Hunting and Gathering

After I came back from my year in France and continued to feed my Francophile cravings with books about la belle pays I had the...experience? pleasure? opportunity?... to come across not one but two descriptions of slaughtering a pig.

Yes. A pig slaughter. You still with me? All right.

One was fictional and the other part of a memoir but both were from books that focussed on the art of acquiring and preparing food (umm, what else would you expect from books about life in France?).  And both accounts made me want to experience this timeless tradition of the slaughter on a small farm in rural France.

Yes. Really. Not kidding.

WHY? Well, maybe it was a bit romantic. Another author, David Adams Richards, does not see it in the same way, but he touches on the central question that leads to my curiosity of knowing about where my meat comes from with his intriguing challenge: that people who eat meat should be morally obligated to kill what they eat at least once in their lifetime.

Interesting, right?

Bouqueria Market, Barcelona, Spain.
April 2009. 

I was reminded that as I worked through my own connections with food post-France, and re-accustomed myself to the sanitized butcher's counter in North American grocery stores (no full rabbits or cows feet visible here, and certainly no tripe on display) I realized how separated we (non farmers in North America) actually are from most of the meat that we eat. And I wondered what it would mean to actually know where our meat comes from. Would more people become vegetarians? Perhaps. Or would it make people think twice about buying no name chicken breasts instead of investing in a whole free-range, grain fed hen? What if people knew more about the whole process of how our meat arrives at the table, not just the butchering process (hunting or not), or the horrible conditions on factory farms that gives us an abundance of cheap meat, but about the historical processes that have created a taste for beef in North American culture, and, more recently, about local farmers who have gone out of business due to the loss of meat packing plants.

Garden bounty in a bike basket.

And it's not just meat. We (okay, really me, but I am sure there are others too) have no idea about the effort and the politics behind something as "natural" as fruit and vegetables. How much of the fruit that we eat is actually grown in Canada?  And what are the genetic modifications that allow it to be transported thousands of miles?

The garden, mid-season
(if you look closely, you can see
zucchinis and tomatoes!)

My lovely summer garden tomatoes barely survived the 3 km bike ride from the garden to the house intact. They were delicious, but they certainly weren't raised to travel. And it was only in passing by the organic section of the produce department this summer that I learned that those imperfections on the tops of my tomatoes were NOT something I should be concerned about - the ones from our garden matched the ones in the organic baskets, not the large beefsteak versions from the US that were "on special" this week. Could I tell you the difference between "Early Girl" and "Big Boy" varieties? Nooo, but we spent a lot of time learning this summer, from the hours spent toiling in the dirt to prepare the clay soil for the seeds to the many mornings spent pulling weeds in the humid heat.  Our 4 x 5 m plot would not have sustained two families for the summer, but we got a few dinners out of it.

I guess what I am realizing is that I need to make more of an effort to understand both my tastes for certain types of food, as well as where those tastes are coming from.