Being Responsible to Your Food

Eating your relatives

Last week’s post sparked a conversation between me and one of my dearest friends. You might remember him as the person who demanded I become a vegetarian with him in solidarity of his solidarity with his then girlfriend.

In response to my call for responsibility to the animal relatives we eat, he wrote:

“I’m curious how this plays out in real life.”

So that’s what I’m going to do in this week’s post. Give some examples of how I attempt to account for the harm I cause the animals I eat and how I root my relationship with them in reciprocity.

Humanity’s Gifts

When I read the first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, titled “Skywoman Falling”, I cried. It surprised me how much the story of how some of the Indigenous people of the land I live on understood their beginnings and their role in the world. The contrast between Skywoman’s story and Adam and Eve’s story, the narrative I was socialized under, is incredibly stark.

Adam and Eve’s story always chafed with my sense of fairness. Rather than being set up to fail, Skywoman was welcomed, held, and saved by her older animal siblings when she entered the world. And to repay the gifts and sacrifices of her new family, she used her talents and gifts to make the world a better place for everyone.

This story, and the rest of the book, put me in a continuous state of questioning what gifts can I and members of my species offer to help make the world better. Which got me thinking about what specific talents are unique to our species, and I think I found one really important one.

Human beings are a story telling species.

Nothing moves a Homo sapien like a good story, a good narrative that activates our prodigious imagination and ability to create tangible and abstract things that never existed before. Tell a human a story that they come to love and identify with and it guides everything they do.

We’ve used this unique ability for unimaginable evil and unimaginable good, often times without being consciously aware of the stories that guide our actions.

The power of story telling is that it can give others detailed information and deep experience with something without the listener having to directly live the events themselves.

For example, I can show you and, if I’m a good story teller, make you feel the joy, frustration, love, and learning of a fishing trip with my father and friends, without you having to be there:

I can translate my respect and appreciation for groundhogs, as well as the complexity of what living with them means for me and perhaps for you too, by telling you this story:

One way I hold myself responsible for the lives I take for food, and the families and communities of those I’ve taken, is to tell the stories of individuals who are on my plate and in my pot. Humans are amazing story tellers and we do honor to those whose stories we tell.

And the wonderful thing about story telling and humans is that we can spread and acquire completely new ways of seeing the world simply by collecting stories from others.

If saving the California condor from extinction required every American to physically experience said relative in person then that species would be extinct. Thankfully, the power of human story telling can translate the plight of an endangered relative in something as simple as a photo:

So, to hold myself responsible and propagate the gifts of the animal relatives I’ve harvested, I have, am, and will always share the stories of their lives and their people as I experience them, in hopes that you will come to love and respect them as I have.

If you’re going to kill me, at least use my body well.

Waste is one of the most morally disrespectful things humans or any species can do. Nature abhors waste, which is why there’s generally so little of it in ecosystems outside of specific human cultures. Everything is precious.

Another way I hold myself responsible for the animals I consume is to use their bodies in such a way that minimizes waste. I am directly responsible for the fact that an animal would otherwise be alive and free to, at the very least, hope for another day, hour, minute of life were it not for me choosing them to keep me alive. The least I can do is make that harm count for as much as possible.

The amazing thing about this practice in modern USian food systems is that whole cuts and “off cuts” (e.g. organs and bones) are much cheaper (and more nutrient dense) than the fancy cuts (look for an episode on this this month).

As for the food you harvest yourself, the work that goes into harvesting a deer or catching a bunch of fish, for me, easily translates to using most or all of the animal in order to maximize the time, energy, and money I put into the hunting or fishing trip. This built in accountability of wild food harvesting is one reason I love the practice so much.

Teach the children

“Raise a child in the way they should go, and when they are grown they shall not depart from it”. I always liked this Christian saying.

Helping children to understand why honoring the lives you take to feed yourself is so important is something they can carry with them their entire lives and thus honor and protect future generations of relatives that will feed them. I spend a lot of time with my own kids and in classrooms of young people I teach, trying to get them to understand the responsibility they have for the necessary harm they cause other species.

Built in protection plan

Taking responsibility of pursuing and harvesting relatives yourself puts you in the spaces those relatives occupy. In order to be successful in your harvest you have to build a keen understanding of the environment that animal relative calls home. You have to see that space as they see it in order to anticipate how they’ll move within their home range.

A curious thing then happens as you come to understand your relative’s home. You begin to see why that thicket would be a safe zone, and why the red oak trees are preferred over the pin oaks, and why they go nuts for blood words but not earthworms. Their patterns and preferences begin to make senes to you and you begin to see the world through their eyes.

I never paid much attention to the way different species of song birds awaken at different times of the morning until I started hunting deer. I never knew how beautiful the sun coming up over Lake Michigan was or how breathtaking its unique color of blue was until I went out to fish for Lake Trout.

And what you love, you protect. The places you harvest delicious and nourishing relatives are places that you don’t want to see harmed, polluted, or destroyed. You can watch a Discovery Channel documentary on red tailed hawks, but I bet you won’t appreciate them or the places they live (which is friggin everywhere) the way a person who’s watched a red tailed hawk hunt a roadside for voles does.

Remain Responsible

So, to answer your question Anthony, what this looks like in real life is putting ourselves as close to the relatives we eat as possible, as often as possible, and then telling as much of those stories as we can to everyone who will listen.

What’s in my pocket

I’ve been making a lot of bone broths lately and in the past I struggle to strain the liquid effectively because my strainers were cheap and didn’t last. Then American’s Test Kitchen put me on this one and it’s made a TON of difference.

The Rösle Fine Mesh Stainless Steel Hand Strainer isn’t cheap, but it’s the last one will ever buy. I LOVE this thing. The build quality is excellent and it’s just a joy to use. If you, or someone you know, is in the market for a new hand strainer, then I cannot recommend this one enough.

• The Rösle Fine Mesh Stainless Steel Hand Strainer

What’s in my ear-hole

I love Lianne La Havas’ music. Love, love love. Her debut album, Is Your Love Big Enough, is one of my favorite albums of all time, and her third and latest album, Lianne La Havas, I think, is better than her 1st. I wasn’t as big a fan of her 2nd album, Blood, as I am of the other two, but I hadn’t listened to it in a long time.

After listening to the first two songs in the car with my son and was surprised how much I love those tracks, given my memories of my feelings about the whole album. So this week, I’m going to spend some time getting reacquainted with Blood. Maybe you should too.

(Something about her sounds and vibe makes me crave her music on rainy or cloudy days.)

What’s on my brain

Last week I mentioned I’d been thinking about turning my online content into an online business, and I haven’t really stopped thinking about that. I actually got a bit overwhelmed with the idea, but in a good way.

To make things more real, I started renovating our basement and removing some flood moist and molded drywall.

We’ve got a lot more work to do, but things are starting to come together, and I’m excited to start putting together a proper studio to work in. Stay tuned for that and perhaps some new video content on this whole starting a business project!

Announcements

This episode is intense, but I think it rounds out this week’s newsletter well. Give it a watch and let me know what you think in the comments section.

Thanks for reading!

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I’ll talk to y’all next Sunday.

Cheers,

Jonathan