Short photo series in Modern Farmer today hit a chord with me. (http://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/chicken-cannibals/ ) Somehow it seems totally creepy to spin livestock's story to where it's a tale of creatures who really enjoy being served as food and simply cannot wait to land on our plate. Doesn't it to you? The other end of this story is the homesteaders who will butcher animals and then say things like "we did this with a hushed, serious reverence,"as if the animal somehow appreciated their taking the whole thing so seriously, or "we feel (enter the name of said animal here) would be so proud to have graced our holiday table and fed so many people," or something equally stupid. No matter what you are eating, it's a pretty good guess that it didn't really want to die and be consumed, whether you were somber as you killed it or not. Both mindsets stem from a fundamental need for modern people to delude themselves about their food, in my opinion. Listen, if you have to die in order to feed something else, which most creatures on the planet do (excepting large carnivores) you probably 1) Do NOT want to die in the first place, as I said. Healthy, young, living creatures generally don't. Which leads us to 2) If you do have to die, as painless and stress-free (read: quick) a dispatch as possible is a kindness, even though you are not given a choice or preference. The last one is just a guess on my part, due to biases about my own eventual demise. If I had a choice I'd rather die quickly and painlessly than in a drawn out, uncomfortable manner. So I also am transferring my own thoughts to the animals, but it seems like if it shortens pain and suffering, that is not necessarily a bad thing. But I don't go further than that into my food's thoughts and mindset. Because to start interjecting emotions into it -- animals gratefully climbing onto our dinner plate, or understanding and agreeing with the whole predator/prey cycle because their butchers are so freaking reverent about it, all those things seem both delusional and stupid. Like my gopher post said yesterday, death in the food cycle is inescapable, but how we deal with that death says a great deal about how in touch with reality we are.
Some people who move to rural environments find they enjoy hunting game and vermin, and even killing livestock for their personal consumption. I am not one of them. Yet when the gopher population began to creep up in numbers here at the homestead, I went through a gradual process that, yes, has finally turned me into an unapologetic killer at times. Sure, I may still save flies and put glass cups over moths and spiders who make it into the house, returning them all outside to live another day. But gophers have become to me what red fire ants have always been: Something that doesn't need to be living anywhere close to where I work, walk or grow my food. Yesterday, I successfully trapped and killed the gopher that had been making inroads into my potato, onion and pumpkin patch down in the field. It was a double victory for me, because I used a Maccabee trap to kill the gopher, which is the same gopher control method used at the winery we belong to. That means no poison is used, which means the hawks, lizards, coyotes and other wildlife are safe from either finding the poison pellets or the poisoned gopher corpse and dying from ingesting either. It also means that the same poison will not be working its way down through the dirt into the aquifer, as strychnine does . A trap may be primitive and violent, but at least it only kills once, when it catches its intended victim. You can't say the same thing about poison. But it also occurred to me that if the winery uses these traps to keep their vineyards pest-free, vermin killings occur everywhere, whether it's in our food, the cotton that makes our clothes, or even the grapes that produce the wine we drink. There is, truly, no food we eat where something has not probably died in order that it could be brought to us. I was a vegetarian for years and never thought of things this way. Sure, I did not consume animal flesh, but that doesn't mean animals didn't die to bring me my grains and vegetables. There is no getting away from this anywhere on Planet Earth, sadly. If you eat food, mammals have been killed so that it can grow, be harvested, and brought to you. So while I hate to think of myself as being a responsible party in all this, I am, whether I am the one placing the trap or not. I eat food, I wear clothes, I drink wine. To believe I have no culpability in it all would be magical thinking. Perhaps in the next world killing will be a thing of the past, but in this one, it seems unescapable. Yet I have to say I never really realized it until I picked up that trap and held that lifeless gopher in my hands. It's not the first gopher I've killed. After all, I've eaten commercial food that was probably protected with traps just like this one. But this was the first time I've actually realized my role in it all. Natural-born killer. Me.
So for the last few days I have been battling the nefarious pill bug, or rolly poly, as we used to call them as kids. They have killed two of my cucumber plants by gnawing them off at the base of their stems, where the plant meets the dirt. I know it's them because both times I caught them in the very act. They have actually damaged all the cucumber plants by doing this, but only two have been gnawed through to a point where it killed them. Obviously this is unacceptable. So here's the rub: We're always told to mulch around our plants, because the organic matter is good for enriching the soil, plus it protects the root systems of the plants themselves by keeping them cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Those are good things. Yes. Yet when you have pill bugs killing your plants, when you go on various websites to determine why they exist in such abundance in your garden beds, the blame is immediately foisted on you for having put mulch down, which creates a nifty environment for said bugs to live in. Because mulch is moist and rich in organic matter. So mulch is a bad thing. Yes? That's the thing about gardening and sometimes, life in general. Everything is the correct thing to do...until it isn't. I will be applying some Spinozad to cull the pill bug population tonight, hopefully before any more cucumber plants fall prey to them. Sigh. We also have gopher traps set for whomever is attempting to get into our pumpkin patch and vegetable beds. I'm getting adept at killing things, which is usually a bad thing. Except, of course, when it's good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGNIUZWFUSQ When I was 22 I moved into my first solo apartment. It was a one-bedroom, ground floor apartment in a big complex, on a gritty, busy, treeless street in the smoggy San Fernando Valley area of Southern California. I remember I used to sit inside on Saturday or Sunday mornings, drink coffee and open the windows (if there weren't too many children screaming up and down the stairs or teenagers blasting their boomboxes by the swimming pool) and listen to this album. It made me think about places far away from any city, places with clear, blue skies, lots of open space and precious little concrete. It took me many years after that to finally leave the city and go and live someplace where the skies were actually clear and there was more to see out the window than a concrete deck and swimming pool, surrounded by towers of other apartment buildings just like mine where people would live, spend their free hours, grow old, and eventually die in. I'd like to think I always knew I would make it out, but in truth, those Saturday mornings in my crappy little apartment were more about dreaming than about practical planning. Well, at least I thought I was just dreaming. Now I look out over our land and wonder if perhaps I knew that somehow, I belonged out in those open spaces, and that one day I'd be there. I wish I could go back in time and tell my 22 year-old self to hang in there, keep listening to music like this, and imagine the possibilities that would one day become reality.
Today we were blessed with cool, breezy weather. In the last four days, we've gone from a high temperature of 102 to the high today of just 66 degrees, and I am not complaining. Mainly because my chores run by the weather. And I needed a cooler day to accomplish some tasks I could not do without Mother Nature's cooperation. First on the agenda was transplanting next fall's butternut squash into the ground, along with some late season tomatoes and some marigolds (the last purely for color and decoration). A cool day is a perfect one for transplanting. If temperatures go much above the low '80's, plants here will struggle as they try to recover from both heat and transplant shock, and I've had many plants either die this way, or just barely hang on, producing nothing, because I planted them while it was too warm and they never quite got over it. The other task I needed to do was put up some of the apricots Big Ag brought home over the weekend. I did two quarts of canned fruit, and four pints of preserves this morning, which used up about half of the apricots I had. The other half I am going to dry, because there is nothing better than the sweet but tart taste of dried apricots, either on their own or in recipes which call for them, like a Moroccan Chicken recipe I like and make a lot. Since commercially dried fruit usually has sulfites, it will also be nice to have some apricots on hand that won't induce an asthma attack in anyone.
But I'm waiting on drying the fruit until later this week, when it is supposed to warm up once again. I can't say I'm looking forward to having the heat back, but I'm glad I will get at least a couple more days of cool ocean breezes before it comes back.
If last weekend was a trial by fire of sorts, as I spent my first two workdays at the winery training during a time of unprecedented, huge crowds, this weekend was exactly the opposite -- much slower than normal weekends are. But the lull gave me time to work on things -- learning more about the wines our customers taste, and sampling some myself in order to be able to describe them. This is not casual drinking; it's being able to describe to customers the difference between Rousanne versus a Marsanne-Rousanne blend, or the difference between the '09 Cabernet and the '10 vintage year. I also got to spend time visiting with each customer a bit more, and chatting with them about what had brought them to the area for the weekend and what else they were planning on doing. Last weekend was all about bussing tables, delivering plates to the kitchen to be washed, and making sure glasses were filled on time; this weekend was about chatting with customers, answering the phone, and lingering over the counter, polishing glasses while giving people directions to good area restaurants or other wineries. I realize you need to have a fair amount of busy weekends in order to have a successful business, but I have to say that the slow day was heavenly. Some jobs are boring when they are not hectic, but a slow day at a winery really lets you take a breath and appreciate where you are and how lucky you are to be there. My life is in a nice balance right now, where some days I hang with my chickens, my livestock and my plants, who aren't really chatty, and other days I am at the winery, where it seems like I'm always talking to someone. You need both in life, I am convinced. If you have either one of those things exclusively -- hermitdom, or constant company, with no balance between the two, and a person will go mad. Seen it happen, not going there.
