Montreal Swine

The journey IS everything. You can't write too much about your experiences without acknowledging that they are sometimes special for no other reason than they simply are. It's indescribable. It's like dancing in shoes on carpet, eating ice-cream while it drizzles, or a student uprising. Life is as extraordinary as we allow ourselves to make it. If you do something you believe in, it is never useless, not even if the outcome is disappointing.

So it goes. I want to tell you about eating head meat and why I like it - why it may eventually come back in style and why I can't decide whether romanticism or efficiency is more important.

I want to play devil's advocate for a while before I become sentimental. Waste management in factory farms has its own sort of efficiency. It is not necessarily more efficient to save a pig's head from its factory uses. Considering about 60 percent of a pig gets used for human consumption after the slaughter, it seems important to know where the rest of the pig is going. These facts directly affect how we will think about pig's heads because they no longer make it from the abattoir to your butcher unless they are ordered specially, which (I am guessing) means they make up a large part of the 'non-consumption' 40 percent indeed.

An estimated 50,000 tons of meat materials (dead-stock and other waste) is used by rendering plants per year in Canada. The waste is turned into meat and bone meal, tallow, blood meal, and feather meal. These substances are used in the creation of soaps, animal feed, dog food, cat food, fossil fuel replacements, organic fertilizer and Lysine.

So yes it's super gross that we do that. We feed sterilized animal meal back to animals in what seems like a present day 'Soylent Green' scenario. We extract Lysine from blood and add it to their feed in order to make it possible for them to feed on corn ('cause it's cheap), and we serve our pets meat and bone meal.  The problem is that we are addicted to meat. What can we do about it? When you finish reading this are you going to make your cat into a seasonally appropriate tourtière? (your last meaty hurrah!) Are you going to eat only what you grow on your balcony?

At this point, all the systems are linked. You can't eat a vegetable without it having benefited from the use of animal fertilizers and heavy amounts of water and fossil fuels.

The only thing you could do is find small local responsible farmers and buy whole animals, slaughter them at home illegally, make lots of blood sausage, subscribe to a service that composts bones, and hope to god that one of your friends becomes a tanner. Perhaps too, that farmer will give you manure so you can keep your garden feeding you healthily (while keeping his waste in check). For most of us - I dare say all of us - this is not a reality.

I am definitely in favour of the idea that every little thing helps, and I love the idea of people coming together for every Eco-initiative possible - local organic food baskets, community gardens - every little bit helps whether you eat only plant matter or you raise your own livestock - whether you just love a fresh carrot from your garden or you buy organic meat on special occasions - you are my hero.

I suppose I decided I wanted to write about this subject matter because I am weighed down by guilt.

I love head meat. I love it.

I love that every part of a head has a different texture and flavour. I love that there's something weird about the idea of ingesting anything from within and around a skull. Brain fat is good for your brain, and muscle is good for your muscle. It makes the whole world seem like some zombie video game where you run around collecting 'brain manna'.

Jaw muscle tastes like turkey, ears fry to a crisp on the outside while remaining chewy on the in, and brains taste like gravy. To obtain meat that is succulent, it's important to brine the head for a long time so you get to infuse the thing with whatever flavour you like. The eventual stock you get from hours of cooking can be used to make jelly to put the whole thing together as one beautiful block of headcheese - more exciting than a block of gold.

What you are left with though is much boiled skin, a skull, and two eyes. Now, I suppose if you didn't decide to make your cat into tourtière, you could give some of this meat to it. You wouldn't want to give all that skin to the cat for fear of veterinary bills. A skull would be a funny toy the first time you made the head cheese, but a rather morbid collection to have if you decide to make it again. Who can afford a meat compost service though - honestly?

The dilemma is this: when I save the meat from the renderers, it goes to my cat and the landfill, but when I leave the meat alone it becomes a part of a system that feeds my cat, fertilizes my crops, provides me with products that clean me, and perhaps even renewable(ish) carbon-light(er) energy to go on writing blogs (almost) guilt-free.

The romanticism of the thing seems so important though, like doing something  and expecting failure but staying true to an ideal. It is important to reflect on the 'forgotten bits'. Forgotten practises may not always be as fast and efficient as modern practices but they often carry more weight, more hard work, more time to think - more romance. We're too impatient. When you spend more time thinking and less time looking forward, you see better where we're going wrong. People are really scared of that.

Hey, who knows, maybe one day I'll be making head cheese every now and again on my farm - that time of year soon after the belly of a prized hog has become fat enough for the perfect bacon. She'll have grown fat on my land's acorns, and my asparagus grown fat from her manure. Maybe education will be free too.

no, now I'm dreaming.


bibliography
http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/meatinspectionreport/chapter_7.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_and_bone_meal
http://www.mapaq.gouv.qc.ca/fr/productions/carcassesanimauxmorts/pages/carcassesanimauxmorts.aspx
http://assets.nationalrenderers.org/essential_rendering_swine.pdf
http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/y5019e/y5019e0a.htm