Meating of My Minds

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.