The Lime

One thing you may not know about me is that I like to add a splash of lime to a variety of drinks. One summer when I was working on the farm I was really into bringing water with a bunch of wedged lemon and lime to work and I found it very refreshing. But I really struggle with wedging limes, so I don't have them as often as I would like to. I guess when I think about it's not really that difficult of a task, but it's a task I really do not like to do.

Another thing that you probably do know is that in one of my English classes we were reading WWI poetry. At first the poems were really celebratory about how great war is and how all of the young men should go to war. And then as the war dragged on, the poems became less celebratory and more about how it was the worst. One poem in particular referenced wheelbarrows full of lime to dust on bodies so they would stop smelling so much. In the middle of reading the poem, the professor interrupted herself and said, Just to be clear, everyone knows what lime is, right? And this awful student—really the worst male undergraduate English student anyone could ever imagine—put up his hand and in the most pompous manner imaginable said, Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe 'lime' is a small, green citrus fruit. Can you imagine? Can you imagine that in the midst of WWI, limes were so plentiful that armies were trundling through the trenches full of rotting bodies and sprinkling them when lime juice? It's especially unbelievable because wedging a lime is so tedious that I can't imagine any of the soldiers would have time for it. Although I guess they might have juiced the limes in advanced and used spray bottles, but I don't even know if spray bottles were widely available during WWI—much less in the trenches.

Hey. Lime.

Why you gotta take so much time?

A Bucket Full of Raw Animal Organs (Pre-Sausage Version)

Pig slaughter season continues in Hungary, and things are only going down hill following the previous post on the pig head in a bucket of its own waste. Note on the pig head: the Hungarians involved have provided some additional information about its preparation: "they smoke the head and eat the flesh from it and they also put head-flesh into kocsonya which is a very disgusting thing. Sally, trust me, you dont want us to go into details!" Kocsonya, which it turns out I really didn't want to know more about, is apparently some sort of disgusting jellied dish made from preparing a soup with a strong cartilage base so that it will jelly when cooled. It is also worth noting that the brain evidently is not eaten raw, as I initially assumed, but is fried and served on toast with onions and, although not explicitly mentioned, probably paprika because they are Hungarians. 

But what appears below can only be described as a horrific massacre. After chopping off the pig head, smoking it, and then tearing the cooked flesh off with your teeth (unconfirmed), the most disgusting organs are harvested and thrown into a large plastic tub. These include kidneys, liver, and lungs (lungs!). These organs are then ground up, stuffed into sausage casings (which for all we know are pig intestines, but might be synthetic, but let's face it, probably aren't), and then people willingly put them in their mouth even though they already saw the raw organs sitting in a heap in the tub. 

I'm sorry that I am making you all look at this in such a large format, but it really haunted
me when I had to see it for the first time, and there's really no reason why I should
have to suffer alone. At first I thought it was a bucket full of slightly unhealthy lobsters.

I'm sorry, but I just could not do this. I couldn't be involved with this. I don't know if this means that I shouldn't be eating meat in the first place, but this bucket of organs is not for me. I can't imagine being involved in this process start to finish. I have no idea how to pull organs out of an animal carcass. Do you wear gloves? Aren't they slippery? Are they surprisingly heavy? Do you drop them in the bucket with a thud, or lay them gently because bruising is a concern? Do you have to cut them into smaller pieces to stuff into the meat grinder? Do you hose them down first? I was told that these organs were being made into hurka sausage. Is it called hurka because you kind of naturally make that sound when you vomit? I don't know if I even want to know the answer to most of these questions. I feel like I already know far too much.

This post about raw organs

Took a lot longer to write because—

Oh wait, hold on, I have to go puke again.

A Skinned Pig Head Cut in Half and then Dumped into a Bucket

Someone I know just ventured out into the wilds of rural Hungary to slaughter a pig. Good for them! I've always kind of agreed that if you're going to eat meat, you should probably be okay with and able to perform the processes required to procure that meat. I say "kind of" because I'm actually not okay with the processes and would never be able to perform them. Case in point: this skinned pig head that has been cut in half, presumably to extract the brains, presumably to consume it:

Okay. So this is what it looks like if, after slaughtering a pig, you cut off
its head, skin the head, cut the head in half down the centre, and then
dump it all into a bucket full of its own fluid.

Umm, this is gross. This is GROSS. I hate this. This pig's brains have been extracted from its skull (probably; still waiting for confirmation*) so that one person or several people can put those brains in their mouth and swallow them. As FOOD. I wish there was a more extreme italics, but there's not.

This is one of the most gruesome things I've ever seen, and yet I cannot look away. Can you imagine touching it? Like, most of it is surely skull, but then there's sinewy muscle fibres laced over top? And it would probably be really slippery? So the only way you could hold onto it is by tightening your grip, and then you had to feel the hardness of the skull even more as it dug into your fleshy hand? You would probably grip it around the jaw because you could easily reach your hand around the bone, and perhaps it would bump against you, and you would feel its dead teeth push against the top of your hand. And maybe even still you would drop it, and it would land with a thud on the muddy ground, and you would pick it up, but it would be speckled with bits of grass and dirt, matted into the flesh that is still clinging to the skull? Or, like, can you imagine cutting a skull in half? I don't even know how you go about it. Personally I would just swing an axe down on it (although then imagine all the little pieces of flesh and bone that would fly back and hit you, and would maybe speckle your skin so that you have stringy little pieces of pig flesh hanging off your face), but I have a feeling you probably can't do that if your entire purpose is to pull the brain out still intact. And imagine pulling the brain out. Like, isn't it still attached to something? Even if the head has been cut off, surely that little brain stem is still attached to some neck vertebrae, and then, like, you have to tug on it and feel and hear it snap apart. And then you're just left holding a brain! And you have to look at it and know that you're about to eat it! And who knows if there's still some shell of skull plastered onto the top of the brain. Probably. I wouldn't have any idea. I've never done this before. I hope I will never have to do this.

Before I wrap things up and hopefully put this horrific image out of my mind forever, I want to stress that I obviously do not have a problem with killing pigs and eating them. Pig meat is probably the best kind of meat there is, and it's probably even more delicious in Hungary because the Hungarians have squirreled away a secret breed of pig that has taken on mythical proportions (and which also seems to be out of mythology because it looks like a bizarre pig-sheep hybrid that Ovid might have dreamed up). Rumours have it that this rare and elusive mangalica is more delicious than any other breed of pig. None of this really changes the fact that the above picture shows a pig skull cut in half with the brain pulled out though.

It has been said that slaughtering your own meat

Is so much more humane.

But in order to do so, you have to crack open the skull

And haul out the brain.

And throw into a bucket of slop 

The bloody and gruesome skull-and-muscle remains. 

And it is this act that separates a mere captain 

From the heroic kapitány.

* It has been confirmed. This is what happened.

Food Thoughtz Review: This All-Meat, No-Cheese, Corpse-Pizza

Look. No one is more understanding and respectful of picky eaters than I am, but even I must draw the line somewhere. And that line is drawn at no-cheese pizza. If you don’t like cheese, that’s fine: we all have our burdens to bear. But don’t burden me with the knowledge that there is a cheeseless pizza in our midst, slathered with various meat toppings. Cheese is an essential quality of pizza and you can't get rid of it just because you're afraid of being kidnapped by a Mexican quesadilla cartel.

Do you know that this pizza looks like? Like that disgusting, rare, corpse-flower, rafflesia arnoldii. I hate that flower. It smells like a corpse because it needs to attract beetles and flies in order to pollinate because it is the worst. Why can’t it just attract bees instead with a sweet, flowery smell like every other flower does? No wonder it's so rare. It’s also enormous. It’s the largest flower on earth. It can be 1 metre across and weigh 11kg, so approximately the same size as a pizza.

Disgusting.

Snails

I don’t know why I’m picking on the French (and the Quebecois--I forgot about that poutine post) so much lately, but I can’t even fathom what a people must collectively have to go through to bring them to a point where they would be willing to suck a snail out of its shell—and then turn around and call it a delicacy. I have so little idea, in fact, that I had to ask Yahoo! One person’s response was that it’s no worse than eating clams, oysters, or lobsters. Right. Exactly. It’s not any worse than that. But nor is it any better, and considering that encrusted sea-garbage is just about the worst “edible” thing there is on this planet, that ranks snails as among the worst of the worst.

As much as I hate snails--both as an animal and as a food-- I did
really enjoy putting these snail shells on my back.

One time I was compelled to eat ribs. I have no idea whether or not the meat was any good because I was too overcome by the horror of tearing flesh from the bone. I know that some people talk about sucking marrow from bones, but I'm pretty sure this is just an urban legend, so I can only imagine—but would prefer not to—how much more horrific it would be to actually suck the meat from a chunk of coiled calcium that functions as a skeleton. Do people actually realize that snails are just slugs with shells? Has anyone seen a slug? Because they are vile and horrific beasts, and I used to devote large portions of my summers to hunting slugs with the sole purpose of then throwing them into the ocean.

I don’t know what snails eat, but I’m pretty sure it’s 90% gross slime, 10% garden plants. The snails in our aquarium live off of the algae that develops on the sides of the tank … which is just slime. And then they convert that slime into more slime so that they can transport themselves to richer slime reserves. They are disgusting. In my quest to rid the west coast of its slugs, I had the displeasure of accidentally stepping on a few a couple of times. That slime is the worst. It is sticky and slimy and doesn't come off, and while I have no idea how snails are prepared for eating, if something is not done to rid them of that slime, I can only imagine they are simultaneously lubricated down your throat, but also cling there like sickly, descended tonsils. And speaking of tonsils, if someone removed their tonsils and gave me the option of eating the raw tonsils or a perfectly prepared snail, I'm about 75% sure I would go for the tonsils. Although both are undoubtedly disgusting, only one of them would be a snail.

 Given that snails as a food are so commonly associated with France, it seems like a shame to not draw a correlation between the depravity of the Marquis de Sade and escargot. I don't know how many of you, like me, once had their interest piqued by Sade's extreme commitment to personal freedom and then proceeded to read an online summary of One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom only to be so utterly shocked and appalled that you could barely even make it through the summary, but that's how I feel about eating snails: the mere idea of it is so repulsive to me that I can't even begin to imagine actually trying the real thing. Through Sade's commitment to destroy and deprave the body so that he might be free (I have no idea what the Marquis de Sade was trying to do), he probably consumed a whole bunch of snails because few things in this world are a greater assault on the human body than that. There might be something interesting to say here (probably not), but I'm really just trying to get to Simone de Beauvoir's famous question, must we burn Sade? Her answer was a tepid no. A more crucial question might be: Il-faut manger les escargots? Our "no" must be far less tepid.

Snails are treated as a culinary specialty,
But sucking snail-meat from its shell
Is nothing more than a perverse bestiality:
If it doesn’t land you in jail, it will surely land you in hell.

So the next time a gentleman asks you to his chateau,
Remember the one hundred and twenty days of the Marquis de Sade:
A debauched, murderous orgy under a “personal freedom” façade.
The invitation, I’m afraid, you are obligated to forego
And give him instead a rousing escar-hellzno!

Asparagus

Tonight my roommate cooked asparagus for dinner and it smelled like one thousand cats had just peed everywhere. Of asparagus, Proust once said: "[It] transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume." Proust also spent nearly his entire life in a cork-lined room.

I have hated asparagus for as long as I can remember. Eating it always reminded me of eating a slimy, plump, green worm bloated with urine. The worst is when it is slightly over cooked and so it’s too soft to cut or bite through cleanly, so you end up having to tear through a bunch of stringy, wet asparagus strands. The only way I could choke it down was by slathering it in butter first. I also don't think it's healthy to eat a food that so drastically alters your urine so quickly.

A little known fact about me (or perhaps very well known, depending on who is reading this) is that I once worked on a farm harvesting asparagus. It was one of the best times of my life and is, I’m sure, directly responsible for why my back now looks like a well-loved leather purse. Although I hate asparagus, it was a pretty fun vegetable to harvest, and one time I even tried it raw (word to the wise: asparagus is way better when consumed raw because it tastes almost identical to garden peas, although I am not sure if it only tastes like this when freshly sliced from the ground). I especially liked harvesting it because I always felt like I was thwarting its will to live by constantly cutting it down.

While I worked on the farm I always thought I was engaging in a slightly unethical activity by bringing asparagus to the masses, as well as encouraging my own family's consumption by bringing home free second-rate asparagus. That summer taught me a lot about myself--namely that I am willing to do just about anything for a very nominal amount of money.

Our bodies often warn us that a food should disgust us

By wreaking havoc on our digestive functions.

What is it about the asparagus

That so grossly alters our renal productions?

So how is it that one continues to devour with glee

A vegetable that so violently alters the smell of our pee?

Burger Round-Up

I am currently on hour 55 of my 64+ hour trip home.  So far I have consumed 3 airport burgers, and one Kelowna burger at The Keg before taking the Greyhound to Vancouver.  Here is a brief overview of those burgers:

1. The Keg:

No photos exist of this burger experience, and frankly, if photographs are supposed to serve as memory keepers, I’m glad: eating at The Keg isn’t really an experience I am eager to remember.  The burger tasted a bit strange, possibly because I believe it was prime rib burger (I have no idea what that might mean) or possibly because there might have been BBQ sauce on it.  The fries were truly terrible, which was surprising because I expected The Keg to, first of all, have steak fries, and second of all, have good fries.  Adding to this already disappointing dining debacle, the waitress was truly abysmal, and at one point referred to my empty plate as “that little guy,” as in, “Let me get that little guy out of the way for ya!”


2. Vera’s Burgers:

Vera’s Burgers are all over Vancouver and are always being touted as “Vancouver’s Best Burger.” You’d think that with all that bragging, they might actually be able to produce a decent burger, but you would be wrong.  After The Keg, this was the second worst burger on the trip.  Everything about it was terrible: the bun, the meat, the cheese, the packaging… It was really disappointing.  I think my burger might have been composed entirely of chunks of ground beef that broke off from previous patties.  I have eaten at Vera’s once before, and I remember thinking that it was okay, but not amazing.  
This burger didn't even register as okay.

I friggin' hate it when buns have a hard shell.  So many unnecessary crumbs,
and it really takes away from the overall experience.

 3. Moxie’s Burger:

You guys.  You guys.  Air Canada put me up in the Sandman City Centre in Calgary after my connecting flight to Toronto had been cancelled and I couldn’t be rebooked until 5pm the following day.  In addition, they gave me a dinner voucher and breakfast voucher to use at the in-hotel Moxie’s restaurant, and another $10 to spend on lunch at the airport.  The Moxie burger was pretty good, and while I couldn’t put it in my Top 10 Burgers, it did taste better because it was free.  I had fries on the side and the waiter didn’t know what malt vinegar was and claimed that they “didn’t have any,” which I find really hard to believe. 


I have no idea if that pickle that was skewered atop my burger was edible or plastic, but I didn't appreciate the gesture.

 4. Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon Burger: 

Okay, despite a few drawbacks, this burger was by far the best of the four and in general is just a really solid burger.  At first I was a bit put off by the high prices because my $10 voucher wouldn’t cover the $15 burger, but then I noticed that they had an “unloaded” option for $11, and I went for it.  And let me just say thank you, Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon, because I have been waiting for an “unloaded” option at a cheaper price for my entire life.  But let me also add, why doesn’t anyone who works at your restaurant know what “unloaded” means?  When my burger arrived, it was topped with lettuce and tomato, and with a larger pickle-quarter on the side.  I promptly put it on a napkin so the waitress could see how she had failed me.  (I didn’t get a refund though.  Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon, if you’re reading this, please give me a free unloaded burger).  Once again, the waitress had never heard of malt vinegar, but she was decent enough to inquire about it for me, and obviously they had some because obviously.  Take note, Moxie’s.  Once again, the fries left something to be desired, but were undoubtedly improved by the malt vinegar.


The Bison Burger

2013 has been, so far, a year of new discoveries. Well, of one discovery. And actually, I discovered this last year, but the ramifications have been rippling outward ever since. I have often seen “Bison Burgers” listed on menus, but until December 2012, I had always assumed that in this context, “bison” only referred to a breed of cattle or a kind of beef, like “angus.” Admittedly, although being a lover of burgers, I know very little about them or the different kinds of beef that go into them (or even that there is such a thing as “a different kind of beef”). I certainly never imagined that we have the option of eating actual bison burgers, because if obsessively playing Oregon Trail throughout elementary school or looking at that picture of all those buffalo* skulls (and I always imagine Teddy Roosevelt standing on top of this, but I think I am just confusing this photo with the one of T-Roos and the elephant) has taught me anything, it’s that we have killed far too many bison and now they don’t exist. I personally used to kill several thousand pounds worth of bison, and as it would not all fit in my wagon, it was presumably left on the plains to rot.

Learning that bison burgers are actually made from bison was a strange moment for me. I was at once forced to acknowledge two pieces of information that I always carry with me, but that I have never once actually put together: 1) that yes, the European settlers did slaughter pretty much all the bison and then compiled their remains into a mountain of bones, and 2) that my elementary school music teacher breeds (or perhaps bred?) bison, so of course they must still exist and exist substantial enough numbers that would suggest we can make burgers out of bison meat. But the idea of bison burgers seems kind of grotesque and unnecessary to me. 

When I first looked at this finished product, I thought, Wow. What a
dream come true! A mountain of burgers! But a mountain of burgers would
be so disgusting in reality. They would be so soggy and soft and you couldn't
actually perch atop them, like this gentleman is doing, because that soggy
mass of bread and meat couldn't possibly support your weight. And while
slowly sinking into a pit of old burgers isn't the worst fate, I think it's one I
would nevertheless meet with an annoyed "Ew."

I really want to stress here that I do not care where out meat comes from. If I were to care about the ethics of factory farming, then I would probably have to stop eating that meat, and I honestly cannot be bothered about animal welfare enough to even slightly complicate my life by paying more for or by tracking down a place that sells ethically raised meat. And yet, on one hand, I kind of feel like maybe we should just leave the bison alone because I don’t trust anyone to not slaughter them all at once in an orgiastic frenzy of gore, since that seems to be how we typically interact with bison. But on the other hand, even if we have developed a moderated way of rearing and slaughtering bison, I still don’t want to eat it. I wouldn’t eat a bison burger no matter how it was raised or where it came from or how much it cost because bison give me the impression of being too wild and too unkempt to actually eat. Thinking of them reminds me of that time Rory (and his family) came to sheer one of our alpacas (Tommy Tippy Toes, for the record), but in the end the alpaca hair (fur?) was too tangled and frizzy and full of various materials from our field to be useful to anyone and eventually it was all just thrown away, and the idea of trying to extract meat from a bison carcass makes me worry that the inevitable dust and old twigs would get into the meat and would remain there throughout the cooking process and that I would be forever pulling out random things out of the burger. And also? Bison burgers are just one more food on a long list of foods that I absolutely do not need in my life. Why would I need to supplement my beef burger intake with bison burgers? I am always worrying that I am not eating nearly enough burgers as it is, and I approach every burger opportunity with relish (not with actual pickle-relish, because that is disgusting) and am not willing to sacrifice even one of these occasions in favour of trying a different kind of burger that I already know to be totally redundant and superfluous because I have already discovered the burgers that I like.

*I am only learning now that buffalo and bison are not the same animal. I always thought that bison was the plural form of buffalo.

Everyone says bison is better than beef:
More vitamins, leaner meat, and environmental relief.
But I don’t care enough about the ethics of factory farming
to eat a bison burger--what I consider to be a form of self-harming
Besides, you don’t have to act the act just to look the look:

Simply present an ethical image of yourself for all to see on facebook.