Her inexperience showed, as did that of everyone else there who slaughtered except for Jamie. Their cuts were much less precise, which I think did hurt the birds, as well as caused them to struggle a lot more. I use struggle gingerly. It was difficult to tell if the bird was alive or dead when it flapped around (only once actually pulling itself out of the cone, which was difficult to watch). I was sure that it was a “chicken with its head cut off” type of reaction where the nervous system shuts down by erupting violently, but I questioned it, since every time Jamie killed a bird this did not happen nearly as much. I was the only one who chose to refrain from killing. Maybe it was lack of courage, but I rationalised that I wanted to watch, learn, and to try to get my head around the idea of killing and how to do it better. I also reasoned that I lacked access to a sharper knife, which I am sure makes the process less painful for the birds.

The way I understand it, the reason the slitting of thoughts with a sharp knife is the preferred method of slaughter is this: think for a moment if you have you ever been cut with a sharp knife, a really sharp knife. If so, you probably didn’t notice right away. You probably saw blood before you ever felt pain. Now, think of a less common injury, that of massive blood loss. Most people who have experienced heavy blood loss describe the sensation as a kind of fading, a swimming in and out of consciousness, or a dreamy, light-headedness. The idea behind slaughtering animals this way is that it is relatively painless and because of blood-loss, death happens quite comfortably for the animal. But the whole time we were killing turkeys, despite these thoughts, I couldn’t help but wonder if this concept of “giving death” anthropomorphises these animals too much. Pretty much everything we did to these birds was better, less painful, and certainly less gruesome than what happens to them in nature. I remember going out into the sheep pasture one morning and finding a dead sheep; it’s head and shoulder twisted unnaturally and all its internal organs removed. And on another morning, feeding the turkey’s one dead, nothing left but bones and feathers in a brown, rotting heap. Another Turkey was sick. It’s wing had somehow been broken, and as it steadily became worse, its own kind pecked it and abused it until its head was a bloody, grey mess and Ty finally, mercifully snapped its neck. We are so concerned for the mercy of the animals we eat, much more so than nature ever is. I can’t help but wonder if this is another way that we have separated ourselves from nature, or if it is somehow in our nature to be merciful and to not want to cause harm and pain.

So, with those thoughts in my mind, I resigned myself to the process of scalding, plucking, eviscerating, and packaging. In order to pluck a bird easily, you have to heat the skin in water to just the right temperature for just the right amount of time. The machine is kind of like a rotisserie that pushes the bird with a metal plate in and out of the hot water for several minutes. The stink of hot wet dead bird became quite rank after mere minutes. Then, you pick up the hot, wet, dead bird that, mind you dry, already weighs some 40lbs, and wet at least 10 more, and hoist it into the plucker. The plucker is a large, stainless steel barrel lined with rubber, carrot-shaped nubs. When you turn the plucker on, the bird whirls around inside and the nubs serve to pull the feathers out in some mystery of physics I don’t understand. It’s pretty intense, watching this animal flap about, neck broken, being removed of its feathers. Then we pulled them out onto a table, removed the feet and heads, split open its belly and removed its entrails. I did a lot of this. I think because at this point the animal was becoming food, and I just sort of resonated with it. It was systematic and fascinating. Then the birds were cleaned with cold water, bagged, weighed, labelled, and put in the chest freezer. It was sort of amazing, having something that was alive not half and hour ago now bagged up and in a freezer, utterly changed, even unrecognisable from its original state. The whole process for 38 birds took about eight hours, including an hour lunch break and clean up. I learned all kinds of amazing and miraculous things about bodies and biology. It was such a powerful thing to see a 5 gallon bucket of blood set out for a few hours. It coagulated into a jello-like substance that was thick and dark and beautiful. There were buckets of unusable entrails, heads and feet and lungs, translucent oesophagus’s, and bright green bile; yellow, shining intestines all twisting and curving. We bagged up livers and gizzards that were purpley and iridescent. I know, it seems so gross when I say it here in writing, but I can’t stress how mesmerisingly beautiful it was to see: like a mystery of creation all laid out plain and vulgar, but no less mysterious.

By the end of the day I wasn’t sure if I would ever eat turkey again, mostly due to the smell, but also, in part, due to the fact that my hands had the sensory memory of the soft squish of lungs being dug out of rib cages. We were all bloody, smelly, and exhausted. As we were driving away, I couldn’t help but feel like I had been initiated, not only into the farm and the very essence of farming, but also into a shared experience of the rest of the world. In this month’s National Geographic, there’s an amazing photo of men in Bangladesh slaughtering a cow in the street. It’s blood arches in a spray as the beast falls toward the ground, the men assisting in its death. The caption below reads that the slaughter is celebratory, in honour of Id al-Adha, a Muslim holiday in honour of Ibraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Ishmael, at God’s request. The story, though differing in detail between the Judeo-Christian and Islamic versions, is read similarly in all three traditions. It is a story of ultimate devotion to the divine and unwavering supplication to the will of God. It also shows that obedience to God, though it my look grim and painful, is always reconciled with unanticipated mercy (remember, God stops Abraham at just the right moment). For Abraham and Isaac (Ibrahim and Ishmael) the horrible journey towards death, indeed a total willingness to both kill and to die without fear is rewarded with joy and relief in the form of a sheep, willing to die in Isaac’s stead. Fundamentally, this story links sacrifice with celebration, death with joy. And so, Ibrahim’s life-affirming sacrifice it is celebrated in the Muslim world with, what else but sacrifice. Animals are ritually and publicly slaughtered and shared among the poor.

The take home message is that animal slaughter is old, it is common, it is even elemental to human existence. It was so in the ancient world and is so today. Animals die so that people might live and this natural order is to be celebrated. It is perhaps difficult for us here in the safe, sterile comfort of the Western world to associate violence with happiness, but we must face this unassailable truth: death is life. Imagine for a moment the happiness a family must feel when they acquire a cow, sheep, or goat that they can use perpetually for food. An animal is a perpetual source because it regenerates itself in the cycles of life, birth, and death. This process is jarring to the uninitiated, (yet so many of us here in the US literally worship this process in the form of Jesus). Imagine for a moment the great physical pains of most of the world, both past and present, of just how dirty and foul it can get. We now, in this country, live in a kind of golden bubble. We have the privilege and indeed, luxury of constant and unwavering food supply. So many of us have the privilege of never seeing an animal die (to say nothing of seeing a human being die). So many have the privilege of spending only twenty-percent of our income on food. So many have the privilege of never bloodying our hands, never sullying them in the planting of seeds and harvesting of roots, of never having smelled the stench of dead things. In short, a great many of us have the privilege of never having to get dirty in order to live. But someone else, somewhere does have to get dirty, and too many of us have the privilege to ignore them. It is this division of people, clean and unclean: those who see death and are willing to die just as much as their food is, and those who think that separation from death is the way to life. This division I reject. So, I got to know death a little better through the sacrifice of 38 birds, 38 birds that will be used to celebrate our bounty, that will be used to remind us of how grateful we are, or perhaps, how grateful we should be, and that will remind us that gratitude is the deepest way we are happy.

Our farm has a corn maze primarily to supplement the farm’s income. Financially, a corn maze makes sense. If you have one, the tourist will come, they will spend their money.  What could possibly be at all wrong? The farmer makes additional income and the tourist has a good time and a happy memory of a farm and a quaintly pleasing impression of rural life. But it is just that that, an impression, that troubles me. In the case of our farm, and I’m sure many others, the impression the tourist leaves with is a false one. We do not raise corn for food, nor ethanol, nor feed, nor research. Corn is not what we do. Our farm uses the land to raise food. We are, as the former head of the Warren Wilson College Farm, John Pilson once told Ross, grass farmers. We take an abundant resource that is inedible to us, grass, let animals who can digest its nutrients eat it, and harvest that nutrition through the meat of that animal. Little of the land that we are on is suitable for raising grains and vegetables, so we raise the food that the land we are on can easily support.  Yet, the many tourists who visit our farm have no idea that this is at all what we actually do. Many don’t even realise we raise animals for food at all. By and large, they come for the corn maze, maybe a few pumpkins, and leave without noticing the freezers of food in the store. The corn maze presents a lie for the sake of a good time and increased income.

A caveat to this argument, though, is that farmers need that increased income. Several times, I have discussed the problem farmers face of making adequate income. Jamie attests, and I think rightly so, that of the vast majority of the interest and the money being made on the local food movement is going to the image of the movement. People buy from Whole Foods and they feel like they’ve done their part. Restaurants will have three or four local food items on their menus and they attract those concerned for food ethics. Shops open to sell nothing but organic sheets spun from cotton grown in Egypt and woven in Thailand and their patrons feel like they’ve made a contribution to something ethical. All the while government regulations and big corporate farms try to jump on the bandwagon diluting the language of ethical eating so that “organic” is equivalent to “all-natural” and either means a food as nutritious and untarnished as “grass-finished”. As a result, farmers still see very little of the billions of dollars made by Whole Foods and Earth Fare. It’s not enough, and neither is a corn maze.

A farm that successfully raises, harvests, and sells its harvest should not ever feel that in order to be economically successful it must go out of its way in terms of skills, labour, and resources for something that ultimately amounts to a waste of time and land for the sake of a tourist who will never buy even one of our steaks, nor encourage others towards ethical farming and eating; who, when the time comes to decide whether to develop or preserve that farm land, will merely shake their heads and say, well, I’m sorry to see the corn maze go, I guess we’ll have to find another one somewhere else.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. There is nothing local about a tourist. For a tourist, there is little incentive to look deeper than the initial good time had. Pleasure is just pleasure unless it has meaning attached to it. Carlo Petrini calls it taste: the marriage of pleasure with meaning. Though the smiles of a tourist have value and play their part in a persons life, there are better ways of getting those smiles and good feelings that will benefit a place an more levels than the fiscal and a person on more levels than amusement. I suggest on farm tours where people might learn the fun and amazement of how cows come when called, workshops on cooking with the food grown on the farm, or even prepared picnics for sale with farm food that can be enjoyed on the grounds, farm volunteer days where kids can come and enjoy shovelling manure, making bouquets for the farm store to sell, helping to press apple cider, or counting piglets, where adults can help repair structures and make improvements. By all means, make money: charge for the experience. The point is to serve the farm and get people to cultivate an authentic experience and an authentic relationship with the land that works to get them to appreciate the farm for what it is rather than what it isn’t. And by all means, if you grow corn, have a corn maze. The point is to work towards the cultivation of a recurring relationship to the idea of the farm and to the idea of food, if not ours specifically, the importance of those that serve the tourist locally. It is our job, as much as it is our job to raise meat, to help people, to help tourists to see at one individual farm how the farms local to them also serve them and their community. Then, maybe, farmers will be able to make enough money that they can stop doing things that aren’t their jobs.