Contents
Chapter Four: Cheez Whiz Is Vegetarian
Chapter Five: Elk Country, Part I
Chapter Six: Strawberry Fields
Chapter Seven: Chickpeas for Breakfast
Chapter Nine: A Seriously Scrappy Flower
Chapter Ten: Tastes Like Chicken
Chapter Eleven: How to Dissect a Chicken
Chapter Twelve: Definitely Not June Cleaver
Chapter Thirteen: Precocious Squash
Chapter Fourteen: Elk Country, Part II
Chapter One
Head Cheese
I WAS STANDING IN knee-high rubber boots, watching blood pool in translucent puddles, then drift slowly towards the drains in the center of the sloped concrete floor. My long hair was bunched up under a plastic shower cap, pulled down nearly over my eyebrows and around my ears. I wasn’t talking much, because it was noisy in there: the hum and whirr of an electric meat saw cutting through flesh, the metallic lurch of a pulley hoisting thousand-pound bodies up to the rafters, the hole-punch ricochet of a bolt gun, and the resultant crumpling collapse. I was just watching, as the staff of six worked the Wednesday morning slaughter line at Black Earth Meats in Black Earth, Wisconsin. And I was staring at the skinned head of a steer.
The lower half of the steer’s jaw had been removed and the thick tongue cut out, tossed heavily onto a nearby metal cart for later packaging, and the entire head had been skinned. Not scalded clean—the eyeballs and all the muscle were still intact—but the hide had been pulled gently backwards over itself, to reveal the maze of tendon and sinew just below the surface. The head hung on a butcher hook not six feet from me, the sharp tongs of the hook punching up into what was once the roof of the steer’s mouth. The head was suspended there, half-removed mouth gaping, metal curves protruding from below its teeth like fangs. The eyeballs bulged without lids to protect them, staring out at me, looking wild and scared and confused.
I was completely fascinated by that head. I could not stop staring at it, at the crazy sideways eyes, the webbing of red muscles crossing back and forth over themselves like gauze, a bandage wrapped around the white skull. I thought it was beautiful, to see the inner life of a body exposed that way, to learn the under-skin mysteries of my food. But then, while I was staring this intently, the cheek of the dead steer twitched.
I jumped a little, shaking in those borrowed rubber boots, and watched as one of the muscles in the steer’s cheek pulsed and flinched again and again, involuntary spasms, convulsing the entire skull, a synapse quake. In half a beat, I regained my composure. I’d read enough to know that this was not an indication that the steer was still alive. All its skin is gone, I reminded myself, its head is fully severed. Sometimes, after death, reflexive muscle spasms will occur. They mean nothing.
I knew all this, which is why I could go on staring, as the exposed muscles of the steer’s skull continued twitching and dancing, its feral eyes still casting out at me blindly, in death, perpetually half-eating the tongs of a meat hook. Although my mouth hung open slightly with wild captivation, I could say later, when recounting this story, that the skinned head of the steer provoked in me no visceral or emotional response. I remained curious, not disgusted.
I WATCHED THE exquisite ballet of the slaughter emerge. I watched as the man with the moustache and the electric knife worked the hide loose from the steer’s body, from the hind legs and haunches, from the gut and back. Silent and quick, he whirred the flesh loose, then clipped the steer’s hind legs into a massive pulley system, which let out a groaning squeal and strained to lift the dead steer up, up. Two more men in aprons attached what looked like a giant set of tongs to each of the loose flaps of skin. Pulley and tongs yanked at the steer, pulling in opposition, peeling the hide back off the dead body. White fascia tissue clung intently to the inside of the skin. The tail pulled nearly to the floor with resistance, then sprang back up and whacked the dead steer’s stomach. The steer hung, inverted and skinned, after only five minutes.
I continued to watch, intent on discovery. I learned that a saw durable enough to cut a steer in half, straight down through its bones, existed. In a breathtaking whirl of blades and bones and blood, the rest of the crew descended on the body, to create from a whole dead steer a pile of component parts: two long slabs of side body for processing into butcher cuts; hooves and horns and hard parts for grinding; liver and heart and tongue for offal; skinned skull on a meat hook, to be boiled later for head cheese.
BUT THE THING I learned that day in the slaughterhouse, that I learned by being quieter than I ever thought I could be, the thing that stayed with me the longest, was what it looked like when a steer was struck brain-dead by a bolt gun. I learned that nobody was looking at me, so it was okay if I jumped when the gun went off, at the enormous noise of metal shooting through skull. I learned deep in my bones the sensation of collapse, the thump of the body to the floor.
As I felt the twinge in my jaw from grinding my teeth together, I learned that the body has its own dance of death, that the body doesn’t lie still. The animal thrashed. Its legs, wild with firing synapses, kicked desperately, frantically, kicked like the animal was still in there, kicked as if an electric pulse was running through its muscles, kick as if it was trying to stand up.
AS I STOOD in the slaughterhouse that day, I sensed