Cows are BIG. Fat is GROSS.

Cows are BIG. Fat is GROSS.

November 17, 2009, 7:55 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

********UPDATE********My very talented friend Kirsten (AKA Malady) illustrated a highly amusing, slightly incriminating companion piece.  Check out her take at missmalady.blogspot.com

The craigslist posting seemed too good to be true:  two cowhides in Woodburn free to the first caller.  I’m NEVER the first caller.  Trying to time possibly pointless forays into little-known suburbs between naps and diaper changes just rarely feels worth the trouble in cost-benefit analysis.  But I’ve been wanting to tan a hide for years, and the rabbits and raccoons piling up in the freezer just weren’t motivating me.  Two whole Black Angus cows.  Now there’s a worthy endeavor.  So despite the lack of visible enthusiasm on Jana’s part (Jana is my brother Gabriel’s girlfriend, has tanned a deer hide, and was my likely partner in this project), I shoved the crying children into the mom-mobile and headed into afternoon Vancouver bridge traffic in the darkening rain.

As we swung the sopping, bloody skins into my trunk from the back of Steve’s (Mr. craigslist) truck, he asked skeptically over Thor’s frustrated wails whether I had done this before.  I now understand why someone with experience would doubt the ability of a woman with 2 kids under 3 to scrape and tan this kind of square footage in a timely manner.  I saw the same look in Jana’s eyes when I plopped the monstrosities under her carport the next morning.

Four days later, the lessons are many.  First, get an ulu knife.  Alaska natives use its sharp, curved blade (imagine a cross between a nut chopper and a Klingon Bat’leth) for all stages of skinning and scraping, and it is the perfect tool for the job.   I switched between a very sharp long knife given to me by a butcher for just such purposes, and a shorter  pointy blade that gave me a bit more dexterity in tough spots.  Struggling ineffectually for purchase on the slimy integument, I slipped and sliced open my rubber gloves over and over,  muttering enviously at Jana’s superior implement nearly the entire time.

Second, get a babysitter.   While this mother relishes the opportunity to address the matter-of-fact  life and death questions of an almost three-year old, the interrogation became repetetive.   For example:

“Is that dead?”

“Yep.”

“Those are guts?

‘”It’s meat and fat.”

“What are you doing?”

“Making leather.”

“What are you doing?”

“What AM I doing?”

“Making leather?”

“Yep.”

“Is that dead?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Ummm…so we can eat meat and make leather.”

“Why?”

“For yummy protein and sturdy shoes.”

“You making leather?”

“We’re making leather.”

“Is it dead?”

“It’s dead.”

“Why?”

This continued ad nauseum with little variation.  But with wicked sharp tools and greasy innards lying around, “why” fatigue is not the only reason to find another supervised activity for the kiddos while concentrating on this tedious but potentially injurious task.  Bringing a little friend along only compounds the problem.  I tried leaving them in the house to fend for themselves.  When I checked on them thirty minutes later, Bandit the salamander was dangerously overstuffed on crickets and the boys were spitting chewed-up sunflower seeds from one end of the house to the other.  Also, babies should obviously not be crawling around in cow juice and freezing rain, but strapping them to the back is not ideal for this kind of work either.  Thor napped through much of the action, but I was not so comfy.  See photo exhibit A.

Third, get a crew.  Cows are big.  Stretch a cow out into two dimensions, and you have something like a king size sheet that weighs as much as a full grown man–and smells much worse.  Scraping a hide is a clan activity, not a solitary one.  And putting out the facebook call is useless.  Both Jana and I posted what we thought was a cleverly worded, very enticing work party announcement which was met only with jokes and half-hearted “would if I coulds.”  Useless!  Personal calls to a hand-selected, hearty of heart few yielded some willing assistants, one of whom showed up.   James, a semiquasi-vegetarian with eastern Oregon roots and antlers on his motorcycle, came with pie.  Oh!  That reminds me of lesson four:  eat before you begin the day’s work.  You will need your energy but you will lose your appetite.  Fat is gross before it becomes the marbling in your steak or the lard in your pie crust, and meat does not smell good until it hits the barbeque.  Incidentally, I can now see how lard makes a superior crust.  The fat naturally occurs in flaky strata that resemble perfect pastry dough.  But noticing this does not make you hungry for pie.  So perhaps the best reason to muster a team is for comiseration.   James joined us on our third day of work, by which time Jana and I had run out of ways to talk about how difficult and disgusting it was.  Thematically, the conversation differed little, but working through the retches with another person made the experience seem fresh and new.  In a few hours with just one extra blade, we nearly finished the second hide.

Last, think about drainage.  After scraping comes salting, which draws moisture out of the hide, preventing rot.  We salted the first hide after scraping it as clean as we had the patience for and hung it in the garage overnight to stay dry.  We had to splash through an inch of pinkish juice the next morning to get to the second hide, thankfully still in a garbage bag.  Jana swept the liquid out to the driveway, where it mixed with standing rainwater and sawdust to form a slurry of biomass that I can compare to nothing else in odor or appearance.  The salted skins release moisture quickly and in surprising quantity, even after second and third applications.  With this new knowledge, and in order to spare my brother’s tools from a second dip in the au jus, we decided to move the skins to my neighbor’s covered deck before we salted the second hide.  The deck is covered, roomy, and elevated.  A tarp and bucket system contains and diverts the salty excretions.  We’ll continue periodic saltings until the hides stop weeping, and the salt stays white and crystalline when rubbed in.    Hopefully we will reach that stage before Thursday, when we’re expecting about twenty guests for Thanksgiving.  But if not, the seepage will surely discourage overeating.

Pardon a little black humor.  I take no pleasure in the death of a cow.  They are gentle creatures with soulful, sentient eyes.  If allowed, they live peaceful lives seeking only sun, shade, grass, and water.  As an omnivore in boots, however, I feel compelled to participate at least sometimes in the unpleasant aspects of the life and death agreement we make with livestock animals, our partners in evolution.   To honor their sacrifice, we must do the dirty work.  And this is dirty work.  In fact, taking on such a large scale project that filled my hands, nostrils, and brain with bloody meat for most of four days gave me some insight on a meat industry implication I hadn’t much pondered.  What is the psychic effect of constant immersion in gore and death?  Who performs this work?  Should this be anyone’s full-time job?  Like so many dirty, dangerous and undesirable jobs in our country, slaughterhouse and tanning work is done by immigrants and poor people with few options and little recourse for injury and exploitation.  In India, caste-less untouchables slosh through toxic tanning chemicals and slice off fingers on the dis-assembly lines that are subject to no safety standards because their workers are entitled to no protections.   Their plight is worse only by degrees than that of other marginalized people worldwide who deal with death, refuse, and excrement.  Labor unions, inspection systems, and international trade agreements can deal with health and safety issues.  But does outsourcing all contact with death violate less obvious human rights?  When killing and dismembering  are a mere job, a purely physical act devoid of ritual and reverence, for some to perform in degrading drudgery while others remove themselves from it, we are all robbed of an elemental existential experience:  meaningful confrontation with death.  We commit a spiritual oppression, causing either traumatic overexposure to or infantile denial of mortality.

The people doing this work are feeding our collective prodigious appetite for meat, without which it is unlikely we would have come this far as a species.  But if we had to produce our own meat, how much of it would we eat?  How much of it would we want to eat?  Raising it  takes work, water, land and time.  Killing for it requires looking death in the eye.  Cutting it apart forces contemplation of the eventual fate of our own mortal remains.   When we eat the meat, when we wear the skin, we literally assimilate the animal that gave it’s life to us.  We consume it’s flesh and assume it’s shape.   This is a sacred communion lost to many, but not to all.   Most of us are unlikely to stop eating meat completely or to begin raising and harvesting all we consume.  But when we divorce ourselves from death completely,  we lose.  We remain as children.  We live blindly, fearing death, ignoring social, economic and spiritual consequences of our most basic consumption–food.

Unfortunately, Saturday was a long-planned steak night.  Feeling uncertain, I toasted to cows, and after a glass of Spanish red I was able to enjoy the smell of a NY strip searing in cast iron.  But I am eating less meat remembering the innard immersion of the past week, which is right and good.  The first heavy, wet slap of the bloody hide on the plywood sent a quiver through my guts as we unfolded it.  My nostrils involuntarily twitched when the smell hit.  The knife in my hand was less than steady on the first few passes, as it is everytime I face the animals that have died for me.  But I would not want to lose this visceral reaction, to become too accustomed to death.  Nor would I feel completely alive without sometimes standing before it with a knife in my hand, renewing the bargain, feeling humble and sorry and grateful.

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