Lenten practices have softened, because these days we Roman-Rite Catholics are permitted to eat meat all through Lent with the exception of Ash Wednesday and Lenten Fridays. And even on those days of abstinence, food prepared in rendered animal fat, like pączki, has been permitted for more than a century. It's indisputable that we've gone soft. But my reflection this morning, as I savored every bite of that home-grown bacon, is that, as a culture, we've lost any real sense of the natural extravagance of meat.
The extravagance of meat was one of the first big lessons of homesteading. Put simply, meat costs a lot to raise. I remember that the first time we raised pigs back in North Carolina we had another family that wanted to go "in" on half a hog. They offered to help with processing and split the feed costs down the middle. Now, 50-lb. bags of hog feed are expensive, and while I did my best to supplement with garbage bags full of expired bread from a discount bakery, the cost per pound ended up being significantly more than the average price per pound that you'd pay for conventional pork in the grocery store. I think it caught the other family by surprise. In any case, it was the last time they suggested going "in" on raising hogs.
These days we've gotten a lot better on the cost front. Since we're now farming on a larger scale, our Wisconsin pigs are fattened mainly on bales of our own hay, apples from our own orchard, and unsaleable squash from our own fields. But money is only part of the story. The pigs still need to be watered twice a day, and processing is a multi-day affair. Consider what went into that bacon even after the trouble of raising and processing the pigs. The bellies needed to be soaked in brine for a week or more, and then they hung for two full days in my home-made smoking box while I watchfully tend to a small fire in the attached pot-bellied stove day-and-night.
Of course, going to the store and buying plastic-wrapped Hormel bacon would have been vastly easier. And considering the value of my time, it may very well be cheaper option as well. But that's exactly my point. As a culture, we simply don't understand how extravagant meat is. Or thought of another way, contra naturam, perhaps meat is not extravagant anymore because it's so prevalent and so, so cheap. Why not eat meat with every meal when a pound of chicken breasts can be had for a dollar, and a pound of ground beef for two dollars?
I'll save for another day my reflections on the inhumane, environmentally deleterious practices that are needed to lower the price point of meat so dramatically. There are strongly held philosophical reasons behind my wife's and my choice to raise all of our own meat. For today, I'll state that meat, naturally speaking, is extravagant. Animals eat plant-based products and exert vast amounts of energy converting them into edible protein, which we then harvest. Even with intensive factory-farming practices, it still takes several pounds of feed to produce a pound of chicken, and nearly a dozen pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef,
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The other day I had to process one of our older breeding does from the goat herd. She's given us twins each year for three straight years, a buckling and a doeling each time. We've sold a few, we've eaten a few, and we have two of her beautiful young does in our herd. But she was having a very difficult time recovering from her last pregnancy. Her labor was induced early, and her milk never fully came in. She had resisted our natural parasite prevention regime last summer and showed all the signs of battling a heavy parasite load. She's an older doe, one of the originals we brought with us from North Carolina. She just wasn't thriving.
I led her out from the barnyard and put the muzzle of the .22 behind her ear while she ate a little hay. She dropped instantly, and she bled out quickly after I slit her throat. Since she's an older goat, I boned her out and pressure-canned the meat in quart jars. But I also left plenty of meat on the bones, which, together with her organs, will feed the livestock guardian dogs for weeks to come.
It's beautiful, and it's the cycle of life. But it's also an example of a costly farming choice, and one that is illustrative of the extravagance of meat. Could she have recovered and given us more babies in future breeding seasons? Was it the right time to cull her? Honestly, it's the sort of decision that would have been entirely alien to me earlier in life. But it's exactly the sort of decision that, naturally speaking, is supposed to be associated with the consumption of meat. There's no saving seeds for next year as an investment. Harvesting an animal means, so to speak, "cashing in" the final check on an expensive, labor-intensive, resource-heavy investment.
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By the way, taste is only one aspect of the full savoring of a product. Another part is acquiring an appreciation for the rarity and expense of the thing. It is along these lines that I'll be savoring my goat meat, which the pressure canning will tenderize nicely. And this Mardi Gras, I have also savored my bacon because, while I did, I pondered every step of the long process of raising and processing and preparing it. To think, there are only 20-odd pound-and-a-half packages more downstairs in the deep freeze.
Familiarity breeds contempt, and Hormel, plastic-wrapped packs of bacon and endless, 39-cent chicken wings have left us, sadly, in contempt of meat.
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