Omnivore's Late Night Work
I came home from a long meeting at the temple, walking in the door a little before 9:30 last night. Jon was already at work -- the counter was covered with large chunks of red meat waiting for attention, sharp knives and cutting boards, a box of nitrile exam gloves, big stainless steel bowls. I took off my coat, washed my hands, got some gloves on and sat down at the counter for a couple of hours.
We don't think anything of this anymore but when we first started butchering and packaging and freezing venison, it was really hard and it felt like it took forever. As I try to remember when we started doing this, I picture Rebecca coming down the stairs when she was in high school and seeing us at work, expressing her disgust at the scene, and going back up to her room. I remember another time when Jon's back was hurting so much that he couldn't get out of bed, so that was before 2009. That time I had to butcher a whole big deer all by myself. It took over five hours.
It all started when the bow hunters stopped packaging our meat for us. Way back when, they would cut up and wrap the meat in white butcher paper and bring it to us all tidy and labeled. We did not know what a gift that was. But then there was some kind of falling out amongst the hunters, leaving only one hunter on this farm and he decided it was time to teach us to butcher.
This hunter, Roger, is meticulous in every way. He has been hunting all his life and when he teaches a young person to use a bow, that young person is not allowed to even hold the bow for the first year of training. There is much to learn. You have to prove that you are ready to pay attention to all the details and be responsible before you are permitted to try to kill an animal.
Lucky for us, Roger really does all the worst parts. He drags the deer out of the woods and hangs it upside down, takes out all the organs, peels off the hide and breaks the deer into big pieces. It's a lot of work. Over the years we have figured out which pieces we will never use, no matter what (because there were large roasts in our freezer that we finally had to take out in the woods and give to the foxes after five years) so now Roger only gives us the easiest parts to deal with. No more neck roasts.
He is very careful not to leave a single hair on the meat. That's a high bar. There are thousands of individual hairs on the outside of a deer. In recent years he has insisted that the hunter in Loudoun give us meat in exchange for hunting privileges and this new hunter was not a practiced field dresser. He just takes the whole deer to a professional and that's that. But Roger showed this guy how to take the deer apart the way he has taught us to expect it. I know I should be more flexible, but this new guy does not come close to Roger's expertise. My face is often in an expression of terrible distaste when we are cutting up a deer from this new hunter -- there is hair, the pieces are cut up like someone did it without understanding how it all fits together, and we get way too much leg. The leg meat is definitely edible but not easy to eat, and we have given up trying to extricate all that tough muscle from between the tendons or whatever that is.
I have a much clearer picture of how muscles are put together now, having taken apart many bodies in the last ten years or so. The job we are doing with our sharp knives is taking out every bit of fascia and fat that is wrapped around the meat. Roger says it makes the meat taste bad and we should not leave any of it. Jon grinds most of the meat in a heavy duty electric grinder that Roger made us buy and we could easily leave some of that white stuff on the meat and no one would be able to see it. But we follow Roger's strict directions because we don't want it to taste bad after all that effort, from someone sitting in a tree in the wind and cold to tracking down the animal after it has been shot to dragging it out of the woods to dressing it to disassembling it in a suburban kitchen. It would be really poor of us to waste all that, never mind the life of that animal.
I know that many people would find this task really distasteful. It is pretty hard core. I have found that I am not constitutionally capable of doing the actual killing -- like when we kill chickens, other people are ready and able to break their necks or cut their throats. That's not me. I can take it from there. I can peel the feathers off, cut the chicken open, put my hands in and pull out all the innards. But I doubt I will ever be ready to do the real job of ending the life.
But if you have read The Omnivore's Dilemma (and if you haven't yet, then you REALLY should...I think it should be required reading for all omnivores) then you know about all the issues that come with eating meat. I can't imagine hunting down a wild boar, but by now we have at least learned to convert a dead animal into packages of meat in the freezer, and that is something.
Our freezer is full of vegetables and fruit from our fields, chickens from Lani's hen houses, and venison that Jon has carefully labeled by weight. Like all farmers we know, we have enough food stashed to keep us going for months. There are entire sections of the supermarket that we don't need to visit (most of the stuff with an ingredients label, we skip that). We live in one of the richest regions of the country, with easy access to everything grown on this planet, but our food stash looks like something from 75 years ago in rural America.
I certainly don't want to go back in time but I am glad to be lucky enough not to depend on the industrial food complex and all the baggage of those systems. We get our milk from a local dairy, eggs from the chickens in Loudoun, now we are part of a newly emerging food co-op that will aspire to get its grains and beans etc. from good sources. We do go into the world for ice cream and cheese but if we really had to, we could learn to make that too. What we can't do is grow citrus and avocados.
But I digress.
I went to bed when we finished the disassembly part and Jon stayed up for a few more hours, grinding and packaging the meat. Hunting and gathering is time consuming. Not everyone has the chance to do this, but we would all be different consumers if we had to do more hands-on work to get meat on the table.
We don't think anything of this anymore but when we first started butchering and packaging and freezing venison, it was really hard and it felt like it took forever. As I try to remember when we started doing this, I picture Rebecca coming down the stairs when she was in high school and seeing us at work, expressing her disgust at the scene, and going back up to her room. I remember another time when Jon's back was hurting so much that he couldn't get out of bed, so that was before 2009. That time I had to butcher a whole big deer all by myself. It took over five hours.
It all started when the bow hunters stopped packaging our meat for us. Way back when, they would cut up and wrap the meat in white butcher paper and bring it to us all tidy and labeled. We did not know what a gift that was. But then there was some kind of falling out amongst the hunters, leaving only one hunter on this farm and he decided it was time to teach us to butcher.
This hunter, Roger, is meticulous in every way. He has been hunting all his life and when he teaches a young person to use a bow, that young person is not allowed to even hold the bow for the first year of training. There is much to learn. You have to prove that you are ready to pay attention to all the details and be responsible before you are permitted to try to kill an animal.
Lucky for us, Roger really does all the worst parts. He drags the deer out of the woods and hangs it upside down, takes out all the organs, peels off the hide and breaks the deer into big pieces. It's a lot of work. Over the years we have figured out which pieces we will never use, no matter what (because there were large roasts in our freezer that we finally had to take out in the woods and give to the foxes after five years) so now Roger only gives us the easiest parts to deal with. No more neck roasts.
He is very careful not to leave a single hair on the meat. That's a high bar. There are thousands of individual hairs on the outside of a deer. In recent years he has insisted that the hunter in Loudoun give us meat in exchange for hunting privileges and this new hunter was not a practiced field dresser. He just takes the whole deer to a professional and that's that. But Roger showed this guy how to take the deer apart the way he has taught us to expect it. I know I should be more flexible, but this new guy does not come close to Roger's expertise. My face is often in an expression of terrible distaste when we are cutting up a deer from this new hunter -- there is hair, the pieces are cut up like someone did it without understanding how it all fits together, and we get way too much leg. The leg meat is definitely edible but not easy to eat, and we have given up trying to extricate all that tough muscle from between the tendons or whatever that is.
I have a much clearer picture of how muscles are put together now, having taken apart many bodies in the last ten years or so. The job we are doing with our sharp knives is taking out every bit of fascia and fat that is wrapped around the meat. Roger says it makes the meat taste bad and we should not leave any of it. Jon grinds most of the meat in a heavy duty electric grinder that Roger made us buy and we could easily leave some of that white stuff on the meat and no one would be able to see it. But we follow Roger's strict directions because we don't want it to taste bad after all that effort, from someone sitting in a tree in the wind and cold to tracking down the animal after it has been shot to dragging it out of the woods to dressing it to disassembling it in a suburban kitchen. It would be really poor of us to waste all that, never mind the life of that animal.
I know that many people would find this task really distasteful. It is pretty hard core. I have found that I am not constitutionally capable of doing the actual killing -- like when we kill chickens, other people are ready and able to break their necks or cut their throats. That's not me. I can take it from there. I can peel the feathers off, cut the chicken open, put my hands in and pull out all the innards. But I doubt I will ever be ready to do the real job of ending the life.
But if you have read The Omnivore's Dilemma (and if you haven't yet, then you REALLY should...I think it should be required reading for all omnivores) then you know about all the issues that come with eating meat. I can't imagine hunting down a wild boar, but by now we have at least learned to convert a dead animal into packages of meat in the freezer, and that is something.
Our freezer is full of vegetables and fruit from our fields, chickens from Lani's hen houses, and venison that Jon has carefully labeled by weight. Like all farmers we know, we have enough food stashed to keep us going for months. There are entire sections of the supermarket that we don't need to visit (most of the stuff with an ingredients label, we skip that). We live in one of the richest regions of the country, with easy access to everything grown on this planet, but our food stash looks like something from 75 years ago in rural America.
I certainly don't want to go back in time but I am glad to be lucky enough not to depend on the industrial food complex and all the baggage of those systems. We get our milk from a local dairy, eggs from the chickens in Loudoun, now we are part of a newly emerging food co-op that will aspire to get its grains and beans etc. from good sources. We do go into the world for ice cream and cheese but if we really had to, we could learn to make that too. What we can't do is grow citrus and avocados.
But I digress.
I went to bed when we finished the disassembly part and Jon stayed up for a few more hours, grinding and packaging the meat. Hunting and gathering is time consuming. Not everyone has the chance to do this, but we would all be different consumers if we had to do more hands-on work to get meat on the table.
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