Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  When I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I spoke with more than 100 diners during my book dinner at Craigie on Main. Only four were hunters, although a few more wanted to start. Over the course of the night, I fielded weird question after weird question from diner after diner. Have I ever shot someone? Did I actually eat what I shot? Wasn’t I afraid of diseases? It was a stark show of ignorance. Not stupidity, mind you, just an utter lack of knowledge of what hunting is all about.

  To be sure, these encounters were in college towns among a certain set of people. I had some book events, notably those in Montana, Pittsburgh and Austin, where most everyone who attended either hunted or was at least familiar with it. And in most places I could be assured of a healthy smattering of fellow hook-and-bullet types or farmers, who are equally familiar with the death of animals.

  But the fact remains: Most people reading this have never killed anything larger than an insect, and among those who have it’s usually been a fish, or an accident—like running over someone’s dog. Most people have no idea what it’s like to take the life of another creature, let alone why someone would actively seek to do so. Let me try to explain to you the way I did to my young foraging friend on book tour. Let me tell you what it means to kill, at least for me.

  To deal death is to experience your world exploding. It is an avalanche of emotion and thought and action.

  Armed with a shotgun, it is often done without thought, on instinct alone. A flushing grouse gives you no more than a few seconds to pull the trigger before it disappears into the alders. A rabbit can leap back into the brambles in even less time. Unless you are perfect in that split second, the animal wins. And being human, we are far from perfect. Even with ducks, where you often have plenty of time to prepare for the shot, their speed and agility are more than adequate defenses. We hunters fail more than we succeed.

  This is why we will often whoop it up when we finally bring a bird down: We are not being callous, rejoicing in the animal’s death. It is a hard-wired reaction to succeeding at something you have been working for days, months, even years to achieve. In some corner of your brain, it means you will eat today. This reaction can look repulsive from the outside.

  Should you arm yourself with a rifle, you then must wrestle your conscious mind. Buck fever is real. A huge set of antlers will hypnotize the best of us, man and woman alike. Even if the animal lacks antlers, as mine often do, you have to contend with The Twin Voices: On one shoulder sits a voice shouting, Shoot! Shoot! You might not get another chance! On the other shoulder sits another voice, grave and calm: Be careful. You must not put that bullet in a place where the animal will suffer. Better to pass a shot than wound an animal. A wise hunter does not kill lightly.

  In that moment when the game shows itself and you ready yourself to shoot, all that matters is that you do your job correctly. And that job is to kill cleanly and quickly. The animal deserves it; we would want no less were the tables turned. And make no mistake: A great many hunters, myself included, do this mental table-turning with some frequency. Seeing animals die so often makes us think of our own death, and I can assure you most of us would rather die with a well-placed shot than wither in a hospital.

  We also know all too well that we are fallible creatures. When we fail to kill cleanly, when we wound the animals we seek, it is our duty to end their suffering ourselves. If there is a moment in this whole process that breaks my heart, it is this one. Everything wants to live, and will try anything it can to escape you. We see ourselves in this struggle, feel tremendous empathy for the struggling bird, the fleeing deer. It is a soul-searing moment where part of you marvels at the animal’s drive to live—to escape!—at the same time the rest of you is consumed with capturing it as fast as possible so you can end this miserable business. This internal conflict is, to me, what being human is all about. A coyote or a hawk has no remorse. We do.

  I am not ashamed to tell you that I have shed a tear more than once when I’ve had to deliver the coup de grace to a duck. I’m not sure what it is about ducks, but they affect me more than other animals. I always apologize to it, knowing full well that this is a weak gesture designed mostly to help me feel better. But it does help me feel better. At least a little. So I keep doing it.

  As the moment of killing fades, death rides home with you in the back of the truck. Once home, you must transmogrify the animal you killed into meat. The transformation is a mystical one, and every time I “dress” game—such a pleasant euphemism, that—I marvel at how fast my mind toggles from hunter to butcher to cook.

  It is a necessary process, and one that is vital to why I have chosen this life, why I am a hunter.

  I look down at my keyboard and see death under my fingernails. I smell the fat and gore and meat of dead ducks upon me; it’s been a good week of hunting. And because I eat everything on a duck but the quack, I have become intimate with the insides of waterfowl. Over the years, I’ve gutted and taken apart so many animals that I know the roadmap blindfolded. And that road leads to meals long remembered. I reach into a deer’s guts without thought: I want those kidneys, and that liver. I turn my arm upwards and wrap my fingers around its stopped heart, slick and firm. It will become heart cutlets, or jaeger schnitzel.

  Once plucked and gutted, I can take apart a duck in 90 seconds. Maybe less. My fingers intuitively know which way and how hard to pluck each feather from a pheasant’s carcass. I know just where to put my boning knife, sharp as lightning, to slice the tendons that hold a hog’s tongue into its head. I use the same knife to caress its hind legs, separating the natural muscle groups apart along each seam. Some will become roasts, others salami. Animal becomes food. The pop of a goose’s thigh bone disjointing from its body no longer sickens me; all it means is that I need to slip my knife under that bone and around the coveted “oyster,” the best bite on any bird.

  Wasting meat is the sin I cannot forgive. When I kill an animal, its death is on my hands, and those animals to whom I’ve had to deliver the coup de grace are especially close to me. There is a bond between us that requires that I do my part to ensure they did not die for nothing. This is why I spend so much time creating recipes for every part of the animal. Nature wastes nothing, and neither should I. It pains me to know that some hunters do not share this feeling, that they care only for backstraps or breasts—and while I know that coyotes and buzzards will eat what we do not, I do not hunt to feed those creatures.

  You might ask me that with all this, why bother eating meat at all? Why deal with all the moral and emotional implications? In the face of such constant death, is it not better to be a vegetarian?

  For me, no. It is a cold fact that no matter what your dietary choice, animals die so you can eat. Just because you choose not to eat the flesh of animals does not mean that their homes did not fall to the plow to become acres of vegetables and soybeans, wheat and corn. Habitat, more than anything, determines the health of a species. The passenger pigeon may have been snuffed out by hunting, but it was the massive destruction of virgin forest—forest cleared to grow crops—that brought the pigeon to the brink. I have nothing against vegetarians, and the vast majority I’ve met understand what I do and respect it. But to those few who do not, I say this: We all have blood on our hands, only I can see mine.

  It all boils down to intimacy. Hunting has created an uncommon closeness between the animals I pursue, the meat I eat, and my own sense of self. There is a terrible seriousness to it all that underlies the thrill of the chase, the camaraderie of being with my fellow hunters and the deep sense of calm I feel when alone in the wild. I welcome this weight: It fuels my desire to make something magical with the mortal remains of the game I manage to bring home. It is a feeling every hunter who’s ever stared into the freezer at that special strip of backstrap, or hard-won bird or beast understands.

  Meat should be special. It has been for most of human existence. And no modern human understands this more than a hunter. I am at peace with killing my own meat because for
me, every duck breast, every boar tongue, every deer heart is a story, not of conquest, but of communion.

  THE GUMBO CHRONICLES

  By Rowan Jacobsen

  From Outside

  How successful was BP’s much-touted cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico after 2010’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Food writer/environmentalist Rowan Jacobsen (author of American Terroir) sailed out with Louisiana crabbers, oystermen, and shrimpers to fish for the real truth.

  In the predawn steam of a Louisiana night, I stood in a yard surrounded by catfish heads. The headlights of dualies towing fiberglass crabbing boats swept into the yard and illuminated wooden pallets stacked six feet high, holding tens of thousands of fish heads: eyes, whiskers, stringy stuff coming out the back. Men in baseball caps stepped out of the trucks, loaded pallets into their boats, and pulled away.

  It was 4:30 A.M., and I was in the yard of Vincent Comardelle, 67, who supplies bait to the crabbers in Larose, a small Cajun town abutting Bayou Lafourche (pronounced la-foosh), a 109-mile, shellfish-heavy waterway that peels off from the Mississippi River above New Orleans and winds through the marshes of southern Louisiana to the Gulf of Mexico. I was waiting to meet Ryan Comardelle, Vincent’s son and one of the top crabbers in the area, who had promised to take me out on the marshes. Finally, a white pickup pulled up. Ryan stepped out and peered at me. He was wearing a tight red T-shirt over a massive chest and Popeye biceps. Buzz cut, goatee, merciless blue eyes.

  “You bring any food?” he asked. I hadn’t. He shot me an unimpressed look. “We gonna be out there all day,” he said. “I don’t like to share my food.”

  Vincent shambled into the house—he has a limp from an old boating accident that ended with an outboard propeller buried in his back—and returned with a package of peanut butter crackers. We launched Ryan’s boat from a nearby dock and motored through a series of shallow, brackish marshes—crab heaven—until we reached Little Lake, which is no longer little, thanks to erosion and land subsidence. Southern Louisiana is sinking, and every year the salty Gulf of Mexico covers more of it, killing the grasses and trees that hold the land together. This is a problem for native shellfish, which rely on a delicate, finely tuned balance of fresh inland water and salty tidal flow.

  A full moon hung in the west, silhouetting the rocket-ship spires of gas rigs and the bones of dead oak trees, killed by encroaching water. Ryan, who has crabbed for most of his 40 years, steered while his friend Reggie, an athletic guy sporting a Bud Light cap and a bewildered expression, handled the traps. Reggie was a little off, which Ryan kept pointing out.

  “He ain’t exactly stupid,” Ryan said. “He just got no sense.”

  “Oh yeah?” Reggie said.

  “Yeah.”

  Reggie tried to think of a comeback, failed, and went back to the traps. We could just make out ghostly foam floats bobbing on the water. Attached to the side of Ryan’s boat was a metal rake, its teeth combing the surface and snatching the line dangling beneath each passing float. When the rake hooked a float, a wire trap came up, dragging near the back of the boat. Reggie opened each trap, shook the captured crabs into a plastic crate, and removed the rotting catfish heads, tossing them overboard. Then he added two new heads and dropped the trap back into the water. For eight hours this is what we did. The boat never stopped. Reggie never stopped. The crabs piled up: olive shells, turquoise legs, orange claws reaching for Reggie when he got close. Every time they pinched him, he’d yelp, “Oh mercy!”

  Most traps held just two or three crabs and the occasional flounder. “I used to run 400 cages,” Ryan said. “Now I’m running 700 and making less money.”

  “Bad season?” I asked.

  Ryan glared. “Today might be my worst day ever,” he said. “Normally I fill 20 pans. Last time I filled 13. I’m hoping to catch half that today. That don’t even cover my expenses.”

  Ryan was going to give up for the year if things didn’t change in a week or two, and he wasn’t alone. When I was in Bayou Lafourche, in September 2011, many crabbers didn’t even bother to go out. Apparently, they hadn’t got the memo that everything in the Gulf was fine. A year and a half after BP’s April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, virtually the entire fishery was open for business, and federal and state officials were happily trumpeting the health of the Gulf’s marine life. Ryan had nothing but contempt for those officials.

  “Dey tellin’ everybody everything’s OK,” he said, in the region’s ubiquitous Cajun accent, which features a lot of dis and dat. “And it’s not. The crabs are not getting fat. A lot of dem are dying right when dey shed. The biologists say everything’s normal. Well, shit. We out here on the water almost every day of our lives. We know what changes from one day to the next. Where the little crabs? Before BP hit, they’d be all over this boat. Where dey at? We screwed.”

  Ryan was much happier talking about arm wrestling. He was ranked number one in Louisiana for his weight division. “No guy around here can put my arm down. You want to see why?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Ryan grabbed the next float from the rake and curled it tightly against his chest as the boat churned along. The cage dragged in the water, half-submerged and spraying a wake. “That’s how I won my biggest match!” Ryan said, veins popping. “Other guys use weights. I just come out here and work. Wanna try?”

  I did. The cage jerked me to the back of the boat, and mercifully, the float ripped out of my hand before I was dragged overboard. Ryan smiled and went back to crabbing. We struggled to fill six crates. I counted time in catfish heads. Around noon, I broke out the crackers.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill, many observers—myself included—anticipated an unthinkable disaster: the death of the Gulf Coast fishery and the final ruination of the Gulf’s beleaguered estuary system. Nearly 206 million gallons of oil leaked from the Macondo well. More than 88,000 square miles of fishing grounds—37 percent of all federal Gulf of Mexico waters—were closed, along with most affected Louisiana waters, including Bayou Lafourche. Oil filled the estuaries and worked its way into the bayou marshes. Destruction appeared imminent.

  And then the oil just seemed to fade like disappearing ink. This happened, we were told, thanks to naturally occurring hydrocarbon-eating bacteria, aided by beneficial ocean currents at the site of the leaking well. By October 2010, most Louisiana state fisheries were reopened, including Bayou Lafourche. Since then thousands of seafood samples have been tested for the carcinogens found in hydrocarbons and deemed safe. On April 12, 2011, with the one-year anniversary of the spill approaching, Eric Schwaab, assistant administrator for fisheries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), proudly declared that “not one piece of tainted seafood has entered the market.” Meanwhile, BP has mitigated the damage to its image with a $20 billion fund to pay the claims of affected businesses, plus a slick TV ad campaign to lure tourists to the region. In January, The New York Times ran an editorial lauding the recovery effort as a shining example for future industrial cleanups. These days the consensus from state and local governments, BP, and pundits alike is that everything is pretty much fine. We dodged a bullet, they tell us.

  All of which seemed incredible to me. I reported from the Gulf during the spill, and I watched the Vessels of Opportunity (local boats hired by BP to lay boom and corral oil) and saw how ineffective they were. I worried about what polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—the mutagens and carcinogens found in crude oil—might do to the generation of shrimp and crab larvae that were getting soaked in gunk. I wondered about the effects of the 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersants that BP sprayed to prevent the oil from accumulating on the ocean’s surface. And I thought about the scientists who said it would take years before we could comprehend the effect of the spill, much less make grand diagnoses about the Gulf’s health.

  These were guys I quoted in my 2010 book on the spill, Shadows on the Gulf, among them Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald, who s
aid, “I expect the hydrocarbon imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable in the marine environment for the rest of my life.” And University of South Florida oceanographer John Paul, who said, “The impact on commercially important larvae that are bathed in this stuff is hard to say. We might see grouper with tumors three years from now.”

  I wanted to believe in the recovery—who doesn’t like miracles?—but the spin was hard to cut through. So I decided to do some personal recon to see if the facts on the ground jibed with the reports being fed to the public. In my mind, there was no better way to assess the Gulf’s health than by traveling around and sourcing one of my favorite meals—seafood gumbo—in the heart of bayou country.

  I’ve written a lot about food traditions, and I’ve always had a thing for gumbo, a delicious stew that came about after a bunch of poor people from elsewhere were stuck in a marginal environment, handed a cooking pot, and told to fend for themselves. The poor people were Acadians, French Catholic farmers who got booted out of Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, arrived in Louisiana, looked around at the soupy, unpromising environment, and thought, How do you make dinner out of this? Not only did they succeed, but they designed a culinary miracle, a spontaneous dish born of the holy trinity of crab, shrimp, and oyster that’s as American as anything we’ve got.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that Bayou Lafourche has traditionally been the finest place in the world to find ingredients for gumbo. Route 1, which hugs Lafourche, is often called “the longest Main Street in the world” because of the way one linear town eases into the next. There are few significant side streets; the only solid land is the two parallel strips of high ground built up on either side of the bayou by millennia of flood sediment. As soon as you get away from that, you sink into the marshes. Those marshes are some of the most fabled crab, shrimp, and oyster grounds on the planet. And they were directly in the crosshairs of the spill. The way I figured it, if I could still make an all-Lafourche gumbo, then America’s seafood soul was intact. So I bought a plane ticket and called my buddy Jim.