Sausage as Muse

This is the transcript of a video broadcast for IGTV ‘Meat School.’ You can watch the archived broadcast here.

I mentioned you’d be hearing a lot from me about sausage over the next couple of weeks, and I mean that in more ways than one. I have an online course launching next week, on June 15th, centered on how to make sausages, and when I say that I mean an all-encompassing practice that includes “sausages, pâtés and salamis,” so I’ll of course be depositing practical information about sausage making, cooking, and eating, but I don’t want to do it in the same ways I always do it.

I feel like sausage making doesn’t get it’s due in the normal food conversations. Most things don’t.  As I have sought to make the transition away from working in the non-profit sector while also trying to advance my business,  and devote myself fully to food system transformation, I have been in the difficult place of trying to talk about sausage in ways that reach beyond the technical within platforms that don’t necessarily recognize the significance of the dialogue. I won’t stop trying but I’m also done trying to fit into the framework of food media as we know it.  And if I’ve learned anything from 2020 so far it’s that it is my passion and my responsibility to be channeling my medium more powerfully toward positive change. A combination of social distancing has given me some much-needed liberation from the superficial trappings of society, and a new wave of equity consciousness within our made-up frameworks has pushed me to realize that I have spent far too long analyzing the injustice in our food system and the way we tell the story of food, and not acting in my full capacity to change that. So, make no mistake, this is not the sausage party you think it’s going to be.

A new friend here yesterday felt it necessary to tell me that this is not the time for surface level conversations about love and light. Thank you, my new friend for the out loud laugh. I have been, since birth, incapable of anything surface level, and as I said back to her on Facebook, you will NEVER hear me say “love and light.” SO, while teaching and even talking about sausage might seem “extra” or “simple” or “surface” these days, I’m interested in starting this sausage-binge by getting us into a straight up spirit-level conversation about this food symbolically, artistically, and socially. 

Maybe you are listening because you make sausage. Maybe you don’t make sausage but you want to. Maybe you don’t ever want to but you like to eat sausage. Either way, this broadcast is about sausage making as muse.  I am a sausage maker. I make sausage. I make so much sausage that sometimes I do it grudgingly, as a chore, as a merely repetitive act. But the doing of it, while it may start out on the empty side, consistently reminds me that I do it, that WE do it, for so many reasons that we need to talk about more. I realize I myself have not done it well enough. I have not tried to encapsulate, or encase (ha- get it?), even in my books, or in a singular medium all the ways that sausage making has opened me, and can open my students, almost as much as cooking itself opens us as people and participants in the flawed and beautiful world. So let’s kick off that reservation with this here broadcast. Let’s talk about why sausage, in the hope of sharing reflection from the meaning it carries. Let’s get into right conversation about it, shall we? 

First of all, learning sausage making is a dynamic skill set.  When you learn sausage making you learn ancient craft, you learn to respect precision, you learn to build flavor, you gain competence with equipment, you learn the adventure of combining ideas about flavor, texture, and and process into a unified EXPERIENCE.

Food and cooking as this kind of dynamic experience matters a lot right now culturally and individually. It brings us into a new way of thinking- about synergy, about composition, about sourcing, and in ways that informs other cooking and thinking about food that has been erased over many years of placing the made-ahead or the untraceable unidentifiable food at the center of our collective focus, simply because it is easier or cheaper. And sausage has fallen into that “unidentifiable, unmentionable” category. But it’s not. It’s artistry, and it takes skill. Dynamic skills, as we’ve said. Skills that serve you throughout the kitchen and even into other spheres of your life. 

Learning sausage making involves myth-busting. You have to cut through this notion that sausages are made from lips and buttholes. “We don’t want to know” is the popular sentiment. Again— this “eyes wide shut” mentality about food that is removing oneself from a dynamic and creative experiencing of the world, as we just said, and harking back to last episode, removing oneself from accountability about where food comes from and how it happens. Sausage actually is extremely pure food, and a creative launching pad that will push you forward toward food freedom while also keeping you grounded in ancestral wisdom. It is meat, fat, and salt at its most basic foundation. The way it has been bastardized by the cheap food complex is not the way we should be thinking about this food. 

Sausage making informs thrift in addition to creativity in the kitchen, in the way that sausages as well as pâtés allow us to make use of lesser used ingredients, or incorporate leftovers to combine flavors in a way that transforms people’s perceptions and palettes. Sausage craft can help us eliminate food waste.  This begins to inform a consciousness in the kitchen and a core meaning within food production and processing. Why can’t we see that making food and that the ingredients themselves are catalysts for how to be in the world, not a reflection of how to be another hologram of our made-up society?  

That leads me to empowerment, both the empowerment that comes from self-reliance, and the freedom from non-transparent ground meat. Ground meat from the grocery can contain meat from many different animals, sourced from both domestic and imported livestock. And it doesn’t have to be labeled as such. Talk about a food security risk—it’s a traceability nightmare. This is empowerment above and beyond that because sausage making closer-to-home frees us from boxed flavors dictated by other people, and it empowers us to remember and give credit to history and purpose.

Which brings about curiosity and research. Asking ourselves, where did this particular sausage come from? Did it come from this book I have in my hand? Or does it go farther back to some forgotten and sacred shit that might be life-changing or justice-bearing? Here’s a little story.  Just last year I did a story about Soujouk, which is one of the most, if not the most popular sausage in the middle east and central Asia. That pressed, fermented sausage pictured in my feed on Wednesday was a picture of one version of Soujouk, more in the Lebanese tradition, as recounted to me by the amazing chef Suzy Phillips of Gypsy Queen Cuisine here in Asheville, NC. In the course of writing this article I was transformed completely by the powerful connectivity and awareness that this sausage awakened within me. Here I was a white woman, trying to cobble together within 1500 words a way to translate the power of this incredible food, this pure food of the people, across time and the space and tradition of more than a dozen modern-day countries. And then, as I was making the sausage, I happened to be listening to media accounts of skirmishes on the border of Turkey and Syria, where innocent people living in one of the regions where this sausage is made and enjoyed were experiencing mortars coming through the roofs of their kitchens, or the unimaginable work of sitting by the bedsides of their infant daughters who had lost limbs. Here I was, with the so-called collateral damage from political skirmishes that I could smell in the fenugreek and in the Aleppo pepper flakes. Sausage, my friends, is not a simple, surface level, basic food. It is easy to make, but the making of it will challenge you and deepen you, and ask you to actually figure out what you think about the world, and why you think it, and whether you are in right relationship with what you believe and what you do. Here is a link to the article that I wrote. I hope I did it justice. 

Even if I didn’t, or even if I only scratched it, it inspired within me an entirely new and raw hunger for sausage-literacy. A bigger why, a farther-reaching understanding of the power of food. And I am sprinting now, toward collaboration with others, and connection to people and cultures, toward a more sacred perspective of spice and salt, toward the unrecorded footprints of some ancient breed of hog on some far northern mountain edge and the sea mist that allows a sausage to dry perfectly from the inside out on the eaves of an old workshop, and the stories that keep it alive. 

As perspective, collaboration and connection increases not only does my curiosity deepen but my craft advances. The more I pay attention, the better life becomes. Recognizing the depth, breadth and variation within sausage craft, that heat for fermentation used to be created by piling sausages under rugs, or holding them between the legs as one rode on horseback across a desert—all of this only embeds the desire to experiment, question, try, fail, try, understand and transcend. As these recipes and inspirations become ingrained in the way I work and cook, they become ingrained in the way I move through the world, in the way I guide my children. 

During salami fermentation, each sausage becomes a dynamic ecosystem, mirroring back to us the cycles of nature within the microscopic fluctuations inside the casings. The concentric patterns of the universe are all right here in front of us, and we are witnesses, vectors. Participant beings with a signature impact, and an unknown ripple.

Which inspires us to do more, and do it beautifully and intentionally. Improving and creating, embodying the essence of our experiences, into whatever art we can make.

And so. Sausage making is not a behind-the-curtain, sterilized activity. Sausage making is a colorful act of awakening, and ever widening resistance. In light of recent events and work I have been so amazed at the utter tidal wave of renaissance in the cultural mindset. While it all has an undergirding of uncertainty, urgency, and confusion I am overwhelmingly encouraged. My work with the non-profit boards on which I serve. My work with my colleagues, clients and trainees. My work to have the “I don’t know, but look at the core and let’s figure it out together” within my own family, with my children. I woke up this morning with the word defragmentation in my mind, as a meta-desrciption of what I feel happening. The first thing I thought of was sausage. I looked it up to see how and if it actually applied and what I found was so interesting. Fragmentation obviously is the breaking up of something into smaller parts, as an example, the fragmentation of whole muscle and fat, or the fragmentation of society into smaller interest groups. This feels a little close to home when we look at the political division in this country over the last decade. In computing terms the word fragmentation means “the storing of a file in separate areas of memory scattered throughout a hard disk.”

I love it. I’ll take it.

Nina Simone: “What amazed me was the order of things…the fact that we wear clothes, that an office has to look a certain way, the whole bit. It’s amazing how accustomed we have become to a certain order. And you become more aware of that order when you see something change it. Everybody turns around and stares. But why, really? Rules, orders. We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares to question it. This is what is wrong.”

Yes. Everything is a program, society being the programmed product of history and influence and the imbalance of power, individuals being programmed by society and culture and family. Information and beliefs that make up that program scattered as they are through body, brain, and the molecules of emotion. Fragmentation breaks it up, stirs the pot. Defragmentation is the reverse process—the consolidation of all the fragmented bits into a new program. The computing definition of defragmentation is to “reduce the fragmentation (of a file) by concatenating parts stored in separate locations on a disk.” Concatenating is defined as “a series of interconnected things or events”. Similar terms are LINKS (if you can believe it) series, sequences, chains, strings. Sausages.

Think of sausage making practically. Do it. It is utterly practical. You’ll eat well. You’ll make use of leftovers. You’ll learn shit to pass on to your children. But please by all means think of it as a completely existential and utterly tangible way to participate in the resistance and the defragmentation of our world towards something more connected, more beautiful, and more intentional. It will get you out of bed in the morning, either way.

End note: Sausage, Salami, Pate, the online course, is launching this coming Monday June 15th on my Vimeo channel. Coinciding with it’s launch I am announcing a giveaway in partnership with LEM Products. The giveaway is a #5 Big Bite Meat Grinder from LEM Products and a Mighty Bite 5# capacity sausage stuffer, also from LEM Products. ANY purchaser of my online courses between June 15th and July 1, 2020 will be entered into a drawing to win this equipment. The retail value of this equipment is around $500. That’s a pretty amazing giveaway, and it will get you well on your way to sausage enlightenment.

 ALSO- I am trying my damndest to open accessibility to my online courses. Vimeo does not allow me to offer scaled pricing, but I want to do that. The course segments are priced at $100-$120 each ($35-40 for each of the sausage segments, of which there are 4) and eventually $700-$800 for all seven segments of intensive trainings. If you cannot afford these as priced, message me privately. I want to work with you and I want you to have this information and inspiration toward artistry, empowerment, and self-reliance. If we can work out a scaled price for you or a payment plan, and you make the purchase or first payment within the giveaway timeframe, you will also be entered into the drawing.

Ok. That is all for this week. Power to the people. Food to the people. Enjoy the weekend.