Death of a goose
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Last month I was in India and as is customary (at least for us) we went about visiting all our relatives. As a parting gift, my aunt gave us a live goose for our dinner table. This kind of gift giving used to be a lot more common a couple of decades ago but this was the first time in a few years that I had been the beneficiary of such an enthralling boon.
When I was a kid, we used to visit India quite regularly for summer holidays. In my grandfather’s house we used to have cows that my cousins used to milk. Now, that was fresh milk. The hen would cluck and before you knew it, the eggs were served. I recall the yolks were more orange than they were yellow.
Then there was the killing of the chicken - the faint hearted can skip over the next couple of paragraphs. As I watched on, my cousin would catch a chicken (or I would catch one for him). He would immobilize it by laying it on its side and stepping on its wings. Then he would slit its throat all the while keeping it pinned - for everyone knows what a headless chicken does. When the bird was dead, we would dip it into a pot of boiling water and then proceed to pluck out its feathers. It was a lot of fun as I recall, except for the slitting the throat part.
My brother once decided to try his hands at slaughtering a chicken. But in the process, he did a poor job of keeping it pinned down. It went bouncing all over the place and he was never seen in the vicinity of a chicken slaughter again. I hear that people who butcher the larger mammals like buffaloes typically get drunk to steel themselves for the task at hand. Having grown up, I no longer have the stomach for such a primal connection with my food. A hypocritical carnivore as I like to think of myself, without the courage to look my food in its eyes (I think I can kill a fish easily, though I would chop its head off and not let it asphyxiate).
Getting back to the goose. I don’t particularly like to eat goose or duck, but it would have been rude of me to refuse the gift. The domestic help (servants as they are referred to in India) stuffed the hapless bird into a bag. I also lied to my daughter about the whole thing. I claimed that the goose was for someone else and that it was sleeping in the trunk of the car. On the ride home, my daughter kept telling me to speak softly so as not to wake up the goose. I kept wondering (and hoping a little bit) that it had actually died.
At home, we handed over the goose to our ’servant’ who carried out the thankless task of killing the animal. At the dinner table, I couldn’t help but notice how clean and soft the palms of my hands were. I don’t think anyone particularly cared for the goose curry, but I made it a point to finish every last bit of it.
I too must admit that I’m a hypocritical carnivore, so I try to make my peace with my meal by trying to buy organic and free range meat whenever possible (I would probably go vegetarian if I were to ever visit a slaughterhouse).
Something I’ve been considering for a while myself.
I am a non-hypocritical carnivore. Every day morning before the roosters crow, I head out into the woods, six blade in hand, and hunt down the meatiest animal this side of the Mason Dixon line. I skin the beast, hang it up using teflon rope in my basement with a bucket or two underneath. After I return home after work, I feed the blood to my pet Great White and cut the meat up into little chunks that I then serve almost raw.
Free range is a myth. It is a labelling tactic used by US meat producers to mollify consumer conscience, and it has little or nothing to do with actual farm conditions. Just another label like USDA Choice, USDA Prime etc, meant to mislead rather than enlighten. I remember an interview with notable carnivore and shock rocker Ted Nugent, who put it succinctly - “That ain’t no range. And those chickens ain’t free.” The problem is that the debate is clouded by extremists on both ends of the spectrum, and a balanced evaluation is hard to obtain. Here’s one view:
http://www.washingtonfreepress.org/65/freeRangeMyth.htm
There is a folk saying in Malayalam - “Konnal paapam thinnal theerum.” Roughly translated, it means - killing is a sin, eating is the absolution. Eat, drink, and be merry.
Ted Nugent has another saying, “Endangered? Damn right it’s endangered, it’s in my gun sight”.
There was an article recently in the Economist which created a bit of a storm, it basically says all these things such as organic, or buying local (to save gas used for freight, also to buy from small farms), etc., are self defeating. For example, organic means you have to do crop rotation to nourish the soil, which isn’t very efficient supposedly, and you have to use more land to get the same yield. Buying local might mean you have to drive more to get to the local farmers’ market, vs. going to the more close grocery store, which means you’ll end up using more gas. Some others wrote rebuttals which I haven’t come across yet.
Not that I was really trying to make any big point, but so much of what we do today is so detached from reality - from made for TV wars to TV dinners.
On the other hand monoculture leads to poor soil which needs to fortified - leading to less nutritious/tasty food (who knows how many trace elements have disappeared from the foods we eat today). Michael Pollan had a nice (long) article called ‘Unhappy Meals’ in this Sundays NY Times Magazine which touches a lot on this topic.
When I was in India, we went to my wife’s aunt’s home and they served us a meal with produce they had grown in their back yard. All kinds of Kerala curries. I am not exaggerating, this was the tastiest meal by far I have had in as long as I can remember.
Why do you call him a “shock rocker?” That label applies more to the bat-biting Ozzy, the cross-dressing Marilyn Manson, or the theatrical Alice Cooper. I have never heard The Nuge being referred to as a shock rocker. Unless you are of course referring to his non-musical persona: he’s often referred to as a racist, sexist, right-wing prick.
Were you told that the produce was from the backyard before or after the meal?
I thought that would come up - I started raving about the food and then they informed me that everything was from the back yard. I never considered myself as having a particularly sensitive palate so the whole experience was taste bud opening to me.
Which would imply that bat-biting and cross-dressing are part of the musical persona. Fact is, these are people who epitomize the cult of personality. What they actually do seems almost tertiary to their carefully cultivated and lovingly tended images. Regardless, in my insufficient understanding of this complex field, I may have granted “The Nuge” membership to a select club reserved for the few, the proud, the bat-biters. So let me rephrase. He’s not a shock rocker, he’s merely a hillbilly rock musician, whose opinions may or may not be shocking to you.
“On the other hand monoculture leads to poor soil which needs to fortified - leading to less nutritious/tasty food (who knows how many trace elements have disappeared from the foods we eat today). Michael Pollan had a nice (long) article called ‘Unhappy Meals’ in this Sundays NY Times Magazine which touches a lot on this topic.”
This is the article about the ugly but tasty tomato available in winter? While other tomatoes (and fruits and veggies) are bred for disease-resistance, damage-resistance, looks, etc..
The ugly tomato article was yet another related article. The ‘Unhappy Meals’ one is here. Like I said, it’s pretty long.