While dabbling with the blood of sacrifice, don’t think I haven’t been feasting as well!

I’ve wanted to make blood sausage ever since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay, “It Takes a Village to Kill a Pig,” where he places boudin noir in his pantheon of “the hundred greatest foods of the world” (de-throning the frozen Milky Way bar!).  I had a chance to eat some last spring, when I was in London and came across a shop selling charcuterie from organic, English meats.  It was ghastly – mealy in texture, with no redeeming flavor.  To get a good boudin, it seemed, I was going to have to make it myself.

Which is not as easy as you might think.  Although it is legal to sell pig’s blood in the US, the slaughterhouse has to have special equipment and has to be specially certified, which almost nobody bothers to do.  As a result, about the only place you can find pig’s blood is at an Asian market, where it will be frozen.  But I wanted fresh blood.  Following the centuries-old tradition of French farmhouses (which you can also find beautifully documented in the opening pages of Stéphane Reynaud’s cookbook, Pork & Sons), I wanted to make boudin on the same day that the pig was slaughtered and encase it in the pig’s own intestines.

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“‘Of all that is written, I love only that which one writes with one’s own blood.  Write with blood, and you will discover that blood is spirit.  It is not at all easy to understand the blood of another…  Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, but rather to be learned by heart.’”
–Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On Reading and Writing”

Thoughts on Sunday morning: What’s the connection between blood and the word?  When we speak of blood or write about blood, is that the same thing as writing in blood?  And how are we to interpret such “blood-signs”?  Are they poison, “heart’s delusion,” or, on the contrary, heart’s balm, worthy “to be learned by heart”?  What might that mean: to learn by heart?

Speaking of blood, speaking of speaking of blood, let’s begin at the beginning, which is to say near the bitter end, with the Last Supper: “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus the same night in which be was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.  After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, this cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians XI, 23-25, King James version).

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If you don’t want to know the name of the pig that I’ll be making into pâté, pulled pork, and prosciutto, of a pig that could pass into your hands in the next year and cross the liminal boundary of your lips, becoming one flesh with your flesh, then stop reading now.  Names and photographs (as the Amish know) are powerful things, and seeing them, reading them, listening to them reverberate silently in our ears – taking them in through the eyes and the ears and keeping them in memory – are all proleptic and anticipate that moment of sacrifice and consumption.

And, by and large, we prefer to eat with our eyes closed or at least averted.  We eat meat, spear it on our forks, but keep ourselves at arm’s length from it, translating even the names of the animals as we transform them into food: pig into pork, sheep into lamb, cow into beef, chicken into McNuggets.  In general, we don’t even want to remember that meat came from an animal, let alone that animal there, the one in the picture, who even has a name, perhaps.  It’s as if we dis-member the animal, break it down into unrecognizable parts, laid out on styrofoam trays at the supermarket or speared on the end of our fork, precisely in order to keep ourselves from thinking about or re-membering the living being they come from.  There are exceptions – hunters, butchers – who look the flesh they eat in the eye first, but anyone with blood on their hands is likely to find themselves ostracized or even demonized by the majority.

And, for all my desire to know where my food comes from, to have a hand in it, to analyze (over-analyze you might be tempted to say) and be aware of the sacrifice involved in it, I am not exempt from this general rule, this blindness.  After all, the eye that never blinks also goes blind.

Although I can tell you the provenance of every scrap of meat I use, I do not know the names of the animals, I did not look them in the eye, I did not have a hand in their slaughter.  Until yesterday.

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“You must want to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you want to become new unless you have first become ashes?”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (“On the Way of the Creator”)

Returning to Harold McGee’s fabulous book, On Food and Cooking, to learn more about milk, I came across this intriguing sentence: “The presence of such biochemical machinery has led to the description of milk as an ‘unstructured tissue,’ since even after it leaves the animal’s body it retains some of the characteristics of a living system” (11).

There’s a lot to digest here. The lens of science, through which McGee looks, tends to reduce “a living system” to the operation of so much “biochemical machinery.” By reductively comparing its functioning to that of a man-made mechanism, this view implies that, however complex such a system might be, it is ultimately understandable and thus masterable. Any mystery is only temporary, not essential. While it would be easy to overlook this patriarchal/scientific reductionism as minor lapse, we can’t ignore the fact that McGee chooses to open his book with “the nature of milk” because this substance defines “our very biological nature as mammals (from the Latin mamma, meaning ‘breast’)” (3). Far from being an isolated, accidental, or individual mistake, this misprision of milk is exemplary, fundamental. It recapitulates an entire western history, in which the struggle over “our very biological nature” begins with milk.

After all, how can male dominance be established as long as we remain dependent on our mother’s milk? From the beginning, patriarchy requires a control and revaluation of female fertility, of the life-giving and life-sustaining female power exemplified by milk.

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As odd as it may seem for a born-again, latter-day Dionysian*, I find myself leading a small-group discussion for members of a Christian fellowship who are reading the book Food & Faith.

It’s a great collection of essays by many of the usual suspects (such as Wendell Berry, Gary Nabhan, M. F. K. Fisher, and Marion Nestle), as well as a range of more explicitly religious writers meditating on the place of food in our lives and in their spiritual journeys. Here are some tidbits from the section dedicated to Spirituality and Food, a little food for thought from this feast of thought for food.

From The Interiority of Food, by Thomas Moore:

“When I was a child, we ate fish on Friday and fasted for hours before communion and gave up certain foods in Lent, and these simple food practices helped link religion with daily life in a simple but effective form of enchantment. When practices like these disappear, the fantasy associated with food, and therefore its soul and charm, diminishes. These days even religion seems to have forgotten the importance of lacing food with sacred imagination, and so we are left with food as a mere means of sustenance and health. We are getting fat in body, but not in soul.”

You don’t have to be religious or even “spiritual” to appreciate the importance of investing the world of “daily life” with “enchantment.” When we lace something as simple, as mundane and quotidian, as food with “sacred imagination,” we are not deceiving or poisoning ourselves; on the contrary, we are clearly seeing the world as a construct of imagination. If the world appears dead and mechanistic, that’s only because we have made ourselves dead and mechanistic.

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Two recent, random events:

A couple weeks ago, a good friend told me, “If it weren’t for our friendship, I’d probably be locked away in a mental institution now.”

And just last week, I ate my first salad from my own garden: chives, kale, spinach, chard, mustard greens, and at least a dozen kinds of lettuce. The first salad of the year is a private, almost sacramental event; I don’t share it with anyone. It’s a moment when I stop to recognize my own small working in the greening of the earth again, gather it for a meal, savor it, and make it part of my own flesh.

I’m not sure what, if anything connects these two events, except my own, mixed-up mind.

Although you probably don’t need me to tell you, growing your own salad is wildly impractical, not to say a little crazy. Although the garden beds are already there, edged in brick and bordered with flourishings hedgerows of chives, getting them ready every year means digging in wheelbarrow-loads of compost. The seeds for the plants that I enjoyed in my salad were sown as far back as February, raised under lights in my basement, then potted up and moved out to the cold frame, and finally put in the ground weeks ago. All so that I could go out in the rain, harvest a few individual leaves, wash them, spin them, dress them, and enjoy a salad for my lunch. Crazy.

Maybe we need small acts of craziness like this to keep us sane. Love, friendship, raising our children, being neighborly, do nothing to contribute to the GNP, do not add up in dollars and cents, but without them, we’d all need to be locked away. Without a connection to the earth, to each other, all that’s left is the insanity of our waking world of “buying and getting,” blind warring and striving. And so we go a little wild and do things that do not compute: make time to grow a garden, have a drink with a friend, and remember that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

My backyard is a special place. If the art of living is finding a balance between dreaming and laboring, then my backyard is where that comes home for me. My backyard is where I’m free to experiment, and as a consquence it’s littered with half-finished projects, half-baked ideas, and the ghosts of all the projects I’ve never taken on. And each year I labor mightily to finish them up, to tidy things up, to get organized, but I start so many new things that the end result is the same: a balancing act, a work in progress, or just a jumble.

Within this special place, I have a special place: under the grapes. There are no grape leaves, let alone grapes, this time of year, but today was the first time this year that it was warm enough to sit out and eat my lunch in the grape arbor, so I wanted to share this picture with all of you who have sat under the grapes with me and graced it with your presence or just dream of having such a place. Among my friends, the phrase “under the grapes” has become a talisman, granting one admittance into this special place, acknowledging one’s initiation into the mysteries.

So just what do we mean when we we bring a gathering “under the grapes”?

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Yesterday, when Suzanne gave me the marvelous gift of the word “abligurition,” it resonated for me like a destiny. When the image of that tatooed tongue popped up, first thing, I felt mesmerized, as if I was being enticed by a chain of reflections into the maw of hell. Having been lured to the precipice (think of the tongue stuck straight out like a diving board), where an entire conceptual order (that of a capitalist phonology that has governed western thought for millenia) seemed to hang in the balance, let’s pull back and consider some of the practical questions of abligurition.

Don’t worry, Laura; I’ll still get my metaphysical licks in.

When I shared this new word with my spouse and told her that it meant “prodigal expense for food,” her immediate response was a laughing “We know all about that!” But do we? really?

Having made a commitment to buy organic food and to buy as much as possible from local producers, it’s true that we spend about twice what the average American spends on groceries. On the face of it, this would seem to be a simple act of abligurition, a prodigal expenditure of capital that should be hoarded up or put to work elsewhere. I know a lot of people who think this.

But if it turns out, in the long run, that the capitalist economy in which we live is itself prodigal, then maybe laying waste to that capital is precisely what we need to do.

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