bloody good
if you’re going to eat it, you should meet it
Diner in restaurant: “What can you tell us about the locally raised organic free range chicken?”
Waitress: “Well, his name was Jeremy…” - from a radio comedy show (I can’t recall which one)
A British television host recently posted pictures of her 11 year old daughter blooded after her first successful duck hunt. (Blooding, for those not familiar with the tradition, requires a novice hunter or huntress to daub themselves with the blood of their first kill.) Not unexpectedly, a firestorm of controversy ensued and — also not unexpectedly — for all the wrong reasons.
Susannah Constantine penned a thoughtful riposte to her critics, which you can read here. She make many excellent points. I have some thoughts of my own.
Here in super-sanitized North America, I think most people — urbanites in particular — prefer not to think about where their food really comes from. We have long been conditioned to believe that everything we eat comes in boneless portions neatly shrinkwrapped on a styrofoam tray with a tiny diaper pad to mop up any distasteful leakage or discharge. (That is, if it hasn’t already been cooked, sauced, side-dished and packaged into an easy to microwave platter.) That this delusionary attitude should be taking root in Europe, which has a long and proud connection to its agricultural heritage, is a very bad sign.
Europeans have, in my experience, always been more keenly aware of Where Food Comes From than colonials. As a child in England, I routinely visited the village butcher with my mother, where beasts and fowl hung whole in the window, awaiting the expert knife. Butchering was often done to order, before the customer’s watchful eye. We lived in a pastoral area, with flocks of sheep and herds of cattle all around us, all of which were there, we understood, to provide us our Sunday roasts. The dotted line from pasture to plate was an accepted fact of life.
Perhaps that experience helped spur me to my present situation, in which (with disproportionate inputs from my incredibly green-thumbed wife) we actually produce much of the food we eat, and source most of the rest from local suppliers.
It must be noted that we didn’t get here through some ‘locavorian’ pledge or ‘100 Mile Diet’ or similar program. We simply moved to the country, began growing some vegetables, and now find ourselves — nearly two decades later — able to provide much of what we eat from our own backyard, and much of the rest from our neighbours’.
Two basic influences drove us to this point. First, my wife’s abiding passion for (and innate skill at) growing things. Second, our desire to spend less time working for a paycheque and more time directly sustaining ourselves.
But the big bonus was this: home grown, organically raised, self tended food tastes simply amazing. Over the years, we have grown to appreciate just how superior our home-grown food is to anything we can buy. We have become utterly spoiled by the quality of the food we enjoy to the point where it is difficult to imagine eating most store-bought provisions.
By the same token, we are also intimately aware of what is involved in raising — and harvesting — said food. Trite as it sounds, we have a relationship with what we eat, and this deepens our appreciation of it on several levels. We don’t just savour the flavours, wonderful as they are; we appreciate the effort and energy that has gone into producing it.
This relationship comes most sharply into focus where livestock are concerned. Raising an animal for food creates a complicated dynamic. You nurture and care for these creatures like a doting parent for their entire lives, ensuring they’re well fed, well-housed and well-socialised and then one day the narrative takes an abrupt turn: you kill and eat them.
It is difficult, and it is messy — but it’s reality. When I eat one of the chickens we’ve raised ourselves, I delight in the goodness and flavour of the meat, but I also know that the bird led a good life, with companionship, activity, natural food and comfortable lodging — a far cry from the conditions that exist in most commercial chicken factories.
So it does my heart glad to see young Ms Constantine out in the marsh, gunning down a duck or two for the Sunday meal. I have no doubt the birds will be savoured and appreciated far more than any plucked and plasticked specimen from the local Asda. And Ms Constantine will have a far greater understanding of where her food comes from, having had a direct hand in hunting and gathering it.
Any one who disagrees may help themselves to the all you can eat salad bar.
More at joesays.ca
