Five Hours For Bacon

A little more than a year ago, which I'm sure feels like ten years ago to all of us, I split a heritage pig from a local farm with my friends. When you buy a whole pig from a local farmer, you get enormous savings per pound on high quality, lean and healthy meat, which at least in this case was raised humanely by Heritage Spots and Feathers. I saw for myself that the Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs live in a semi-forested field so that they can do what pigs do best, root around for seeds and stuff underground and lay around in the shady muck to get fat and keep cool in the Georgia heat. When you buy a whole pig you also get to choose your cuts: chops, hams, butts, ground, sausage, etc.

What you don't often get is small-scale, humanely-raised bacon.

For that, the farmer would have to ship the pig five hours away.

FIVE HOURS. FOR BACON.

I promise that this is a story about bacon, but I have to digress already to explain this insanity.

Just a few days ago I watched a CNET livecast about Biden's Build a Better Food System initiatives that will set aside money to increase competition in the meat processing sector. I had to laugh at their (and all government, really) analysis of the problem of consolidation in the meatpacking industry. It's always couched in passive terms as if it just happened. Like magic. Like all the small-scale butchers that used to exist in every town, sometimes in every neighborhood somehow just vanished, like they were raptured up to bacon heaven.

No, consolidation was a concerted campaign on the part of large-scale meat brands (Hormel, Purdue, etc) to vertically integrate the industry, eliminate the competition, own the packing plants and everything but the animals and the farmland. They even go so far as to partly own the farmer in the weird share cropping-esque agreement between food companies and farmers that is contract farming. But that's another story. In this story, once again state capitalism masquerades as food safety policy and "humane" processing (which is anything but).

Since the 1970s, new rules emerged every few years or so that tightened the regulatory hold on animal slaughter. They introduced new technologies and practices that were designed, in theory, to guarantee food safety and to ensure better deaths for animals. To that end, the USDA requires all animal processing facilities to be inspected. This means that a person has to stand there and watch the whole process from start to finish to ensure that rigorous safety standards are adhered to. Well, at least in theory. I guess a single inspector can watch thousands of birds die an hour in a slaughterhouse, in theory. Anyway, hiring an inspector is an enormous expense for a small-scale abattoir, and of course, that expense has to be passed on to the consumer, raising prices in relation to prices for industrially produced food that are already distorted by subsidies.

USDA inspected facilities also require a bunch of equipment and processes to do it by the food safety handbook, which is maybe a good thing. Studies show that small-scale backyard processing for retail sales still practiced by the Amish in Pennsylvania and a few other places are less contaminated by pathogens (such as e. coli and salmonella) than those slaughtered in large packing plants. Backyard processing also arguably give animals far less stressful deaths than if they were transported FIVE HOURS to a USDA facility. Far from giving animals better deaths, and us safer foods, the cost prohibitive machinery, facilities and inspectors gave large-scale meat processors an edge that smaller scale facilities did not have. So those local butchers closed up shop one after another until only a few stalwart holdouts were left.

So, at this point you might be asking how did I get a pig processed for my freezer if all this is true? The pig itself was processed in a deer processing facility, which is exempt from USDA requirements. Bacon falls under animal food processing, so it must happen in a USDA inspected facility. So, me and my friends have been eating meat processed without inspection or all the other required safety measures for years and somehow surviving it.

Hmmmm.

We also made our own bacon and lived to tell about it.

Come back to learn how next week!

Food Writers are the Worst!

There's something I have to get off my chest: food writers are the worst.

Julie Guthman, a geographer once wrote that Michael Pollan made her want to eat Cheetos. While I wouldn't go that far, I can wholeheartedly agree that popular food writers do little more than sell books and make some people food good about making alternative food choices, which is why Julie wants to do the exact opposite. Tone-deaf at best and dangerously out of touch at worst, I can confirm that these books, which I've been reading too many for my next book project, do not offer reasonable, workable solutions that are based on science.

What's worse, most food writers in the U.S., the Michael Pollans, Mark Bittmans, Matthew Evans and other slow food acolytes, after rehearsing the horrific evils of the industrial food system for a couple hundred pages of best-selling texts, all come to the same conclusion: eat local food. It's something we academics have been studying for a while now (and I advocate for in a limited way), but few of us breezily conclude a book-length tome with encouragement to trot on down to the farmer's market, as if that will magically solve the problem.

There are a few reasons academics don't wave the local food flag: one is that we also understand that food is a heavily subsidized industry and that the price of food in the supermarket does not accurately reflect the cost of producing it. The food prices in farmer's markets reflect a different, freer market and are thus wildly out of sync with the supermarket, especially when it comes to animal products. Second, this distortion in prices is a result of something called a cheap food policy that suppresses the cost of food, so wait for it—wages can be suppressed in other economic sectors. Shocking, I know, that state capitalism would be so shady. Third, agricultural policy favors the large-scale production of food, especially animal products, and as such small-scale farmers cannot access the facilities such as abattoirs, that they need to safely process and distribute food in local markets. Fourth, because of various other forms of manufactured inequality, an unhealthy percentage of the population cannot ensure adequate food intake at all. So, how on earth would enough people be able to adequately influence markets so that production practices would change to small-scale, local and organic?

Spoiler alert: they haven't.

What has happened is that these food writers have made a lot of money selling books with the same basic message and industrial agriculture has continued unchanged. The haves of the U.S. enjoy feel-good food that may or may not contain unhealthy toxins and the have-nots must settle for the poisoned industrially produced garbage that passes for food. Clair Hinrichs calls it a two-class food system, mostly referring to the fact that small-scale farmers who grow organic food can't afford to buy it, but it also operates for consumers who cannot afford to buy the foods that the food writers tell us will save the planet. News flash: small-scale, organic farmers struggle with making basic ends meet due to distorted food prices, can't afford health insurance and negotiate ever more discriminatory agricultural policies.

As such, none of these men with names starting with M appear to have had any meaningful experience with a farm, or they might suggest a different approach. One exception: Matthew, after making a fortune in television, took himself down to Tasmania (as one does) and bought a farm. He felt this was a reasonable approach to solving the problems of the food system, and maybe it jolly-well was—for him. While one has to admire the chutzpah of this act, most people do not have the means or the skills to simply take up farming. Even if they did, how is this an answer?

The same perverse logic operates with the admonition to "eat more plants." This mantra has been taken up in various forms in various ways, but most recently the warnings about climate change have encouraged a reduction in meat consumption. Unfortunately for plant-eating advocates, meat consumption hasn't changed a bit in recent decades and has only increased in many places. What has also increased is the production of meat and dairy alternatives, sourced from far-away places, that now clog the freezer and refrigerated sections of the supermarket.

Eating more plant-based foods hasn't solved any ecological crises, it's made new problems for people, animals and the environment. Most people who consume plant-based foods have no idea what is going on at the other end of a complicated supply chain and I'm here to tell you it's not good. What could be good, however, is a different approach altogether, one that integrates new social movements with bioregional diets focused on cooperative production. So, now that I've gotten this beef off my chest, I'll be writing about real solutions in a few installments (with a couple posts about bacon and milk in between) over the next several weeks, so stay tuned!

Responsibility and Love

Multi-species flourishing is a concept popularized by social theorists Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway to describe a state of being, counter to capitalism, where more than one species enjoys a quality life and well-being. This is necessary, they argue, to reset what capitalism and its zero sum game relations, has put asunder and to envision life beyond the limits of economic rationalities. My last blog posts focused on love and caretaking and I think these are essential elements to raising all animals for consumption (or otherwise) when the goal is ensuring multi-species well-being.

Bill Perry, star of last week's post, continues—or rather his pigs, continue to be—in the spotlight of this week's post. When I was taking pictures of his sheep for my forthcoming book, The Geographies of Food and Power, he told me about the pigs, which were so well hidden away in the pine trees that I would never have known they were there. Please also note, that pigs, inaccurately infamous for their smell, were undetectable by their odor either. We focused on the sheep that day and I told him I'd come back to learn more about the pigs.

With my mother (who as you already know has an interest in all things agricultural) and my daughter in tow, we visited Bill's farm on a beautiful fall day last week. He told me the pigs are a joint venture with a neighboring dairy farm (which will show up on this blog very soon, trust me!). The owner of the dairy farm works at an undisclosed university in the dairy program, which is, for obvious, historic reasons is situated near the swine program. Bill told me, that the swine program, to my horror and disgust (obviously everyone's in the story as well), breeds pigs and weans the piglets at three weeks old to get the sows pregnant again. The piglets are judged against industry production standards, which I gather is a set of size and conformation measurements that predict how big the adult pig will be, therefore ensuring its profitability and about which you could pay good money to the unnamed university to learn about. I would rather not, and neither would Bill, because the piglets that don't meet the industry standard are culled.

I didn't ask how, because I don't want to know, but here's a great example of an actual baby animal (not like the misnomer "lamb" leads people to believe that baby sheep are killed for food) destroyed before it can reach adulthood and for no reason other than an arbitrary set of standards that ensure profit-making. This is a narrow interpretation of value and something few small-scale farmers can afford to do or would want to do. Many farmers I know grieve for loss of young animals for many and complicated reasons and no one but an enormous, wealthy institution in this case (these standards are developed to benefit farmers with thousands of pigs) benefited from the life and death of the pigs. It's probably safe to say that few grieved their loss very much either.

Enter a dairy and a sheep farmer with big hearts who saw an opportunity: Bill and his partner take the piglets who would have been culled and raise them to adulthood in a veritable paradise compared to where their brothers and sisters now live: on concrete, inside a stinking barn, eating feeds specifically formulated to make them grow, awaiting their eventual deaths. While these piglets also await their eventual deaths, in the meantime they root and play in a forest floor, escape their pen to follow Bill around, curl up together at night in a bed of hay and eat soured milk that would have gone to waste otherwise.

Bill just wanted a pig or two for himself since he never wants to eat the pork produced in or be complicit in a system of industrial feedlots, but his partner saw an opportunity to expand his business beyond beef and milk to pork. In short, Bill and his partner take what would have been waste under capitalist agriculture: the pigs, the pine forest and the milk. They turn it into a good, happy life with a good death for the pigs, a fertilized pine forest and the return of what would have been waste to nature.

This, to me, is a perfect example of multi-species flourishing and it would not be possible without the capacity to care and the desire to nurture (the animals, the environment, their own bodies, their businesses and other businesses) that both of these men enact and embody. They have taken what is hidden from view and wasteful and turned it into a sober and life-giving responsibility to others, both human and nonhuman.

You can be a part of it too.

Multi-Species Flourishing

My parents went back to the land in the late 1970s. Both my parents were raised on farms in Iowa and for them, modern agriculture was a primary cause of environmental damage. My dad, an ornithologist with a PhD in the newly formed field of wildlife ecology, worked for the US Fish and Wildlife service. His PhD research was on the disruptions to migration and reproduction for waterfowl when the ecology of prairie wetlands was disrupted by draining and tilling the land for monocrops. My mom was a nurse, and as you already know, came from a long line of farming women. They bought a farm in Northern Minnesota and set to work planting a garden, fruit trees and procuring livestock from some rather nefarious sources. When my dad left to work in Virginia, she took over the farm by herself.

My mother, 5 foot, 2 inches tall on a good day and 100 pounds soaking wet is made of steel, love and grit. With a herd of sheep and goats, a flock of chickens, rabbits, a 40-acre hay field and a big garden, she would have made her ancestors proud. Canning, pickling, milking, butchering, she kept my brother and I busy and all of us and our animals well fed and cared for year-round. Mostly by herself. After a few seasons of this, however, reality set in and she decided to nix the sheep who spent their lives in a back pasture full of thistle and tansy. They were a 4-H project for my brother, but as a teenager with a farm permit to drive, he wasn't that into 4-H anymore. Once we'd sheared the sheep to sell the wool, she sold the herd. I wasn't very old at the time, not old enough to know the difference between a ram's scrotum and an ewe's udder, to my family's great and enduring delight, anyway.

The goats were definitely smarter and friendlier than the sheep, so I didn't really miss them too much, but I slept under a woolen bat filled with their wool until a few years ago when my mother insisted I get some imitation down comforter. It's not the same. We also didn't eat the sheep meat, for reasons I don't really understand. Perhaps the ram was no different from the ewe in the reproductive department and we never had enough lambs to make it worth the effort. It was only when, inspired by my mother, I was pursuing a graduate degree at Penn State on women farmers and sustainability, that I encountered serious meat sheep farmers. Lamb—or mutton—as a prefer to call it given how it's not exactly accurate to call a nearly full-grown sheep a lamb, is considered something of a luxury food in the United States. We eat it for special occasions and the stuff in the grocery store is almost always from Australia or New Zealand, for reasons that boggle the mind.

Sheep can be raised virtually anywhere.

One woman farmer I interviewed for my project, got into farming with her late husband when the two of them bought a piece of mountain hillside in Central Pennsylvania. It was all they could afford at the time and since they didn't want a dairy farm, it suited their needs to go back to the land just fine. Until they started thinking about what they could actually raise on the steep hillside without destroying the land like their neighbors had done with cattle. There were a few possibilities, but only two they would generate income quickly and reliably: blueberries and sheep. They planted blueberries, which matured in a few years and they invited the public to pick their own berries, thus saving them the labor of harvest. Sheep, lightweight and easy to feed, grazed the hillside in pastures that rotated to preserve the ground and protect the forage. Urban markets were close enough to get a good price for the high-quality meat. For these farmers, the environment mattered more than the individual lives of a single sheep and their business supported dozens of other businesses, civil society and consumers, while they made the land better.

I meet a lot of people who tell me they don't eat lamb, because the word conjures up images of sweet eyed babies, but let me tell you, no farmer is dumb enough to harvest a 10-pound cutie. The "lamb" we eat is nearly full-grown because it doesn't make any economic sense to do it otherwise. My neighbor, Bill Perry, who supplies me with the mutton I eat, let me take a look at his herd for another project, and even I can't tell you which of those sheep was a "lamb" destined for my freezer.

He could, though. Because he cares for them daily, and their life and death matter to him, in a really good way. He too, rotates his pastures even though he isn't anywhere near making a negative impact with his small herd on a big pasture, but he tells me that it's better for the pasture and all the living things in the ground for the herd to be rotated every few weeks.

That's why I buy mutton from Bill and not Australia, because I want to continue to be a part of something bigger than me and bigger than a single animal's life. And it matters to me that the animal that he harvested for me was known personally by Bill, had a good life and a good death and that Bill's business supported other small businesses and farms around me. That's the kind of multi-species flourishing that I was raised with, that I want to continue to support and I want to encourage more people to support.

Buttons, Beans or Bow?

My family loves to tell a story about me as a girl growing up on a small farm in northern Minnesota. It is told, I think largely to connect, through an unspoken code, to people who grew up eating the animals they raised and to shock those who have not. It is also no doubt told to poke fun at me, the little girl who played with goats but got above her raising by getting a Ph.D. It is also likely to remind me where I came from so I don't forget. Fortunately, they tell it often enough so that there is no danger of that.

The story goes like this: one Sunday in the fall of the year, after butchering season, my mother placed a roast on the table. She wasn't the best at cooking the goats who had spent their entire lives running around our farm and it usually turned out a bit dusty and required the application of a lot of gravy. She'd been raised on a farm like her mother before her and her mother and grandmother and great grandmother in unbroken lines to the land in Denmark, Norway and Germany. The meat required gravy, not just because my mother learned to roast meat by cooking beef and pork, which has a very different fat content from goat; It was also hard to cook well because it was tough from a life lived in pursuit of me.

This particular year had netted us nine kids from our four does in an unprecedented year of triplets. Born in the frigid darkness of March in Minnesota my mother helped deliver them into clean and dry bedding, dried them with towels, guided the shaky babies to the udder and sat back with a lump in her throat at the miracle of life. Daisy, our oldest and wisest doe, a Nubian with a riot of black, brown and white spots gave birth to three boys that year, who I named Buttons, Beans and Bow.

As a kid on a farm, I had jobs. So, through the spring, I bottlefed them from a five-gallon bucket equipped with nipples. They came running when they saw me coming. They drained it in seconds, down on their knees, tails furiously flying. The does produced hundreds of pounds of milk that year: enough for us, the young goats, the neighbors and to make a little cheese. On this diet of fat, sugar and protein they quickly grew into fifty-pound monsters. By mid-summer, I set the bucket down and ran. When we weaned them off milk and started feeding them alfalfa pellets, they chased me anyway, jumping on my back, bouncing off with glee and mobbing me on the ground when I fell.

Nine of them.

For reference: a full-grown Nubian boat weighs more than a hundred pounds, can jump on top of a car (eat the top off of it too, by the way) and standing on their back feet, can reach over ten feet tall. 

So, it was to my family's deep and enduring amusement that when I poured gravy over the roast on my plate, I queried, without a trace of remorse, "Was this Buttons, Beans or Bow?"

It is possible to truly love one's animals, to give them a truly good life and to also eat them.

In fact, it's the only way we should.