Straight From the Farm

I'm certainly feeling productive this morning. Woke up and fed all of the house animals, then went down and fed the horses, cleaned stalls, scrubbed and cleaned the watertub and cleared some pesky weeds from my fence line. Then headed back up to the house to clean out the chicken coop and house. All before 8 am! I pulled a ton of eggs this morning... as I set them in a bowl to soak I once again was struck by how removed our society is from our food sources. I know so many people who would be incredibly grossed out by my eggs in their "natural" state when I pull them from the coop after being in there overnight. Don't worry, I do soak them before I put them in the fridge, and scrub off the poop and hay. :)

But really, everything is like that nowadays. I remember when I was twelve and I first moved to Maryland from Denver and was horrified that my neighbor ran a butcher shop, and that my grandfather had a shed which was frequently used to butcher deer. I used to cry every time I saw the deer hanging (yup). Within a year I was right down there with them, curious about how they removed everything and how it all got cut up. I still love being down there with the guys when they butcher. We get a whole crowd of big, loud men with huge bellies and gray whiskered beards, taking a full deer and converting it to steaks and ribs and ground meat, laughing and joking, and quite often cooking the deer steaks right then and there over a grate on the fire. It feels so real. The smell of the blood, the heads of the deer in the buckets, it is common place to me now. They laugh when I ask to look over bits before they cut it off so I can observe muscle movement and tendons. But the deer that I eat that night for dinner is the same deer that I saw in full form, skin, head and all, hanging in the shop. The same deer I saw frolicking in the fields. I know it, I accept it, and I thank the deer for it's contribution to my life cycle by not wasting it.

How many people can do that though? We are considered "rednecks" by many in my little corner of the woods, partly for this practice of hunting and fishing and cutting your own wood. The food you buy in the store is just meat. It never had a name or a face. It is just red muscle in a plastic package. People don't care about it, where it came from, how it got there, what it's life was like, or even whether it was healthy. Instead, veterinarians and farm workers have to care for all of that instead, and the people go on buying and eating one way or the other. Maybe this is why I'm interested in food medicine and food production. I want my food to have a face. (Is that horrid?) I want to know that it had a good life, that it was healthy, that somewhere, someone along the way cared for and looked at each individual cow that ended up on your plate.

If you are a vegetarian, I sorely apologize for the above descriptions.

Melissa