No One Remembers “Everything But the Squeal”

 

shutterstock_169653197Okay, so yesterday world leaders salved their collective consumption consciences by eating a lunch made with garbage. Yes, after wasting thousands of gallons of jet fuel flying in from all over the world with their enormous entourages, they wore their Savile Row suits and Italian leather shoes to an upscale lunch, eating landfill salad with their veggie burgers (made of juicing pulp) and corn-starch French fries. No word on how the consumables were obtained for this groundbreaking luncheon. Surely they came from the kitchen garbage right there at the United Nations.

This dinner was all about addressing food waste by Western cultures. I know, I know, I always throw out my pulp after juicing. Oh, wait, no I don’t. I don’t juice. It’s stupid because you throw out all the parts of the fruits and vegetables that are actually good for you — like half the vitamins and all the fiber — so you can get the sweet, sweet sugars and tell yourself you’ve extracted all the good parts. You’re better off eating an apple from your local farmer’s market with a glass of low-sodium V-8, or just having a colorful salad without all the good parts like bacon and cheese.

But I digress.

I come from a culture — rural Kentucky — long known for using “everything but the squeal” on a pig: snouts, feet, curly tail, guts, everything turns into delicious bacon and ham or some form of sausage or offal meat. The skin becomes cracklin’s, the intestines either sausage casing or chitlins. You want to see a lack of food waste, go on up into the hills and hollers to an old-fashioned pig slaughter. Chickens are used the same way, only the offal gets fed to the hogs and dogs. Wild berries become pies and cobbler. A housewife who knew what she was doing could feed her family well on the proceeds of a few pigs, a cow, a flock of chickens, a small kitchen garden for veggies, and a couple bags of staples like flour, processed sugar, and salt.

We did not waste food or anything else. What wasn’t eaten by humans was fed to the animals or tossed into a compost heap, and animal and human waste was repurposed into dense, rich fertilizer that went right into the kitchen garden or a small cash crop like tobacco or, well … let’s just say Kentucky is fairly well known for marijuana and corn liquor.

My grandparents lived the real green lifestyle, which is why I look at the new “green” lifestyle with some confusion. If them city folk would just buy themselves a little house on a little plot of land and go back to the way their grandparents used to live, why, they could save all kinds of money on groceries, feel healthier (because of all that gardening work) and eat much better.

But here’s the problem.

We Americans don’t live like that anymore. Living the way my grandparents did was time consuming, especially for the wife. You could not — absolutely not — have a two-income family and live like that. You had kids that became financial assets: they could help out by slopping the hogs, fetching eggs, and weeding the garden, and those kids grew up allergy-free because they were exposed to all those germy animals and wild plants and dirt at a young age. The demands of cooking, small farming, and raising those kids (AKA your future social security program) was a full-time job in itself, and someone had to stay home to do it.

We have sacrificed the health benefits of that lifestyle for the prosperity benefits of our current one. Children aren’t financial assets now, but luxuries (which is a whole nother topic for a future digression). Working women don’t have the time to stay home and craft healthy meals from scratch, and everyone would rather be playing games on the iPad or catching up with shows on Hulu than taking care of those critters destined for the dinner table.

We save time by picking up pre-packaged meals in the freezer section, sometimes pretending to cook for the family by adding some fresh chicken or beef to an oversalted, overpreserved bag of veggies. We forgo the little kitchen garden in favor of having a small apartment close to the cultural centers, or we just have sterile landscaped yards that are crafted more to compete with the neighbors than for any kind of practical purpose. And here in America, we produce more prosperity than anyone else in the world, yet still feel guilty for not producing even more.

Apparently we are to be punished for embracing convenience and Western productivity by having our leaders fly-in garbage to be turned into food, so that they might eat the sins of our wastefulness and lecture us through example. Is it any wonder that we’re sick to death of them all?

But okay. They want our respect or something. Fine. Let’s see them give up the jet planes and fancy garbage dinners. Have ’em put on blue jeans, hop in an old pickup truck or, if they want to be “green,” an old school bus with all the windows down for natural a/c. Drive up them curvy roads and hollers on a crisp autumn day, smell the red-turning leaves, enjoy the transition of the green Appalachians into fiery reds and oranges. Seek out a little old town with nothing in it but a gas station, a barber shop, and an old dog and find a hog killin’, preferably one that ends with a jamboree on the back porch. Help the community render down the fat into life-sustaining lard, eat some fresh hot cracklin’s on collard greens, let the smart old folks tell you how to drain the life blood and grind up the offal into homemade sausage, and then sip some fine Kentucky corn “wine” while y’all sit on the back porch and listen to the old-timey music that gave birth last century to rock ‘n roll, country, blues, jazz, and bluegrass. Sing along if you like.

Instead of telling us what our culture and our future needs to be, in other words, come back to the roots. Those roots have everything you say you want: health, culture, joy, lack of waste, community spirit, and love. Stop lecturing us on how bad we are, and try finding out just how good we have always been. And pass the jug on ’round.

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  1. genferei Member
    genferei
    @genferei

    Let’s not overlook the effects of government intervention in the food sector on current patterns of production and consumption. The spurious food pyramid. The nonsense warnings against saturated fat and then fat in general. The war on salt. The ever-shifting rules about ‘nutrition’ labeling and use-by dates. Excessive hygiene regulations. And so on. The response of industry is to (a) get bigger in order to capture the regulators (and, in turn, be captured by them) and (b) invent all sorts of un-‘natural’ food-like products to appeal to consumers thoroughly confused (and misled) by state experts. (To say nothing about the hazards of being a baker in today’s climate of intolerance…)

    • #1
  2. Jamie Wilson Member
    Jamie Wilson
    @JamieWilson

    And essentially the same thing has happened in the drug industry – overregulation, industrialization, and lots and lots of wasted resources. Few consumers really understand what’s in the drugs they take or how to appropriately use them. Comedian Jerry Clower once referred to a woman as “educated beyond her intelligence” – seems to me that, in many ways, we have the same problem as a culture.

    • #2
  3. carcat74 Member
    carcat74
    @carcat74

    Amen, and how right you are! (all of you!)

    • #3
  4. The King Prawn Inactive
    The King Prawn
    @TheKingPrawn

    I love this so much — and a Jerry Clower reference! Main Feed. Now.

    There is a lot of appeal to simplicity in the old life. Of course, subsistence living, and being entirely at the whims of nature, is the normal state of humanity. Technology and productivity has given us the ability to rise above that for the first time in human existence. We should be celebrating our achievements, not denigrating it by eating trash.

    • #4
  5. skipsul Inactive
    skipsul
    @skipsul

    I remember the old expression – my grandmother (also a farmer in her youth) was quite fond of it.

    • #5
  6. She Member
    She
    @She

    Many, many likes for this post.

    I remember the expression too.  Even when I was growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Dad had what he called a ‘tame’ butcher who would provide all sorts of things, from fresh hams, to unmentionable odds and ends that Dad would cure, or render, or stuff, resulting in exotic, tasty, and sometimes just plain weird delicacies that we would scarf up, sometimes without telling our friends what they were.

    For years, Mr She and I have been on a quest for the perfect kiszka, or black pudding (same thing, just different ethnic variations).  The best is from Albert’s, the local butcher, which exceeds even that from the Polish deli in Pittsburgh, who fly it in from Chicago.  But Albert doesn’t make it often, and it’s hard to find.

    Fortunately, my neighbor is made of the same stuff as Jamie Wilson’s Kentucky kin, and periodically slaughters a hog.

    All I have to do is go up there at the right time, and steel myself for the process of making black puddings according to my traditional recipe, which begins:

    FIRSTLY, the blood must be saved when the pig is killed.  This is done by catching the blood in a handbowl and placing it in a bucket, stirring with the hand while still hot to remove the veins (which will adhere to the fingers and be easily removed).

    I’m not quite there yet.  Stay tuned.

    • #6
  7. Songwriter Inactive
    Songwriter
    @user_19450

    Love this post. My dad grew up in rural west Texas in a subsistence life. He worked his fingers to the bone to build a business –  so his kids could grow up in the modern world. If he were alive today, he would have some choice words for our betters eating a five-star meal made from the garbage.

    • #7
  8. Jamie Wilson Member
    Jamie Wilson
    @JamieWilson

    It’s the poorest members in any society who get creative with offal and foods others are inclined to throw out, and it’s those foods that are often the most delicious cuisine. That is surely part of what offended me so much about this story – the idea that the “elites” could enforce their diktats to eat garbage when it’s the peasants who have always eaten the flavorful brown bread and braved such oddities as oysters and crayfish. The freshest and most creative culture – in food, in arts, in performance – rises from the have-nots, at least in America. The wealthy only share in the harvest.

    • #8
  9. Sabrdance Member
    Sabrdance
    @Sabrdance

    My uncle grew up on a farm in Arkansas, then in Kansas, in the 1930s.  In the 1950s he drafted the guidance system for the Redstone Rocket.  In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked at Westinghouse on things as varied as transistors and microchips, LCD screens, and color television.

    He likes to say that as much as he liked his childhood, modernity has it beat all hollow.

    We put a lot of work into being able to waste that food.

    • #9
  10. She Member
    She
    @She

    Sabrdance:My uncle grew up on a farm in Arkansas, then in Kansas, in the 1930s. In the 1950s he drafted the guidance system for the Redstone Rocket. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked at Westinghouse on things as varied as transistors and microchips, LCD screens, and color television.

    It must be something in the water.  Two of the most ‘rural’ gentlemen (and I use both of those words lovingly and with the greatest respect) I ever knew, were, in their other lives, really serious engineers with RCA, and other, less public, outfits.

    They were both wonderfully eccentric, kind, and interesting old men, and those who met them will never forget them.

    • #10
  11. 6foot2inhighheels Member
    6foot2inhighheels
    @6foot2inhighheels

    Beautiful piece!  Should be required reading for all “Do as I say” Liberals.

    • #11
  12. Jamie Wilson Member
    Jamie Wilson
    @JamieWilson

    She:

    Sabrdance:My uncle grew up on a farm in Arkansas, then in Kansas, in the 1930s. In the 1950s he drafted the guidance system for the Redstone Rocket. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked at Westinghouse on things as varied as transistors and microchips, LCD screens, and color television.

    It must be something in the water. Two of the most ‘rural’ gentlemen (and I use both of those words lovingly and with the greatest respect) I ever knew, were, in their other lives, really serious engineers with RCA, and other, less public, outfits.

    They were both wonderfully eccentric, kind, and interesting old men, and those who met them will never forget them.

    The movie “October Sky” about Homer Hickam was set in rural Appalachia, if you’ll remember, and IIRC quite a few rocket scientists came from those same hills in Tennessee and Kentucky. And then there are the remarkable Rocket City Rednecks led by the super-hot-in-person Travis Taylor. Definitely something in the water.

    • #12
  13. Sabrdance Member
    Sabrdance
    @Sabrdance

    As my uncle would tell you, he was poor, not stupid.  So was my grandfather.  (And my uncle was at RCA, not Westinghouse, I knew something sounded off…)

    In the 1930s if you wanted to eat, and you could own land, you grew it yourself.  It was hard work, but it was necessary.  Granddad hit on the idea in the late 20s/early 30s to buy a truck and run a circuit every day making deliveries to the neighboring towns (the real trick was keeping the truck full enough to pay for the trips), but the Depression killed that.  The real improvement came with the expansion of the railroads and highways in the 40s and 50s.  Granddad became an electrician on the railroads, and suddenly the world was at his fingertips.  You could get anything delivered.  Your kids could have music lessons.  You could get electronics.  Cars and trucks were cheap.  You could send your kids to high school (why grandmother insisted on moving to Kansas).  You could even send your daughters to college!  They were never rich -my mom recalls pancake dinners at the end of every month in the late 50s and early 60s -but they were never hungry, either.

    This is inspiring a post of my own, but it will have to wait.

    • #13
  14. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    An awesome essay! Nice going. Very well done.

    • #14
  15. Mr. Dart Inactive
    Mr. Dart
    @MrDart

    I read this aloud to my bird dog while sitting in my porch rocker.  It got a serious and sustained tail wag.  Post of the week.

    And, “Knock him out, John!”

    • #15
  16. OkieSailor Member
    OkieSailor
    @OkieSailor

    For the Liberal Elites it’s all about how they feel about themselves. If something makes them feel good they don’t care whether it makes sense or not. Then they want to force everyone to copy the action that has made them feel superior. That’s why they want to force us to recycle things in ways that make no economic sense, for instance.
    It is possible to live a modern existence, enjoy many conveniences, and still get the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. It doesn’t take al day to raise a 100 square foot garden which can produce all the fresh vegetables your family needs and wants, though there is a learning curve involved. Kitchen scraps and most paper goods will compost into great garden soil over time. Cooking  food from scratch (we use a lot of scratch so we buy ours at Sam’s) can  be quicker than eating out counting drive and wait times and saves a ton of money. Our approach has  been, “Use it up, wear it out and find a new purpose for it before you throw anything away.”
    We live in the modern world with electricity etc. but raised four children on a single income without missing any of the ‘extras’ that most people seem to chase into their graves. But I would fight tooth and nail to oppose any legislation designed to force or ‘encourage’ others to copy that lifestyle. I’m for all Liberty commensurate with civilized society!

    • #16
  17. skipsul Inactive
    skipsul
    @skipsul

    Jamie Wilson:It’s the poorest members in any society who get creative with offal and foods others are inclined to throw out, and it’s those foods that are often the most delicious cuisine. That is surely part of what offended me so much about this story – the idea that the “elites” could enforce their diktats to eat garbage when it’s the peasants who have always eaten the flavorful brown bread and braved such oddities as oysters and crayfish. The freshest and most creative culture – in food, in arts, in performance – rises from the have-nots, at least in America. The wealthy only share in the harvest.

    Don’t forget lobsters – formerly the food of the poor – or quinoa – formerly the local grain of the Andes.  Trendiness in food has priced these well beyond the peasants who formerly subsisted on them.

    • #17
  18. Wily Penelope Member
    Wily Penelope
    @WilyPenelope

    Great post!

    I am glad we all have the freedom and prosperity to choose to not be subsistence farmers. But obviously the culture has lost something along the way.

    It is difficult for kids to feel useful or essential to the family anymore. They have the time and opportunity to pursue all kinds of extracurricular activities and are able to focus completely on their education. But most don’t know how to work hard, enter adulthood with few life skills, and suffer a long, drawn-out adolescence because they have spent their entire lives being merely decorative and have trouble switching gears to join the useful and productive segment of society. Kids used to look forward to being adults because adulthood was obviously better. Sometimes I look at my suburban relatives serving, serving, serving their kids and I wonder how the kid can possibly top that experience. What is there to look forward to?

    The farmer’s wife had a lot of physically demanding labor but the modern suburban mother spends much of her day either paying for or providing with her own two hands an Ideal Childhood Experience for her children.

    • #18
  19. Qoumidan Coolidge
    Qoumidan
    @Qoumidan

    “and those kids grew up allergy-free because they were exposed to all those germy animals and wild plants and dirt at a young age.”

    I would like to point out that I grew rolling in the dirt, playing in the woods, climbing trees (to the top), never experienced my father’s dream of a “pet-free” environment and my mother, while tidy enough, was not a great house-keeper. Despite all this, I am allergic to nearly everything. The trees I used to climb every day now make me swell up like a balloon, my furry animal allergies have only gotten worse, I was diagnosed with athsma at 8 and, yes, I’m allergic to dirt. Oddly enough, especially considering the current fads, I do not seem to be allergic to any foods, just their precursors.
    As a result, I don’t hold much stock in that view.

    • #19
  20. She Member
    She
    @She

    Sabrdance:As my uncle would tell you, he was poor, not stupid. So was my grandfather. (And my uncle was at RCA, not Westinghouse, I knew something sounded off…)

    In the 1930s if you wanted to eat, and you could own land, you grew it yourself. It was hard work, but it was necessary. Granddad hit on the idea in the late 20s/early 30s to buy a truck and run a circuit every day making deliveries to the neighboring towns (the real trick was keeping the truck full enough to pay for the trips), but the Depression killed that. The real improvement came with the expansion of the railroads and highways in the 40s and 50s. Granddad became an electrician on the railroads, and suddenly the world was at his fingertips. You could get anything delivered. Your kids could have music lessons. You could get electronics. Cars and trucks were cheap. You could send your kids to high school (why grandmother insisted on moving to Kansas). You could even send your daughters to college! They were never rich -my mom recalls pancake dinners at the end of every month in the late 50s and early 60s -but they were never hungry, either.

    This is inspiring a post of my own, but it will have to wait.

    Your grandparents sound fascinating.

    I wonder about the RCA business, given my experience with my engineering friends here, and the very little I know about some of their other activities.  Perhaps it was “RCA,” nudge, nudge, wink, wink?

    Best bread I’ve ever eaten in my life came from a farmhouse in Prince Edward Island where an elderly couple lived, complete with hand pump and wood stove in their kitchen, and an outhouse.  (This was in early/mid 1970s).  Their children wanted them to move or modernize, but they weren’t having any of it.  (Shortly before they died, the kids did prevail on Mom and Pop to install running water, but that was as far as they would go.  And they died shortly thereafter.  Go figure).

    Anyhoo, she’d make the bread entirely by hand and bake it in the wood stove (she also made a mean cake, also, whose ‘doneness’ she would test by pulling a bristle out of the broom and sticking it into the middle . . . ).

    The bread, though.  Crusty on the outside, tender on the inside, with fresh farm butter.  Nothing better.

    • #20
  21. Jamie Wilson Member
    Jamie Wilson
    @JamieWilson

    I had forgotten about the broom bristle test – my mamaw used to do that with, gosh, corn bread and her dense-crust cobbler (made with from-scratch baking soda biscuit dough). Memories.

    • #21
  22. She Member
    She
    @She

    Jamie Wilson:I had forgotten about the broom bristle test – my mamaw used to do that with, gosh, corn bread and her dense-crust cobbler (made with from-scratch baking soda biscuit dough). Memories.

    Yes, memories.  That’s what it’s all about.  After I’m gone, I’ll live on for a while through my granddaughter, who’ll tell her children and grandchildren that her ‘granny could do anything.’ (Not quite true, but she’s only seven.  Pray she never finds out).

    I completely agree with you about living with some dirt, and how that reduces one’s sensitivity to allergens.  Perhaps I only believe this because I’m a lazy housekeeper, and one who lives on a farm, but I remind myself often of MY grandmother (who died six months after I was born), who was known for saying

    You’ve got to eat a peck* of dirt before you die.

    I never knew if this meant that, before you died at a ripe old age, you would have eaten, across the decades, at least a peck of dirt, or if it meant that if you sat down and ate a peck of dirt at one sitting, you’d be dead.

    The first, I think.

    *In case ‘no one remembers’ what a peck is, it’s an old imperial measurement equal to one-quarter of a bushel.  Hope that helps.

    • #22
  23. Hank Rhody Contributor
    Hank Rhody
    @HankRhody

    Whenever I hear that line I always think “There’s gotta be a way to monetize pig squeals.”

    One somewhat related point. You’ll hear statistics about how much food Americans waste each year. How much of those statistics do you think come from government regulations as to how long businesses can keep food? Or other such things.

    • #23
  24. MLH Inactive
    MLH
    @MLH

    Hank Rhody:Whenever I hear that line I always think “There’s gotta be a way to monetize pig squeals.”

    One somewhat related point. You’ll hear statistics about how much food Americans waste each year. How much of those statistics do you think come from government regulations as to how long businesses can keep food? Or other such things.

    I have friend who has done a lot of travelling. She thinks people get a little too worried about how long food sits out (“yogurt’s just spoiled milk, isn’t it?!”)

    Another friend who was a hospital lab officer in the Navy told me: the meat’s a little, uh, ripe? Soak it vinegar for awhile,  it’ll be fine.

    Then there is the cutting the mold off the cheese.

    • #24
  25. She Member
    She
    @She

    Hank Rhody:Whenever I hear that line I always think “There’s gotta be a way to monetize pig squeals.”

    One somewhat related point. You’ll hear statistics about how much food Americans waste each year. How much of those statistics do you think come from government regulations as to how long businesses can keep food? Or other such things.

    Yes.  As I understand it, anything that they put on the table in a restaurant that you don’t eat has to be thrown away.  There are some outfits that claim to donate ‘unused food’ to charity, but I’m not sure if they are allowed to give them the rolls that you don’t touch, or the remains of the appetizers that you don’t eat.  I suspect that what they are allowed to donate may be just what’s left over in the kitchen at the end of the business day, and there are probably even restrictions on that.

    That’s why I take everything that I’ve paid for home (not things like coffee creamers or jelly packets, but the stuff that is put our for ME or US).  If I don’t eat the leftovers, the farm creatures will enjoy them, and I can’t stand the thought that it will just be thrown away.

    • #25
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