Where Food Comes From

After I processed turkeys a couple of weeks ago, I roasted up a breast and sliced it to pack in my lunch at work. When people at work have found out that I'm eating a turkey I raised and butchered, the reaction has been the same:

"How mean!"

This bothers me a great deal. Have I done anything worse than what happened to the donor for your turkey (or ham, or roast beef) sandwich? Not really. I just happened to do it myself, at my house, rather than outsourcing it to Waco, or Guymon, or Dumas (to name the closest big turkey, hog, and beef slaughter plants I can think of).

Today, I came across this post at Offal Good about why people don't like offal. One reason is that they don't like to be reminded that their food came from a living animal. (Another, as I found out last week with the liver, is that it tastes bad. But I digress.)

Combine that with the opposition to foie gras, because it's mean. Putting aside the actual evidence of how cruel the treatment of these birds is (or isn't), I think that people don't like to be reminded that, every day of their lives, people are handling these birds with the express intent of making them taste better after death. I think that it's not just the feeding, it's the planning for death that is objectionable.

I find it sad, and frustrating, that "meat" in our culture has been divorced from living animals, and that products become objectionable not based on flavor or safety or actual cruelty, but rather on how much they remind us of our participation in this cycle.

Name that meat!

We had tacos tonight, and this is the meat we put on them. It looks like hamburger, but it's not. It's not pork sausage, either--it's turkey!

I processed four of my turkeys on Saturday. One of the toms was much too big for just two people--seventeen pounds--so I parted him out. I ground up the legs and thighs; that's what we had tonight.

My turkeys are outside all the time, and they sleep on a roost that's about knee-high. They are literally always on their feet, and his legs showed it. They were the same dark red color as beef, and (as you can see) the muscle cooked up very beef-like. It had a strong flavor, as well. It wasn't necessarily beefy, or gamy, or anything specific, but it was strong enough to stand up to the tomatoes, salsa, sour cream, cheese, and avacadoes that went into the tacos.

Going Whole Hog

Wait a minute--are you saying that you're never going to eat another animal again?
Yes.
What about bacon?
No.
What about ham?
No!
What about pork chops?
Dad, those all come from the same animal!
Yeah, right, Lisa. A magical, wonderful, animal.

--From The Simpsons episode, "Lisa the Vegetarian."

Homer was right. The pig is a magical, wonderful animal. It's the most widely-distributed large farm animal. It eats the widest range of stuff, under the widest range of conditions. And it provides the widest range of cuts to eat, from nose to tail.

Pigs loom larger in my memory than other livestock. We lived on a hog farm until I was three. One of my earliest (and worst) memories is of using a stock trailer as a jungle gym, falling down into the trailer, and getting a mouthful of what the hogs left behind on the floor. I remember how cute baby pigs are, and how big adult pigs look to a toddler. I remember how cozy warm the farrowing (that's birthing) barn is in the winter, and the smell that it has. Later, we lived on a small acreage, and I raised at least a couple of hogs for 4-H every year from the time I was nine until I graduated from high school. We put a hog in the freezer every year, too, so I grew up eating lots of pork.

We had a neighbor who was an old rancher (as a kid, he learned to ride and rope from an old man who, in his youth, had driven cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas--how cool is that). This rancher leased a small part of his ranch to a teacher who raised pigs as a hobby. Part of the lease payment was a fat hog, on the hoof, delivered after the first frost each fall. The rancher would butcher the hog there behind the house to have pork for the winter. One year, I rode my bike over and helped him out a little. That was the first time I ever saw an animal butchered and turned into food. Incidentally, this rancher was famous in our church for making wonderful rolls that no one could duplicate. He would freely give out the recipe (I wish I had a copy of it now), but no one could make rolls as good as his. The secret? He used lard instead of shortening, and it gave the rolls a lighter texture.

I've been around a lot of hogs in my life, and I've eaten a lot of pork. However, I realized today that my gustatory experiences with the pig are somewhat limited. Pigs are famous for being eminently edible--farmers tout that you can eat everything but the squeal--but I've only had a few of the big muscles. Today, I resolved to remedy that situation: I'm going to eat a whole hog, and post it all here for your enjoyment.

This is the part where I get all lawyer-ish, and set forth the terms and conditions that make up "eating a whole hog."

1. I'm going to eat a WHOLE hog, not A whole hog. That is, I'm going to eat each of the parts that make up a whole hog, rather than the parts of one single pig.

2. I'm not going to eat the whole thing by myself. I'm going to share with family, friends, guests, well-wishers, and food adventurers.

3. "Whole" is used here in the platonic sense, not the accounting sense. I'm going to cook and eat a meal made from every single part of a hog, but I'm not necessarily going to eat the entirety of each major muscle group. In other words, I'm not going to eat thirty pounds of pork chops, two entire hams, two entire shoulders (well, I may eat two shoulders, because I love pulled pork). I'll try every part, but the total of what I cook and eat probably won't total up to the 200 pound live weight of a hog.

4. Finally, though I'm going to try every part of the pig, I'm not going keep eating anything that's nasty. I reserve the right to stop eating any part after I've tried a bite. Some of the parts worry me--chitterlings and feet in particular--but I'll be a trooper and at least taste everything.

Keep checking back, and I'll give you a guided tour of Homer's magical, wonderful animal. And, as Homer has said so often:

Mmmmmmm......poooooooorrrrrrrkkkkk.........

Food Safety: what's definitely not safe

Yesterday, I looked at foods that are definitely safe to eat. Today, I'll look at foods that are definitely not safe, and what you can do about it.

The key transmission route for food-borne illness like salmonella and the dangerous strain of E. coli is fecal-oral transmission. In other words, foods that may have come into contact with poop. In a nutshell, any animal product that hasn't gone through a sanitizing step should be considered dangerous. As we discussed yesterday, heat, acids, salt, and fermentation all have the potential to kill the germs on food. Raw animal products--meat, milk, and eggs--are all potentially dangerous; cooked animal products are safe. Let's take a closer look at some animal products.

The food that is most likely to be contaminated is raw poultry. According to the New York Times last week, 83% of raw chickens they tested carried some pathogenic bacteria. You should treat any raw poultry as if it were contaminated, and anything it touches as contaminated. That means that if you handle raw chicken, you must wash your hands before handling other food. If you chop it up, you must wash (with hot, soapy water) the knife, cutting board, and counter. Never, ever handle raw chicken, then immediately touch your hands, cooking utensils, or countertop to something you are going to eat raw. That's the surest way to make yourself sick. The good news is that the bacteria on chicken are strictly external. The inside of any muscle tissue is sanitary, unless the animal was sick. Once you have started to cook the outside of the chicken, it becomes safe. There is actually no danger from eating rare chicken, if you get the outside good and hot. It may be gross, but it's safe.

Red meat also has a high probability of being contaminated, but lower than that of poultry. That's because so much poultry either has the skin on, or is just one cut removed from the skin (meaning the knife pulls through the skin into the muscle, contaminating the meat). Red meat is skinned and cut up much smaller (proportionally), so the bacteria get spread quite a bit thinner. Additionally, the processing of poultry tends to spread the bacteria load much more uniformly over all the animals than large-animal processing does. The same rules for handling poultry still apply, though--clean anything that comes into contact with meat before it touches anything else. Rare meat, like rare poultry, is also safe if you sear the outside.

There is however, one exception to this rule: ground meat. This comes into play much more with beef and pork than with chicken or turkey, because we make sausage out of hogs, and hamburgers out of cattle. With ground meat, the inside of the meat and the outside of the meat get all jumbled up, and so do the accompanying bacteria. Ground meat must always be cooked to an internal temperature of at least 140, or medium. If there's any pink left in a burger or sausage patty, it poses a risk.

Dairy products are generally safer that meats. Most milk is sold pasteurized, so it's safe. Raw milk carries some risk, and its sale is strictly regulated (or sometimes prohibited). Hard cheeses are low-water, fairly salty, and fairly acidic. That renders them pretty safe. By law, soft cheeses must be made from pasteurized milk in the U.S. This interferes with some traditional cheesemaking techniques, but it does produce safe cheese.

Eggs are a slightly different case. The outside of eggs is cleaned and sanitized in the packaging process, so they are safe. However, there is a percentage of hens that carry salmonella in their ovaries, and deposit the bugs into the shell with the yolk. This is much more common with caged hens than free-ranging birds, but all raw eggs should be viewed with skepticism. If you really must have raw eggs (blech), find a pasteurized product like egg beaters, and be safe.

That's a pretty good summary of what's clearly dangerous, but conspicuously absent are green onions and spinach--the culprits behind the two recent scares.