Day Fifty-One: Meat and Plop

It was cool but sunny today. I had a phone meeting in the morning, and we discussed the meat processing situation in the country right now. Meat processors have had to shut down, but farmers still have thousands and thousands of hogs with nowhere for them to go, so they are having to euthanize all of those animals. An article I read estimated that by the time this is all over, millions of animals might have to be euthanized and disposed of. This exposes the precariousness of our food system, designed for maximum efficiency and profit. One glitch - a few large processors shutting down - leads to millions of animals being put down. The ironic thing is, I suppose, that all those deaths would have happened anyway. They just would have resulted in food. But now we're seeing meat shortages and farmers having to bury their livestock. What a terrible, heartbreaking waste.

The situation for me highlights the need for community-scaled agricultural supply chains. Small farmers, small processors, local buyers. Diversity = resilience. Redundancy = resilience. We have two hogs on the farm that are nearing processing weight. One is going in our freezer, and we are selling the other to two bulk customers. Jeremy called our local processor to set up an appointment for them, and at first they said they were booked until January 2021. Thankfully, since we are long-time customers and it's just two hogs, they managed to work us in sooner. But that just goes to show how swamped even the small, local processors are right now. The owner was telling Jeremy that Tyson called and offered them 1,000 full-grown hogs for free if they could process them, but they had to turn it down, because they are just not set up for that quantity. One thousand free hogs. I'm sure that's just a drop in the bucket of the supply they're trying to deal with.

Anyway, that's enough talk about meat for one day. As a former long-time vegetarian, I still have limits to the amount of time I really want to discuss such things. My final, parting words are: please, support your local farmers, now and A.C. (after coronavirus). Consumers need to be a part of building the food system that they believe in. 

A photo from several years ago, but I just love seeing
little Taiya and big Jeremy looking at the cows.

Speaking of local farmers, Jeremy got to play midwife to a calf today. A heifer was struggling, so he pulled her calf this afternoon. Both mama and baby survived the process, thank goodness. Sometimes I marvel at how much we have learned since we moved back here in 2007. Pulling a calf? No big deal. Just a part of the afternoon. 

For dinner, we ate black beans slow-cooked with a ham bone from last year's pig, brown rice, avocado, bell pepper, and cheddar cheese. Jeremy and I call this kind of meal "plop," an elegant name derived from the nature of its presentation: a bunch of stuff plopped in a pile on the plate. We have made rice and bean plop a part of our regular rotation forever, doctored with whatever we have on hand. It's a versatile, cheap meal that deserves a better name. What is "plop" in French? Un plauxp? Ha. You can tell I took Latin in high school.