Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  An appropriate response would be to stop this, which the British did. They also began testing 100 percent of cows over two years old at slaughter for BSE, and removing all "downer" cows (cows unable to walk on their own) from the food supply. As a result, the U.K. virtually eradicated BSE in two years. Reasonably enough, Japan implemented the same policies.

  In the United States, the response has been somewhat different. U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows. Since prions aren't destroyed by extreme heat or any known drug, they readily survive this food-chain loop-de-loop. Cow blood (yum) may also be dinner for other cows and calves, and restaurant plate wastes can also be served.

  After the first detected case of U.S. mad cow disease, fifty-two countries banned U.S. beef. The USDA then required 2 percent of all the downer cows to be tested, and 1 percent of all cows that were slaughtered. After that, the number of downer cows reported in the United States decreased by 20 percent (did I mention it was voluntary reporting?), and only two more cases of BSE were detected. In May 2006, the USDA decided the threat was so low that only one-tenth of one percent of all slaughtered cows needed to be tested. Jean Halloran, the food policy initiatives director at Consumers Union, responded, "It approaches a policy of don't look, don't find."

  How can consumers respond to this? Can we seek out beef tested as BSE-free by the meat packers? No. One company tried to test all its beef, but the USDA declared that illegal (possibly to protect any BSE cows from embarrassment). Would I suggest a beef boycott? Heavens, no; cows are our friends (plus, I believe that would be illegal). But it might be worth remembering this: not a single case of BSE, anywhere, has ever turned up in cattle that were raised and finished on pasture grass or organic feed. As for the other 99 percent of beef in the United States, my recommendation would be to consider the words of Gary Weber, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association head of regulatory affairs: "The consumers we've done focus groups with are comfortable that this is a very rare disease."

  For more information visit www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.html.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  The girls returned carrying rooster #1 upside down, by the legs. Inversion has the immediate effect of lulling a chicken to sleep, or something near to it. What comes next is quick and final. We set the rooster gently across our big chopping block (a legendary fixture of our backyard, whose bloodstains hold visiting children in thrall), and down comes the ax. All sensation ends with that quick stroke. He must then be held by the legs over a large plastic bucket until all the blood has run out. Farmers who regularly process poultry have more equipment, including banks of "killing cones" or inverted funnels that contain the birds while the processor pierces each neck with a sharp knife, cutting two major arteries and ending brain function. We're not pros, so we have a more rudimentary setup. By lulling and swiftly decapitating my animal, I can make sure my relatively unpracticed handling won't draw out the procedure or cause pain.

  What you've heard is true: the rooster will flap his wings hard during this part. If you drop him he'll thrash right across the yard, unpleasantly spewing blood all around, though the body doesn't run--it's nothing that well coordinated. His newly detached head silently opens and closes its mouth, down in the bottom of the gut bucket, a world apart from the ruckus. The cause of all these actions is an explosion of massively firing neurons without a brain to supervise them. Most people who claim to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, really, are not even close. The nearest thing might be the final convulsive seconds of an All-Star wrestling match.

  For Rooster #1 it was over, and into the big kettle for a quick scald. After a one-minute immersion in 145-degree water, the muscle tissue releases the feathers so they're easier to pluck. "Easier" is relative--every last feather still has to be pulled, carefully enough to avoid tearing the skin. The downy breast feathers come out by handfuls, while the long wing and tail feathers sometimes must be removed individually with pliers. If we were pros we would have an electric scalder and automatic plucker, a fascinating bucket full of rotating rubber fingers that does the job in no time flat. For future harvests we might borrow a friend's equipment, but for today we had a pulley on a tree limb so we could hoist the scalded carcass to shoulder level, suspending it there from a rope so several of us could pluck at once. Lily, Abby, and Eli pulled neck and breast feathers, making necessary observations such as "Gag, look where his head came off," and "Wonder which one of these tube thingies was his windpipe." Most kids need only about ninety seconds to get from eeew gross to solid science. A few weeks later Abby would give an award-winning, fully illustrated 4-H presentation entitled "You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day."

  Laura and Becky and I answered the kids' questions, and also talked about Mom things while working on back and wing feathers. (Our husbands were on to the next beheading.) Laura and I compared notes on our teenage daughters--relatively new drivers on the narrow country roads between their jobs, friends, and home--and the worries that come with that territory. I was painfully conscious of Becky's quiet, her ache for a teenage son who never even got to acquire a driver's license. The accident that killed Larry could not have been avoided through any amount of worry. We all cultivate illusions of safety that could fall away in the knife edge of one second.

  I wondered how we would get through this afternoon, how she would get through months and years of living with impossible loss. I wondered if I'd been tactless, inviting these dear friends to an afternoon of ending lives. And then felt stupid for that thought. People who are grieving walk with death, every waking moment. When the rest of us dread that we'll somehow remind them of death's existence, we are missing their reality. Harvesting turkeys--which this family would soon do on their own farm--was just another kind of work. A rendezvous with death, for them, was waking up each morning without their brother and son.

  By early afternoon six roosters had lost their heads, feathers, and viscera, and were chilling on ice. We had six turkeys to go, the hardest piece of our work simply because the animals are larger and heavier. Some of these birds were close to twenty pounds. They would take center stage on our holiday table and those of some of our friends. At least one would be charcuterie--in the garden I had sage, rosemary, garlic, onions, everything we needed for turkey sausage. And the first two roosters we'd harvested would be going on the rotisserie later that afternoon.

  We allowed ourselves a break before the challenge of hoisting, plucking, and dressing the turkeys. While Lily and her friends constructed feather crowns and ran for the poultry house to check in with the living, the adults cracked open beers and stretched out in lawn chairs in the September sun. Our conversation turned quickly to the national preoccupation of that autumn: Katrina, the hurricane that had just hit southern Louisiana and Mississippi. We were horrified by the news that was beginning to filter out of that flooded darkness, the children stranded on rooftops, the bereaved and bewildered families slogging through streets waist-deep in water, breaking plate glass windows to get bottles of water. People drowning and dying of thirst at the same time.

  It was already clear this would be an epic disaster. New Orleans and countless other towns across southern Louisiana and Mississippi were being evacuated and left for dead. The news cameras had focused solely on urban losses, sending images of flooded streets, people on rooftops, broken storefronts, and the desperate crises of people in the city with no resources for relocating or evacuating. I had not seen one photograph from the countryside--a wrecked golf course was the closest thing to it. I wondered about the farmers whose year of work still lay in the fields, just weeks or days away from harvest, when the flood took it all. I still can't say whether the rural victims of Katrina found their support systems more resilient, or if their hardships simply went unreported.

  The disaster reached into the rest of the country with u
nexpected tentacles. Our town and schools were already taking in people who had lost everything. The office where I'd just sent my passport for renewal was now underwater. Gasoline had passed $3 a gallon, here and elsewhere, leaving our nation in sticker shock. U.S. citizens were making outlandish declarations about staying home. Climate scientists were saying, "If you warm up the globe, you eventually pay for it." Economists were eyeing our budget deficits and predicting collapse, mayhem, infrastructure breakdown. In so many ways, disaster makes us take stock. For me it had inspired powerful cravings about living within our means. I wasn't thinking so much of my household budget or the national one but the big budget, the one that involves consuming approximately the same things we produce. Taking a symbolic cue from my presumed-soggy passport, I suddenly felt like sticking very close to home, with a hand on my family's production, even when it wasn't all that easy or fun--like today.

  Analysts of current events were mostly looking to blame administrators. Fair enough, but there were also, it seemed, obvious vulnerabilities here--whole populations depending on everyday, long-distance lifelines, supplies of food and water and fuel and everything else that are acutely centralized. That's what we consider normal life. Now nature had written a hugely abnormal question across the bottom of our map. I wondered what our answers might be.

  Our mood stayed solemn until Eli introduced the comedy show of poultry parts. He applied his artistry and grossout-proof ingenuity to raw materials retrieved from the gut bucket. While the rest of us merely labored, Eli acted, directed, and produced. He invented the turkey-foot backscratcher, the inflated turkey-crop balloon. Children--even when they have endured the unthinkable--have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up. We got a little slap-happy egging on the two turkey heads that moved their mouths to Eli's words, starring in a mock TV talk show. As I gutted the last bird of the day, I began thinking twice about what props I was tossing into the gut bucket. I was not sure I wanted to see what an eight-year-old boy could do with twelve feet of intestine.

  The good news was that we were nearly done. I encouraged the rest of the adults to go ahead and wash up, I had things in hand. They changed out of the T-shirts that made them look like Braveheart extras. The girls persuaded Eli to retire the talking heads and submit to a hosing-down. Our conversation finally relaxed fully into personal news, the trivial gripes and celebrations for which friends count on one another: what was impossible these days at work. How the children were faring with various teachers and 4-H projects. How I felt about having been put on the list.

  That question referred to a book that had been released that summer, alerting our nation to the dangers of one hundred people who are Destroying America. It was popular for nearly a week and a half, so I'd received a heads-up about my being the seventy-fourth most dangerous person in America. It gave a certain pizzazz to my days, I thought, as I went about canning tomatoes, doing laundry, meeting the school bus, and here and there writing a novel or essay or whatever, knowing full well that kind of thing only leads to trouble. My thrilling new status had no impact on my household position: I still had to wait till the comics were read to get the Sudoku puzzle, and the dog ignored me as usual. Some of my heroes had turned up much higher on the list. Jimmy Carter was number 6.

  "When you're seventy-four, you try harder," I now informed my friends, as I reached high up into the turkey's chest cavity from the, um, lower end. I was trying to wedge my fingers between the lungs and ribs to pull out the whole package of viscera in one clean motion. It takes practice, dexterity, and a real flair for menace to disembowel a deceased turkey. "Bond. James Bond," a person might say by way of introduction, in many situations of this type. My friends watched me, openly expressing doubts as to my actual dangerousness. They didn't think I even deserved to be number 74.

  "Hey," I said, pretty sure I now had the gizzard in hand, "don't distract me. I'm on the job here. Destroying America is not the walk in the park you clearly think it is."

  Someone had sent me a copy of this book, presumably to protect me from myself. A couple of people now went into the house to fetch it so they could stage dramatic readings from the back jacket. These friends I've known for years uncovered the secrets they'd never known about me, President Carter, and our ilk: "These," the book warned, "are the cultural elites who look down their snobby noses at 'ordinary' Americans...."

  All eyes turned fearfully to me. My "Kentucky NCAA Champions" shirt was by now so bloodstained, you would think I had worn it to a North Carolina game. Also, I had feathers sticking to my hair. I was crouched in something of an inharmonious yoga pose with both my arms up a turkey's hind end, more than elbow deep.

  With a sudden sucking sound the viscera let go and I staggered back, trailing intestines. My compatriots laughed very hard. With me, not at me, I'm sure.

  And that was the end of a day's work. I hosed down the butcher shop and changed into more civilized attire (happy to see my wedding ring was still on) while everybody else set the big picnic table on our patio with plates and glasses and all the food in the fridge we'd prepared ahead. The meat on the rotisserie smelled really good, helping to move our party's mindset toward the end stages of the "cooking from scratch" proposition. Steven brushed the chicken skin with our house-specialty sweet-and-sour sauce and we uncorked the wine. At dusk we finally sat down to feast on cold bean salad, sliced tomatoes with basil, blue potato salad, and meat that had met this day's dawn by crowing.

  We felt tired to our bones but anointed by life in a durable, companionable way, for at least the present moment. We the living take every step in tandem with death, naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven, whether we can see that or not. We bear it by the grace of friendship, good meals, and if we need them, talking turkey heads.

  * * *

  Carnivory

  BY CAMILLE

  The summer I was eleven, our family took a detour through the Midwest on our annual drive back from our farm in Virginia to Tucson. We passed by one feedlot after another. The odor was horrifying to me, and the sight of the animals was haunting: cows standing on mountains of their own excrement, packed so tightly together they had no room to walk. All they could do was wearily moo and munch on grain mixed with the cow pies under their feet.

  Looking out the window at these creatures made my heart sink and my stomach lose all interest. The outdoor part of the operation seemed crueler than anything that might go on inside a slaughterhouse. Whether or not it was scheduled to die, no living thing, I felt, should have to spend its life the way those cows were. When we got home I told my parents I would never eat beef from a feedlot again. Surprisingly, they agreed and took the same vow.

  I had another eye-opening experience that fall, in my junior high cafeteria: most people, I learned, really don't want to know what their hamburger lived through before it got to the bun. Some of the girls at my usual lunch table stopped sitting with me because they didn't like the reasons I gave them for not eating the ground-beef spaghetti sauce or taco salad the lunch ladies were serving. I couldn't imagine my friends would care so little about something that seemed so important. To my shock, they expressed no intention of changing their ways, and got mad at me for making them feel badly about their choice. A very important lesson for me.

  Nobody (including me) wants to be told what church to attend or how to dress, and people don't like being told what to eat either. Food is one of our most intensely personal systems of preference, so obviously it's a touchy subject for public debate. Eight years after my cafeteria drama, I can see plainly now I was wrong to try to impose my food ethics on others, even friends. I was recently annoyed when somebody told me I should not eat yogurt because "If I were a cow, how would I like to be milked?" At the same time, we create our personal and moral standards based on the information we have, and most of us (beyond grade seven) want to make informed choices.

  Egg and meat industries in the United States take some care not to publicize specifics ab
out how they raise animals. Phrases like "all natural" on packaged meat in supermarkets don't necessarily mean the cow or chicken agrees. Animals in CAFOs live under enormous physiological stress. Cows that are fed grain diets in confinement are universally plagued with gastric ailments, most commonly subacute acidosis, which leads to ulceration of the stomach and eventually death, though the cattle don't usually live long enough to die of it. Most cattle raised in this country begin their lives on pasture but are sent to feedlots to fatten up during the last half of life. Factory-farmed chickens and turkeys often spend their entire lives without seeing sunlight.

  On the other hand, if cattle remain on pasture right to the end, that kind of beef is called "grass finished." The differences between this and CAFO beef are not just relevant to how kindly you feel about animals: meat and eggs of pastured animals also have a measurably different nutrient composition. A lot of recent research has been published on this subject, which is slowly reaching the public. USDA studies found much lower levels of saturated fats and higher vitamin E, beta-carotene, and omega-3 levels in meat from cattle fattened on pasture grasses (their natural diet), compared with CAFO animals. In a direct approach, Mother Earth News hosts a "Chicken and Egg Page" on its Web site, inviting farmers to send eggs from all over the country into a laboratory for nutritional analyses, and posting the results. The verdict confirms research published fifteen years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine: eggs from chickens that ranged freely on grass have about half the cholesterol of factory-farmed eggs, and it's mostly LDL, the cholesterol that's good for you. They also have more vitamin E, beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids than their cooped-up counterparts. The more pasture time a chicken is allowed, the greater these differences.