On Fat
“…The pig cannot resist the land, and when the pig dies, we eat its body. If we are really eating, we muse on whether or not the body is enough homage to the land. Whether we can taste the fog, and the seeds, and the fruit. For the better it tastes, and the better it feels, the better we know it lived.”
- The Ethical Meat Handbook. p 86
Food is an expression of the land, and a lived experience. The body of the plant, the animal, the fruit, speaks a story that echoes of place. Close your eyes and taste. What do you recall in your carrot? The intravenous drip of water and the inside of a truck? Or the warm breath of fungal sugars and the trickling rain from the lips of leaves? For the place calling back to us through aroma and flavor to be one of abundance, where the land is the mother, the bosom, the fount, has been the focus of my search. If you have had the good fortune to partake of food like this, you know that it does not hold back. It bellows and breathes of its origin, the sounds of the air there are in the pop of the skin, the water there is the water in its tissues. You can feel, when you touch and smell this food, that there has been some covenant honored between life and death and the land. In my work, I see hints of this sacred understanding in many details of the food I am preparing, but the ultimate exemplar is fat. Fat is the final word.
Fat is the stored bounty. All of food is memory, record, and score, but fat is singular in what it contains. Look at it. Where in the body has it built itself? What does it feel like? Is it firm and clean? Yet you can see the water it holds? Is it flaky? Does it smell of water and air and earth? When fat like this screams at me I know I am about to have a revelatory food experience. I know that the muscle and organ that accompanies that fat is going to be a journey and a grounding, and I know that whatever land this food came from is honored and full. (When fat is piddling, poisoned, rank, or nonexistent, I know I am about to work harder.)
To work as a butcher is to embark on a quest of convincing people that fat is normal, healthy, and delicious, especially fat from rich resources. And there is really no better way to do this than by example. Come in. Come into my kitchen. Let’s make some confit. When people are able to pay attention and work with fat, it’s like they know the import of the ingredients immediately. There is a primal, instinctual, sensual, ancestral understanding of this powerful food. And then- the flavor that fat contributes, the feeling of it on your fingers, and the way it carries spice and other songs of the food in your mouth in lingering course after course seals the deal. We are no longer conversing, debating or convincing, we are feeling and feeding ourselves.
As always, I am extending my meditation on food to my own lived experience. What memory am I storing? What rote circles of movement and thought am I committing to my cell membranes? How am I holding on? Does the venerated land live in me, or have I left it behind? My visitation upon fat this week has me reflecting on what ways I’ve put myself on a diet from the present moment, and what ways I have refused to feel the full weight of what is right in front of me. If you’ve watched a pig ambling through a field, and seen it stop, and snuff the earth, then you know what I am talking about. Stop, snuff about you, as if to thoroughly ask: What is the offering? How will the body take it on?
Some of the offerings lately have been confusing, callous, or unfinished. The urge to deny them from my experience is strong. But as I go along, the more I succumb to that urge, the more sickly I seem to feel. Instead, I’d like to feel it all, lining my life with a million secret lessons, the brambles and the plums, a record of receptivity, sensuality, and grit. A new acquaintance asked me last night, asked a few of us, actually- if we were thinking radically enough. If our sacrifices and offerings were actually in line with our desires for a rightness of living, or if we were making excuses. I believe her question is the correct one. We agreed to ask ourselves every single day.
In the next week, fat will take center stage in my online offerings, as we explore fat-dependent meat preservation such as awarma, rillettes and confit. We will also make terrine. The time of year is ripe for this, for putting a few final things by. For unpacking all the grief you’ve gathered. For caching the fine fettle. For stuffing a fragrant sachet, and tucking it close to the bone.
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