Dolores, another Salvation Army soup kitchen volunteer,
who is even older than I am, hobbled in a couple of weeks ago and growled, "Who
cooked last Thursday?"
"I did."
I confessed sheepishly.
"Well, two of my friends said it was
awful. They couldn't eat it." Dolores' friends go to the local senior
center, whose members we feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Dolores is, I guess, about eighty. It's hard to tell because she tops her head
with a bright yellow curly cap of hair, but she obviously lost the skill of
walking fast and upright a long time ago. Nevertheless, she takes home all the
aprons, washcloths, and towels every Tuesday and washes them. She comes in the following week with the
clean laundry and helps out, including washing big pots and pans. Another SA hero. I was justifiably rebuked. It was like losing
a round of Chopped after being judged by an ancient glowering Anne Burrell with
different but also odd hair.
Sometimes the meals for the seniors and our regular
soup kitchen diners are different, but on that fateful day, both groups had
gotten my horrible meatloaf. The essence
in these loaves comes from ground meat, donated by Walmart, that has been
cast blushing-red by carbon monoxide, made E-coli-free
by ammonia, and stuffed into five-pound tubes. It
doesn't cost the Army anything, and it's what we have. That day I extracted the grim cow tissue from
six tubes, mushed it together with two dozen eggs, four cups of bread crumbs,
and handfuls of random seasonings found along the counter, squashed it into two
long pans, which I shoved into our inadequate oven at 9:00 AM at 450
degrees.
Unfortunately, our oven typically only manages to
break the 400 degree barrier after a very, very long time, and, given that the
15 pounds of meat, bread, and eggs in each pain were compressed to the density
of a dwarf star, even after two and half hours the meat was still raw. Ria, an awesome
fellow volunteer, fired up two huge cauldrons and we threw the whole mess into
them, frying it into a bacteria-free mush. We slapped half this beefy gruel
into a serving tray for the duffers and the other half we used for our regular diners,
piling blotchy gray slush onto humps of rice. It was not pretty. It looked like the product of a chain saw
massacre, a haunting reminder of the bad passage modern meat takes from life to
death.
I tried to be a vegetarian once. It lasted three months; loneliness drove me
back to meat. While subsisting on nuts
and berries, I realized that eating meat, and especially ungulates, is not only
primal, it's celebratory – the hunters carrying the dead antelope dangling from
a pole back to the tribe, which builds a huge fire and dances around the
sizzling corpse. The outliers, we
vegetarians, are in the shadows gnawing on our roots alone.
A recent example of this occurred over the weekend at
my grandson's graduation party. His
uncle's wife, a wan and pretty woman, had been a vegetarian as long as I've
know her, but until recently managed to eke out a meal at family events from any
available carbs and dairy. This weekend I learned that she is now a
gluten-sugar-free-vegan, so she brings her own food. Late in the day I saw her in a dark corner, hunched
over a plastic container balanced on her lap, scooping out tofu sausage and
zucchini pasta, silently munching them down.
The rest of the tribe, including me, was cheerfully buzzing around the totem
dining table, downing fried chicken nuggets, meatballs, and cheesy dips. I felt sorry for her but also envious of her
ability to sustain an eating system that was both healthy and humane.
Nagged by this young woman's righteous example and by
the memory of my meatloaf, when I got home I forced myself to watch
slaughterhouse videos on YouTube. In the first one, the initial few minutes were very tough; the cows were stunned, then
finished off with some creepy device thrust through their heads, but the
killing was quick. The video is 30
minutes long, however, and after the initial shock of seeing a few cow murders
and their subsequent terrible lurching along the gruesome assembly line, the
ADD kicked in and I became distracted. I
focused on the workers, who were now gutting out the bellies, which, although
gross, is a critical component of the process. Most were talking back and forth
in Spanish and seemed to be cheerful, just like my imaginary hunters would be
while cleaning out their antelope, dangling from its pole.
I decided to search on into YouTube's heart of
darkness and found far worse examples of animal slaughter. Most showed various creatures being
brutalized in farm factories, but even organically raised animals were not
spared, with one video showing several farm hands gutting a pig alive while it
shrieked and screamed like a child and another a halal-slaughtered cow, still
living while its throat was slit and its skull slowly crushed. Although most,
if not all, of these videos were either a decade or more old or filmed in the
rural backwater of some monochromatic foreign country, they were devastating.
So to make myself feel better (because that's what
certifiable liberals do), I watched and listened to Temple Grandin's soothing monotone while she gently directed cows and turkeys to their doom.
And I watched Larry Althier, a
local butcher in Hartwick, NY killing with kindness. I was comforted, perhaps hypocritically, by these
videos and by a 2013 article in Modern Farmer quoting Grandin: " non-humane
handling’s no longer my biggest concern…[A] video of a farmer beating a pig
with a gate rod isn’t any more representative of widespread practices than a
fiery crash in one Mothers Against Drunk Driving video indicates that every driver
on the road is hammered."
Largely because of
Grandin's influence and her changes in slaughter practice, Burger King, Wendy's, and McDonalds have all claimed commitment to humane care of
the animals they kill. (Chipotle is top of the list of good guys.
Nevertheless, the
unintended consequence of these reforms is that well-intentioned people who
would ordinarily avoid fast-food might now feel it's ok to eat animals who have
been kindly slaughtered but who still live out their short existences in
penitentiaries, having done nothing to deserve this miserable life sentence.
Therefore, because I can, I spend
lots of additional money on meat from the local farmer's market or in packages
marked "grass fed" and "humanely raised". So, of course, here's the next guilt-laden meat
issue. If you want to eat meat ethically,
it costs big. Grazin, a diner here on Warren St, is owned by farmers whose menu
lets you eat the remains only of grass-fed animals indulgently raised on their
own or near by farms. A quarter pounder with nothing on it costs $8.50 and with
cheese it's $10.50; a MacDonald quarter pounder with cheese is $3.70. At Grazin a 10-oz burger will cost $19 with
cheese; a Mickey D double quarter pounder with cheese is $6.79 (2 oz. less, but
still…).
Now back to the Army kitchen. We get a lot of really good food
donations. On a regular basis, local
supermarkets and farms contribute fresh produce, baked goods, and diary
products, often organic. And then there's the meat. We can't expect the local farms where happy
cows and pigs have only one bad day to donate an entire valuable dead animal,
butchered and ready for our chest freezer.
Occasionally we get the odd package of meat from an entitled animal, but
most of the time the meat donations are racks of ribs, big hams and turkeys,
and, of course, the mysterious beef rolls – all presumably the remains of very,
very miserable creatures, whose only happy day was their last one.
I checked out one of the beef rolls to see where
the meat originally came from:
Tyson. And if you want a major villain
in this story, Tyson is Jaws. One of the world's largest processors and
marketers of chicken, beef, and pork, as well as packaged snacks, it is not a
good corporate person. It is not kind to its fellow creatures. Google Tyson and
animal abuse. You'll find links to both
truly nasty stuff and corporate reassurances. I suppose it's true that under significant pressure,
Tyson is starting to reform their animal handling process, but they must be
watched like a hawk.
Death is not evil.
It just is. The process on getting
there is what counts. With the risk of stating the obvious, evil occurs when
people take one aspect of a creature – flesh, boobs, skin color – and
generalize it to suit their needs – eat, screw, hate. We detach that one aspect from the whole
individual and it allows us to inflict pain and even murder without feeling
bad. And when this becomes institutionalized, the evil becomes more profound –
penal executions, factory farmed meat, drones and air strike. Couple this with corporate media that focuses
and reports only on these flayed singularities in order to numb and distance
the popular mind from any significant pain. and you have cooked up a very bad
culture. To counter all this we have the distribution of unique experiences via
social media -- YouTube, Twitter, FB --
that bear personal witness to such damaging effects on whole selves. I'm counting on these Watchers and Recorders
to impose grassroots pressure so that eventually what we kill and what we eat
will occur in some natural harmonious balance.
In the meantime, if we want to be perfect righteous
Army volunteers, we should stop serving evil-empire meat to our indigent diners
and start frying up tofu. But that's not
going to happen. These are hungry people
who like meat, and we have the privilege of serving it to them for free. And when our ribs or ham or brisket are
particularly good, the diners in our communal setting are lively and cheerful,
almost celebratory. And this makes those
of us who have brought the dangled beasts to the table happy.
Last Thursday, I cooked up a mean pulled pork for
the seniors. For the BBQ sauce I used
canned chopped tomatoes and paste, phony maple syrup (but without corn
fructose), red wine vinegar inexplicably imported from Italy, soy sauce, and a
collection of random dried herbs. I also
added bacon. I considered that pig's fat and muscles and detached myself from her
fate. I'm looking forward to Dolores'
review. Anything's better than the meat
loaf.
