“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.
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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 about 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.
As with the chickens, the nutritional benefits in beef are directly proportional to the fraction of the steer’s life it spent at home on the range eating grass instead of grain-gruel. Free-range beef also has less danger of bacterial contamination because feeding on grass maintains normal levels of acidity in the animal’s stomach. At the risk of making you not want to sit at my table, I should tell you that the high-acid stomachs of grain-fed cattle commonly harbor acid-resistant strains of E. coli that are very dangerous to humans. Because CAFOs are so widespread in our country, this particular strain of deadly bacteria is starting to turn up more and more commonly in soil, water, and even other animals, causing contamination incidents like the nationwide outbreak of spinach-related illnesses and deaths in 2006. Free-range grazing is not just kinder to the animals and the surrounding environment; it produces an entirely different product. With that said, I leave the decision to you.
Pasture-finished meat is increasingly available, and free-range eggs are now sold almost everywhere. Here is the recipe for one of my family’s standard, easy egg-based meals. If you feel more adventurous, you can get some free-range turkey meat and freak out your kids’ friends with my parents’ sausage recipe.
VEGGIE FRITTATA
Olive oil for pan
8 eggs
½ cup milk
Beat eggs and milk together, then pour into oiled, oven-proof skillet over medium heat.
Chopped kale, broccoli, asparagus, or
spinach, depending on the season
Salt and pepper to taste
Feta or other cheese (optional)
Promptly add vegetables and stir evenly into egg mixture. At this point you can also add feta or other cheeses. Cook on low without stirring until eggs are mostly set, then transfer to oven and broil 2–4 minutes, until lightly golden on top. Cool to set before serving.
SPICY TURKEY SAUSAGE
2½ pounds raw turkey meat, diced, including dark meat and fat
½ cup chopped onion
¼ cup chopped garlic
½ tablespoon paprika
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons fresh oregano (or 1 teaspoon dry)
2 teaspoons fresh thyme (or 1 teaspoon dry)
1 teaspoon ground black pepper 2 teaspoons cayenne (optional)
Hog casings (ask your butcher, optional)
Combine seasonings in a large bowl and mix well. Toss with turkey meat until thoroughly coated. If the meat is very lean, you may need to add olive oil to moisten. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Then grind the mixture in a meat grinder or food processor. You can make patties, or stuff casings to make sausage links. An inexpensive sausage-stuffing attachment is available for KitchenAid and other grinders; your butcher may know a source for organic hog casings.
Download these and all other Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes at www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com
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15 • WHERE FISH WEAR CROWNS
September
Steven came downstairs with the suitcases and found me in the kitchen studying a box full of papery bulbs. My mail-order seed garlic had just arrived.
His face fell. “You’re going to plant those now?”
In two hours we were taking off on our first real vacation without kids since our honeymoon—a trip to Italy we’d dreamed of for nearly a decade. My new passport had escaped, by one day, the hurricane that destroyed the New Orleans office of its issue. We had scrupulously organized child care for Lily, backup child care, backup-backup plus the animal chores and so forth. We’d put the garden away for the season, cleaned the house, and finally were really going to do this: the romantic dinners alfresco, the Tuscan sun. The second-honeymoon bride reeking of garlic…
“Sorry,” I said. I put the bulbs back in the box.
I confess to a ludicrous flair for last-minute projects before big events. I moved nine cubic yards of topsoil the day before going into labor with my first child. (She was overdue, so yes, I was trying.) On the evening of my once-in-a-lifetime dinner at the White House with President and Mrs. Clinton, my hands were stained slightly purple because I’d been canning olives the day before. I have hoed, planted, and even butchered poultry in the hours before stepping onstage for a fund-raising gala. Some divas get a manicure before a performance; I just try to make sure there’s nothing real scary under my fingernails. My mother raised children who feel we need to earn what this world means to give us. When I sat back and relaxed on the flight to Rome, I left behind a spit-shined kitchen, a year’s harvest put away, and some unplanted garlic. I’d live with it.
With the runway of the Leonardo da Vinci airport finally in sight and our hearts all set for andiamo, at the last possible moment the pilot aborted our landing. Wind shear, he announced succinctly. We circled Rome, flying low over ruddy September fields, tile-roofed farmhouses, and paddocks enclosed by low stone walls. The overnight flight had gone smoothly, but now I had ten extra minutes to examine my second thoughts. Would this trip be everything we’d waited for? Could I forget about work and the kids, indulging in the luxury of hotels and meals prepared by someone else?
Finally the nose cone tipped down and our 767 roared low over a plowed field next to the airport. Drifting in the interzone between waiting and beginning, suspended by modern aerodynamics over an ancient field of pebbled black soil, I found myself studying freshly turned furrows and then the farmer himself. A stone’s throw from the bustle of Rome’s international airport, this elderly farmer was plowing with harnessed draft horses. For reasons I didn’t really understand yet, I thought: I’ve come home.
I am Italian by marriage: both Steven’s maternal grandparents were born there, emigrating as young adults. His mother and aunts grew up in an Italian-speaking home, deeply identified with the foodways and all other ways of the mother country. Steven has ancestors from other parts of the world too, but we don’t know much about them. It’s my observation that when Italian genes are present, all others duck and cover. His daughter looks like the apple that fell not very far from the olive tree; when asked, Lily identifies herself as American and invariably adds, “but really I’m Italian.”
After arriving on the ancestral soil I figured out pretty quickly why that heritage swamps all competition. It’s a culture that sweeps you in, sits you down in the kitchen, and feeds you so well you really don’t want to leave. In the whole of Italy we could not find a bad meal. Not that we were looking. But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall.
Eating establishments where cuisine isn’t the point—is that a strange notion? Maybe, but in the United States we have them galore: fast-food joints where “fast” is the point; cafeterias where it’s all about efficient caloric load; sports bars where the purported agenda is “sports” and the real one is to close down the arteries to the diameter of a pin. In most airport restaurants the premise is “captive starving audience.” In our country it’s a reasonable presumption that unless you have gone out of your way to find good food, you’ll be settling for mediocre at best.
What we discovered in Italy was that if an establishment serves food, then food is the point. Museum cafeterias offer crusty panini and homemade desserts; any simple diner serving the lunch crowd is likely to roll and cut its own pasta, served up with truffles or special house combinations. Pizzerias smother their pizzas with fresh local ingredients in widely recognized combinations with evocative names. I took to reading these aloud from the menu. Most of the named meals I’d ever known about had butch monikers like Whopper, Monster, and Gulp. I was enchanted with the idea of a lunch named Margherita, Capricciosa, or Quattro Stagioni.
Reading the menus was reliable entertainment for other reasons too. More Italians were going to chef school, apparently, than translator school. This is not a complaint; it’s my belief that when in Rome, you speak the best darn Italian you can muster. So we mustered. I speak some languages, but that isn’t one of them. Steven’s Italian consisted of only the endearments and swear words he grew up hearing from his Nonnie. I knew the Italian vocabulary of classical music, plus that one song from Lady and the Tramp. But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining words from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.
To my astonishment, this technique served really well about 80 percent of the time. Italians are a deeply forgiving people. Or else they are polite, and still laughing. Va bene. With a dictionary and grammar book in hand, learning a little more actual Italian each day, we traveled in our rental car from Rome up the winding mountain roads to Steven’s grandmother’s hometown in Abruzzi, then north through the farmsteads of Umbria and Tuscany, and finally by train to Venice, having fascinating conversations along the way with people who did not speak English. I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. In this case they were kind enough to dumb down their explanations and patiently unscramble a romance language omelet.
So we didn’t expect English translations on the menu. No problem. Often there was no menu at all, just the meal of the day in a couple of variations. But restaurants with printed menus generally offered some transla
tion, especially around cities and tourist destinations. I felt less abashed about my own wacky patois as I puzzled through entries such as “Nose Fish,” “Pizza with fungus,” and the even less appetizing “Polyps, baked or grilled.” It seemed “Porky mushrooms” were in season everywhere, along with the perennial favorite (but biologically challenging) “bull mozzarella.”
The fun didn’t stop with printed menus: an impressive sculpture in the Vatican Museum was identified as the “Patron Genius of Childbirth.” (So that’s who thought it up.) A National Park brochure advised us about hiking preparedness, closing with this helpful tip: “Be sure you have the necessary equipments to make funny outings in respects of nature!” One morning after breakfast we found a polite little sign in our hotel room that warned: “Due to general works in the village, no water or electricity 8:30 to 11:00. Thank you for your comprehension.”
Comprehension is just what was called for in these situations. Sooner or later we always figured out the menus, though we remained permanently mystified by a recurring item called “oven-baked rhombus.” We were tempted to order it just to put the question to rest, but never did. Too square, I guess.
Italian food is not delicious for its fussiness or complexity, but for the opposite reason: it’s simple. And it’s an obsession. For a while I thought I was making this up, an outsider’s exaggerated sensitivity to a new cultural expression. But I really wasn’t. In the famous Siena cathedral I used my binoculars to study the marble carvings over the entry door (positioned higher than the Donatello frescoes), discovering these icons to be eggplants, tomatoes, cabbages, and zucchini. In sidewalk cafés and trattoria with checkered tablecloths, we eavesdropped on Italians at other tables engaging in spirited arguments, with lots of hand gestures. Gradually we were able to understand they were disagreeing over not politics, but olive oils or the best wines. (Or soccer teams.) In small towns the restaurant staff always urged us to try the local oil, and then told us in confidence that the olive oil from the next town over was terrible. Really, worse than terrible: (sotto voce) it was mierda! Restaurateurs in the next town over, naturally, would repeat the same story in reverse. We always agreed. Everything was the best.
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