from beating heart to supper pot
Last week, N and I went to the community trust to go over their new contract with the African Development Foundation. (Yes, we got funding, it's very exciting, I may write about it later.) In typical form, we arrived to the settlements late, rounded up the board members, drove in the dark to the second settlement, scrounged for firewood, and with great anticipation seasoned the meat we'd bought earlier at Ghanzi Butchery. "I'll get the braai stand," N announced, and hopped into the back of the truck to look for it. A few moments later, after much shuffling and crashing around, he emerged in consternation, without the braai stand. "NO! Those motherf***ers didn't pack it!" he howled. We stood for a moment, staring at the fire, which the cold wind was quickly fanning into braai-worthy coals - at the indigo 9:30 p.m. sky with the Milky Way strewn brightly upon it - at our own complaining bellies.
"Well," I said, "we could use the top of the gas burner..." So we unscrewed the top of the gas cannister, wedged it between a couple of bricks, and haphazardly piled the meat on top of it. The burner is poorly shaped for braaing; it has some metal flaps that point straight up, holes in unusual places, and overall does not make for evenly cooked meat. However, being desperate, we made the best of it, and enjoyed our dinner.
We all slept on the floor of the VDC (Village Development Committee) office, as it was too cold and late to set up tents, and woke up the next morning to collect the rest of the board members and hold our meeting. The purpose of this whole last-minute trip was to go over, in excruciating details, several dozen pages of convulted American legal language... The process took hours, involving the following steps:
1. I read the passage in English
2. After thinking for awhile, I translated the passage into simplified/logical English, as opposed to legalese
3. Nathaniel translated the simplified English into Setswana
4. Questions and clarifications
We finished around three, and went in search of our belated lunch. The kgosi of Grootlaagte had just slaughtered one of her cows, so we drove a few kilometers off into the bush to her cattle post, and found the cow in the process of being loaded onto someone's pickup truck.
It was quite a scene. I'd never actually seen a freshly-killed cow... sides of meat hanging in butcheries or markets, perhaps, but never the whole shebang. Even this time, the animal had already been skinned, but it was still the most visceral (no pun intended!) experience I've had of a dead cow.
We parked just outside their fence and walked in. The first thing I saw was the colour, a huge splash of the brightest red imaginable. It was initially removed from shape, dimension, perspective - just a blot of scarlet, surrounded by the weaving shapes of hungry dogs. As we got closer I realized it was the inside of the skin, laid across some low bushes, with some of the meat still lying on top of it and the organs spread out in one corner. The blood on the light interior of the hide was surprisingly bright, much brighter than the duller crimson of the muscle tissues. Seeing the organs laid out was another book-learning vs. practical-learning moment; though I know all the names, structures, and functions of the organs from my biology class, when they were messily, bloodily jumbled about on the ground I couldn't tell which was which. N knew exactly what they were from having seen countless cows laid out in just such a manner. There was one large, rounded sac that I didn't recognize; I asked N, but he couldn't remember its name in English. "It's, it's..." he struggled, "it's, you know, it had many flaps, and the grass is in it..." One of the women chopping up the carcass neatly sliced open the organ in question, and I realized that it was the rumen.* Indeed - many flaps, and full of grass.
There were three or four women slicing, separating, sorting, and cleaning the organs - with blood splattered on their dresses and dyeing their arms red to the elbow, they neatly wielded their long-bladed knives and quickly sliced the connective tissues, separating intestine from stomach, lungs from heart. One made a long slit in the stomach and they began shovelling great handfuls of half-digested grass out of it - huge amounts, the entirety so heavy that they couldn't just pick up the stomach and empty its contents out onto the ground. When it was empty, they turned the stomach inside out and washed it in a bucket, revealing the frilly convoluted texture of something I like to think of as "delicious tripe" and not "recently in contact with half-digested grass." Three men struggled to lift one of the back legs, and staggered over to the pickup truck to dump it in. The receiving men in the back actually overbalanced and fell down with the weight of the leg, landing and staining their trousers in a puddle of blood.
Quickly, the organs had been sorted (saleable; non-saleable), and all the meat loaded into the back, and we followed the pickup into the village to their own little BMC (Botswana Meat Commission). By slicing a hole between bone and tendon, and hooking a piece of wire through the hole, they hung the huge haunches of meat up on a tree, then laid the hide out on the ground beneath a spring scale, and waited for their customers. Soon there were several dozen people gathered around, pointing at which bit they'd like, and with axes and knives the cow was slowly chopped apart on the carpet of its hide, weighed on the spring scale, paid for, and then stuffed into a plastic bag and taken home for supper. By the time we left, half of it must have been gone...
The whole thing took perhaps three hours, to kill the cow, clean and divide it, transport it and hang it in the impromptu butchery, and then sell it off piece by piece. In the Western removal from our food, we don't like to think about where our meat comes from; these mystic degrees of separation exist for us from a cow in a field (or in a disease-infested metal cage in a sunless warehouse, whichever), and the tidily packaged slice of meat that we buy in the supermarket. There are a few more links in the North American meat chain, but this is essentially it: the animal is killed. Immediately its blood is drawn, its stomach emptied of the food it was eating just an hour ago, its organs separated and sorted, its meat sliced into reasonable portions and then swiftly sold off. Death is not a long process for a meat animal; there is no polite grace period, no period of transition from "cow" to "beef." It happens literally with the stroke of a knife. One moment living, the next moment meat.
We had part of that cow for lunch. I wanted to savour it, to pay some kind of respect to the animal that provided me with my first real-live look at a rumen. But we cooked it in the traditional style of boiling it to death with an excess of oil, and in fact I didn't enjoy it at all.
* Ok, revision, after writing this I realized I really didn't know a cow's digestive system very well, and looked it up... I think that what I was looking at was actually the omasum, whose job it is to suck up the nutrients and water from the somewhat-digested grass. The cow's "stomach" has four sections: rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. The biggest compartment and what you'd probably think of as the stomach is actually the rumen, but the abomasum is the bit that's closest to the human stomach.
"Well," I said, "we could use the top of the gas burner..." So we unscrewed the top of the gas cannister, wedged it between a couple of bricks, and haphazardly piled the meat on top of it. The burner is poorly shaped for braaing; it has some metal flaps that point straight up, holes in unusual places, and overall does not make for evenly cooked meat. However, being desperate, we made the best of it, and enjoyed our dinner.
We all slept on the floor of the VDC (Village Development Committee) office, as it was too cold and late to set up tents, and woke up the next morning to collect the rest of the board members and hold our meeting. The purpose of this whole last-minute trip was to go over, in excruciating details, several dozen pages of convulted American legal language... The process took hours, involving the following steps:
1. I read the passage in English
2. After thinking for awhile, I translated the passage into simplified/logical English, as opposed to legalese
3. Nathaniel translated the simplified English into Setswana
4. Questions and clarifications
We finished around three, and went in search of our belated lunch. The kgosi of Grootlaagte had just slaughtered one of her cows, so we drove a few kilometers off into the bush to her cattle post, and found the cow in the process of being loaded onto someone's pickup truck.
It was quite a scene. I'd never actually seen a freshly-killed cow... sides of meat hanging in butcheries or markets, perhaps, but never the whole shebang. Even this time, the animal had already been skinned, but it was still the most visceral (no pun intended!) experience I've had of a dead cow.
We parked just outside their fence and walked in. The first thing I saw was the colour, a huge splash of the brightest red imaginable. It was initially removed from shape, dimension, perspective - just a blot of scarlet, surrounded by the weaving shapes of hungry dogs. As we got closer I realized it was the inside of the skin, laid across some low bushes, with some of the meat still lying on top of it and the organs spread out in one corner. The blood on the light interior of the hide was surprisingly bright, much brighter than the duller crimson of the muscle tissues. Seeing the organs laid out was another book-learning vs. practical-learning moment; though I know all the names, structures, and functions of the organs from my biology class, when they were messily, bloodily jumbled about on the ground I couldn't tell which was which. N knew exactly what they were from having seen countless cows laid out in just such a manner. There was one large, rounded sac that I didn't recognize; I asked N, but he couldn't remember its name in English. "It's, it's..." he struggled, "it's, you know, it had many flaps, and the grass is in it..." One of the women chopping up the carcass neatly sliced open the organ in question, and I realized that it was the rumen.* Indeed - many flaps, and full of grass.
There were three or four women slicing, separating, sorting, and cleaning the organs - with blood splattered on their dresses and dyeing their arms red to the elbow, they neatly wielded their long-bladed knives and quickly sliced the connective tissues, separating intestine from stomach, lungs from heart. One made a long slit in the stomach and they began shovelling great handfuls of half-digested grass out of it - huge amounts, the entirety so heavy that they couldn't just pick up the stomach and empty its contents out onto the ground. When it was empty, they turned the stomach inside out and washed it in a bucket, revealing the frilly convoluted texture of something I like to think of as "delicious tripe" and not "recently in contact with half-digested grass." Three men struggled to lift one of the back legs, and staggered over to the pickup truck to dump it in. The receiving men in the back actually overbalanced and fell down with the weight of the leg, landing and staining their trousers in a puddle of blood.
Quickly, the organs had been sorted (saleable; non-saleable), and all the meat loaded into the back, and we followed the pickup into the village to their own little BMC (Botswana Meat Commission). By slicing a hole between bone and tendon, and hooking a piece of wire through the hole, they hung the huge haunches of meat up on a tree, then laid the hide out on the ground beneath a spring scale, and waited for their customers. Soon there were several dozen people gathered around, pointing at which bit they'd like, and with axes and knives the cow was slowly chopped apart on the carpet of its hide, weighed on the spring scale, paid for, and then stuffed into a plastic bag and taken home for supper. By the time we left, half of it must have been gone...
The whole thing took perhaps three hours, to kill the cow, clean and divide it, transport it and hang it in the impromptu butchery, and then sell it off piece by piece. In the Western removal from our food, we don't like to think about where our meat comes from; these mystic degrees of separation exist for us from a cow in a field (or in a disease-infested metal cage in a sunless warehouse, whichever), and the tidily packaged slice of meat that we buy in the supermarket. There are a few more links in the North American meat chain, but this is essentially it: the animal is killed. Immediately its blood is drawn, its stomach emptied of the food it was eating just an hour ago, its organs separated and sorted, its meat sliced into reasonable portions and then swiftly sold off. Death is not a long process for a meat animal; there is no polite grace period, no period of transition from "cow" to "beef." It happens literally with the stroke of a knife. One moment living, the next moment meat.
We had part of that cow for lunch. I wanted to savour it, to pay some kind of respect to the animal that provided me with my first real-live look at a rumen. But we cooked it in the traditional style of boiling it to death with an excess of oil, and in fact I didn't enjoy it at all.
* Ok, revision, after writing this I realized I really didn't know a cow's digestive system very well, and looked it up... I think that what I was looking at was actually the omasum, whose job it is to suck up the nutrients and water from the somewhat-digested grass. The cow's "stomach" has four sections: rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. The biggest compartment and what you'd probably think of as the stomach is actually the rumen, but the abomasum is the bit that's closest to the human stomach.
posted by Jenn at
3:42 PM
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