Scrap-Wood Feast

The orchard lay east and south of the house. Winnowed by years, hot summers and bitter winters, when I was young all that remained were two apricots, two peaches, and the singletons: a single apple, gnarled with age but far from infirm, and a barren cherry, infertile and alone. Those few steps from the back walk to lush flavor, juices running from mouths edge and lip, were a delight still unmatched by anything less carnal among adulthood's discoveries. A delight now gone, as first apple, then a peach, then cherry, then the last peach succumbed to age, and finally the two apricots failed after a twenty-eight below winter.
Bones of limb and trunk stood, the untended dead, until they fell and were left there still. The world spun and the lives of those who should have, who once, cared tumulted and failed too in the heats and colds of life, illness, and poverty.
Eventually, some of these bones were dragged away and piled with others, mill worked lengths of oak so old and left exposed so long that they had regained the twists and arthritic bends of their rooted life. This oak, saved from boxcars by my great-grandfather and by his son for projects unknown, and the fruit woods lay together, bleaching and cracking in the sun and storms, more kin to Temujin's distant cairns than to sweet ripe fruit or warm hand worked carpentry. And so... and so... the years passed.
My life here is a complex one, as maybe anyone's is raised on land, in a place that is of such strong character and all at once fire, hammer, anvil for, and fiber soft, strong, and raw woven into, the character of those generations lived, worked, fought, nourished, fucked, slept and died there. I've run from this place, run to it, fought and feared it, and at last undertaken to live with it. To make peace, if not friends, with the ghosts and make for myself, my family, a home. Bones into meal, my days are ones of working the remains of one-hundred years of life here into the next years, the next generations. Building from what they left things my ancestors would recognize and be proud of, but that also serve me and will serve my son and daughter in their lives beyond my ken. It is nourishing work, the soul well fed with calloused hands, and the place looking and feeling alive once more. To nourish soul, place, mind, and life, you must also nourish the body.
The landscape is littered with small  arroyos, washouts between the hard unnourishing knots of bunch grass, from the sides of which spill rusting cans and shattered jars. Long ago sheepherders, homesteaders, and cowboys lived here, much on what came out of cans. Venison and beef may hang but a few months out of the year here, and jerk dries the already dust parched mouth. The harvest of even small gardens goes further if put up in mason jars, and what a revelation a can of corned beef to go with it instead of hard salt-beef as dry as the stones. The ones who came before fed this way, leaving their trash piles rusty evidence of their passing, staying, eating, living.
We eat our share of canned goods. Much of it is even not real bad, and nothing keeps here like canned food, safe from spoilage and depredations of the larders enemies, mice and bugs. There is no substitute for fresh meat, though, and every trip to town brings excitement for whatever large cut we'll be bringing home. A smoke-house will be built, but until that day the town run brings omnivorous joy at the first meat not out of a can in two or more weeks.
Meat and bones, this is a natural pairing. The long dry, long removed from nourishment or use, bones of the orchard, the bones of the carpenter, can now be put to rest in use The small kitchen in the old adobe has only a cast-iron wood burning stove. Almost three square feet of smooth black iron cooktop, above an oven big enough for any Yuletide goose. Put to heat, entirely, by a firebox for only wood. Outside, in the long established New Mexico fashion, is a summertime kitchen, centered around a large wood brazier over which can be placed a grill or sheet-iron cooktop. If we eat it, it was likely made over a wood fire.
Nearly eighty years ago my great-grandmother planted an elm tree beside the overflow pond from the well. Still alive today, this elm has become gargantuan, though no official recorder has ever measured it the tree stands unique by size. On water nearly constantly every day of its life, the old elm reaches ten feet above the thirty-five foot windmill tower and stretches branches thirty-feet in every direction from its sixteen foot diameter trunk. The old elm has given rise to, and outlived, many children, sprouting all over the yard as elms do. Also as elms do, the old tree sheds branches from time to time, dropping whole limbs to become bones alongside its outlived children. These bones make a hot fire with a mild smoke, and though poor fair for heat compared to native cedar or piñon, elm makes a fine cookfire.
Today these bones are cut into short lengths and put into a kiln to turn into charcoal. The charcoal, cherry, elm and a bit of apricot, goes into my smoker below pounds of pork belly brought from town. The pork belly has been bathed in a sauce of honey, balsamic vinegar, coconut aminos, and spices and herbs including safe, garlic, pepper, and clove. As the sauce reduced, a few shattered black walnuts were added, over the brazier fire.
Brazier smoke mingles with the rising smoke from the smoker as the sauce bathed meat is placed onto the rack and closed in for the next six hours, to slowly cook swirled in the smoke of history, of life. When it emerges, tender and falling apart beneath the fork, it will nourish the body and soul of my hard working, fully living, family. The bones of trees that were, will have turned to powdered ash, and others will wait for the next days cook fires, and the nourishment it will provide.

Faceless Consumption (Being a Tale of Idiots, and Meat)

The other day I tripped over a piece of foolishness online, and haven't been able to shake it. This being the internet, finding foolishness shouldn't come as any surprise, but it did. I was reading in one of the few low-idiocy havens I've found online; A forum which the core membership of is primary military, law enforcement and emergency rescue personnel. So I was relaxed and receptive when I stumbled into the following gem of subintelligent thought, sort of like wandering into a trap. It was not meant for me, like all truly devastating traps it was entirely impersonal and aimed at whomever chanced upon it. A Bouncing Betty of stupidity.
The discussion at hand was on the film “The Cove”, which depicts in horrifying detail the mass slaughter of Dolphins in a particular cove in Japan. The general consensus was that killing something smarter than many people (or any politician) was “not cool”, and killing much of anything in that fashion was equally unacceptable. All of this brought on a small discussion of hunting, and that is where the idiot struck. He said, “The day I have to kill for food is the day i[sic] eat fucking nuts and berries. With all the meat in someones local food superstore, why kill any animals? I am in no way putting anyone down for hunting,it just isn't for me or something I want to do. Terrorists,yep. Animals,No[sic]."

I was flabbergasted by this idiots perspective, quite honestly. Not that I don't believe people think this way. I know that such twits exist, but I remain amazed and disgusted by it. In this case the source also probably has a lot to do with why it continues to bother me. Such a statement coming from someone with a military background, a group of people who commonly refer to themselves as “meat eaters” and take a great pride in the hunting of many things, is particularly surprising. More than that, I find this perspective fairly insulting in a broader fashion. No matter your background, or your particular thoughts on hunting, divorcing yourself so thoroughly from the origins of your food is beyond dishonest.
It is an incredibly spoiled and elitist position; One made possible only by a certain class of living, allowing such a luxury as routine access to a supermarket and little or no exposure to agriculture. Only from there is it possible to have no involvement with the animal, except to get hunks of its meat from the store, all while expecting others to do the killing (and even the thinking about the killing). This total removal of the self from the process of killing what is eaten is to deny that what we eat was ever alive. As an act it reduces life, a heartbeat and a spirit, to nothing more than a commodity. Whole beings become nothing more than their inanimate pieces. People who act this way say the animals death bothers them, as their reason for this denial of it's life, but there is no honor or respect in their actions, no respect for life.
This act also reduces the actor to something less as well; Something which is also denied heartbeat and spirit by the very spirit possessing it. If none of our food has a face, we ourselves become faceless. Such denial of the life of food is, in essence, making a choice to be sub-human. To make that choice, to seek that ignorance, is to say "I am not a human being. I am not a predator. I am some creature that eats the hard work of others, consumes the lives of other animals, without doing any of the mental or physical work or giving recognition to the costs necessary for me to survive." That's akin to being some sort of vaguely sentient mushroom or something, that just soaks in nutrients without awareness of where they come from.
It is incredibly disrespectful to divorce yourself from the process of killing and still want to consume its results. It is disrespectful to those who do that work, and it's disrespectful to the life you're now treating as merely commodified pieces. Such disrespect is also disrespect of the self, and remains so even if the divorce from food carries over to only eating non-animal foods. It is disrespectful to the self, as a human being, a predator; A creature of strong legs, and cunning mind, evolved to hunt and kill.
Some might say they wish to overcome being a predator, but do they have any idea what we would be if were were not predators? Our hunting and meat eating habits are at the root of many of the fundamental attributes of human beings; We are what we are because of eating animals. Theory suggests that the impact of meat consumption on brain development was fundamental to achieving the brains we have today. Who you think you are (to jump from brain to mind for a moment) owes to the mental gymnastics you are capable of thanks to descending from predators. And that's not to say anything about what being predators has done for the body.
Jackson Landers, “The Locavore Hunter”, provides us with this:

“As Christopher McDougall points out in his book, ‘Born to Run,’ we became modern humans in large part because we became predators. We have a lot of anatomical features that don’t make sense any other way. We are unique among living primates in that we have an Achilles tendon. An Achilles tendon is only really good for long-distance running. You don’t need one to walk or to sprint (as other apes demonstrate). Ditto our unusually large gluteus maximus muscles. We are finely tuned to be long-distance runners. And what good is running long distances? We can’t sprint fast enough to escape predators. But over marathon distances we can outrun even a racehorse. As a few indigenous tribes are still demonstrating, our bodies are very good at running down four legged prey until it collapses from exhaustion.
The physiological adaptations that allow us to do this are profoundly complex. Our tendons are especially springy compared to other primates. Our hearts and lungs are capable of amazing efficiency. We can sweat and regulate our bodies temperatures to avoid overheating. That kind of evolution doesn’t happen for nothing.
The title of McDougall’s book, ‘Born to Run,’ tells half of the story. The other half is that we were born to kill.” In Defense of Predation, The Locavore Hunter

These mushroom-people who want to divorce themselves from being predators are not just rejecting meat, they are rejecting essential humanity as well. Refusing to be a predator is a decision to step outside of humanity and be something else. Adherents of such a lifestyle seem to think they have risen above by doing so. They often act as if they've gained some pious state from which to condemn and dictate to others. Such people are so convinced of their superiority as to verge on suggesting tyrannies against real human beings acting in tune with nature (likening meat eaters to pedophiles and cannibals, as people who need to be "corrected"):

“The line of thinking goes like this: Evolution is natural, and what is natural is good; and because humans evolved the capacity to eat and digest meat, the practice of eating meat must also be natural and subsequently good. This is the naturalistic fallacy and it leads to all sorts of problems. Given this line of thinking we should also condone other human traits that came about through evolution, namely rape, murder, pedophilia and cannibalism. Obviously we’re not about to do this any time soon. We know very well that many people cannot be left to their own hard-wired devices; this is why we have self-corrective memes (i.e. ethics, laws, etc.) and why we need to have police and penal systems.
More to the point, however, is the acknowledgment that overriding our evolutionary baggage is part of the human mission. Having Darwinian processes guide our moral compass is sheer lunacy. Where is the morality in ‘survival of the fittest?’ Evolution may have helped us describe how we got here, but it most certainly won’t help us move forward as a compassionate species.” Meat Eaters are Bad People, Sentient Development

The cost of moving forward as a “compassionate species”, to those standards at least, will be not moving forward as a species at all. The nature these types claim to love and want to protect from “bad people”, is actually the very thing they are denying when they go on like this. They seem to see themselves to as smarter than, superior to, the way of the world for millions of years, and in their arrogance think they can override it. In reality, these petty would-be-god's have simply decided to be something less capable and interesting than a human being. Something needs to come along and eat them, if it can palate the taste.

In a certain way, these (anti-)people who either divorce themselves from their food, or refuse to be predators, should make me happy; If a cataclysm were to seriously challenge the survival of the human species, even if these mushrooms survived the initial event, they would be among the first to die or be eaten in the aftermath. That thought might bring a smile to my face, but for the fact that such cataclysm isn't around the corner. Even as things continue on the path they are on, true cataclysm is unlikely. So, we're forced to harbor these mental defectives; Those of us who participate in agriculture are forced to feed them, and the rest are forced to share with them.

(Photo: Original from Beverly & Pack's Flickr stream)