On butchering

A good buddy of mine, Dave Seastrom, a fellow Brown County resident and co-producer of the Brown County Hour radio show, recently posted on the great blue plague known as Facebook a bit about butchering a deer he had acquired. In his inimitable style, Dave wrote:

Becky and I got home about the same time and she took charge of the dogs while I went to the shop to skin the deer and quarter him. Once I had him rendered into manageable pieces, I bagged up the sections and put them in the fridge to continue aging for another day.

Before I began my work I took some time to show my respect, and thanked the deer for the life he gave and for the nourishment we will receive. I consider it a privilege to be directly involved with the food we eat, and this little fellow represents the most wholesome form of meat possible in a world full of questionable choices, and we are truly grateful for this gift.

Here we are, part of the greater life cycle and it’s our choice to be directly involved or not, but either way we’re all in this together, sharing the gift of life as each of us get our day in the Sun.

Brings back memories, buddy. I was raised on a nice-sized family farm (180 acres all told), and we were big on self-sufficiency. Besides our gardening, we raised our own range-fed cattle, hogs and chickens, and handled the butchering ourselves in a homemade butcher shop on my brother’s farm. I remember grandma, a Hoosier farm girl herself, cleaning hog intestines to be used for making our own link sausage. Since our family was in the heavy equipment business, we had a certain advantage in handling the chore of butchering, using a small cherry-picker crane or a loader to hoist the carcasses. We had a walk-in cooler we had salvaged out of the old Marhoefer plant we were contracted to demolish. We made a huge boil vat (for scalding hogs to loosen the hair for scraping) out of an old steel storage tank, and heated it up with a big diesel salamander, dipping entire hogs into the scalding water with the front-end loader.

My dad, Pat Foster, was known thereabouts for the quality of his beef, and had a waiting list of folks wanting sides when they were ready. Unlike commercial livestock producers who would pour on the grain once the steers were a year old, the old man preferred to give them an extra year to fully develop the frame to support the fattening. They were range-fed, as I said, but the choice steers (and we did our own cutting, BTW), were fed organic corn we raised ourselves (fertilized year-round by the animals as they grazed), nicely bedded and quite pampered, actually. If an animal required medical treatment even once, it would not make the grade for our consumption, and would be sent to market instead.

We put our animals down one at a time, there was no “mass slaughter day” where multiple animals had to get all freaked out at the smell of death, which causes an animal to flood the body with adrenaline — not something you want to consume later. It might be months before another animal would be taken. We figured the least we could do is give an animal a calm, peaceful exit from this world.

We’d isolate the animal in a pen away from the others, then with one clean shot to the head with a 30-06 rifle, the animal was dropped in his tracks, as painlessly as we could manage the deed. Butchering commenced immediately, and by day’s end we were done with it. Like you, we were always aware of the sacrifice we required of an animal (might have been the Cherokee blood in our veins), and thankful for the nourishment it provided our family. We considered it an honorable thing to be able to take care of ourselves and not be dependent on outside sources of food. We took pride in that.

These are lifestyle skills which are largely lost in today’s world. People are totally separated from the the food they consume, from the cycle of life itself, and have no stomach for the realities of consumption and the inevitable taking of life it requires (OK, you can kill vegetables instead, but the principle’s the same, merely differing in the degree of gore). I’ve often said that if modern Americans suddenly had to butcher their own meat, we’d be a nation of vegetarians overnight.

I also find it striking that on a topic as absolutely fundamental to our survival as nutrition, there’s seemingly no consensus whatsoever on what constitutes a healthy diet. One can eschew meat (and I often have at various points in my life), and while the jury seems perpetually out on this point, in my view there’s no substitute for animal protein. We see the “primal” diet movement making significant strides in recent years, and I think there just may be something to it. I also think the issue isn’t so much what you choose to eat, but the quality of the ingredients. In this regard, modern agricultural practices are failing us miserably.