Happy Birthday Grandma

Before I left for Sweden I began a project to better understand the history of my maternal side of our family. The work I wanted to conduct was a combination of family history and gastronomy. I wanted to combine food and culture in some format. I wasn't entirely sure what the outcome of the project would be, but I figured it was a low risk way to glean a little self understanding and was therefore worthy of a time commitment of some sort. Over the course of several days I had an intimate opportunity to interview my grandmother on the history of her life and related perceptions. My plan was to take the oral history I was to receive and morph it into written form at the same time weaving in some reflection into the stories. I wanted to do this while looking through a filtering lens of 'food', and specifically German food. Some of the writing I did I am happy with, some of it I am not....therefore the project never completely came to fruition and is yet one more 'pet project' that will remain on the ever expanding to-do list. That being said, the time I got to spend with my grandmother was the outcome of the project. What she shared was a reminder that the most important things in life aren't things at all....they're each other and specifically in this case, they're family. Despite failing to produce a physical work of my efforts the learning I gained from this experience has sat in the forefront of my mind and continues to impact me. So, in light of my grandmother's 87th birthday I have decided to post a snippet from what I compiled......

Wurst not, want not.

It seems to be a common trait among my generation to perennially take for granted the readily accessible meat options we have available at our local grocer. Not only do we have a host of critters from air, land, and sea for our ready consumption, but we have those options available in organic, farm raised, wild caught, all natural, or any combination of such. It wasn’t always as simple as a glass case and some butcher paper to gather your ‘kill’….no, at one point in our evolution people had to butcher their own animals, cut their own filets and stuff their own wurst.

My grandma explains the process as it once was. Typically you would slaughter both a pig and a cow at the same time. The men of the family would bleed out the animals so as to minimize the amount of spoilage that would result from some sort of blunt trauma (like a gun shot) to any other part of the animal. Not to mention that all the parts of the animal were to be used in the process and any waste that could be avoided was desired. Once the initial killing was finished the animal could be divided into its various parts. At this point it was all hands on deck. The animal would be split in two starting just below the underbelly where the ribs connected to the sternum and cutting all the way down to the asshole. The organs, intestines, and other innards were removed and given to the children to process. Next up was the removal of the head. The head was cut clean from where it attached to the neck. It was then sawed in two right down the middle the long way. The brain and tongue were removed and added to the pile of ‘top chops’ that were being compiled by the men who were busy at work cutting, chopping, and sawing the animal into its various parts. Sometimes the women of the family would sneak the brains into the kitchen and fry them up to give to the children who were hard at work scraping the small intestines clean for sausage stuffing. My grandma describes the cooked cranium as having the texture and properties of scrambled eggs. Light in color and the perfect consistency of clumped mush that perfectly replicates scrambled ova. It was just reward for the kids who were hard at work with their dull kitchen knifes scraping intestines (both the insides and outsides) clean on wooden boards, the smell of the swine’s partially digested last meal permeating the air as its waste removed. The casings would soon be loaded into the orifice of the family meat grinder where sausage links would be stuffed using a hand cranked, human powered KitchenAid. The last part of the process was to take the skin of the animal, once all meat and edible parts were removed, and slice it into 2-4 inch strips which were placed on a baking sheet and cooked to a crisp. The end product was a baked form of pork rinds known as ‘swara’.

The barbaric depiction above gives us insight to a concept we have pushed aside in developed times. The idea that waste is just that; waste and not a desired outcome for anything of use. I struggle to understand when this paradigm shifted and we felt empowered to trounce on the very resources that facilitate our highly elevated living standards that those of us in developed countries reap. Perhaps the butchers of the old world were true environmentalists that those of us who claim to be in modern times embody. I know for certain I’ve never understood the waste and recklessness that surrounds us in modern society. Does a field of trees have to be cleared for that mountain retreat so that one can be more ‘nestled’ among nature? Do we have to get our water from plastic bottles with life spans many times our own? Do we need to keep our homes hot in the winter and cold in the summer so as to numb the four seasons? The obvious answer to all of these questions is a resounding NO. Encouragement and awareness that the ‘feet and ears’ are ok to eat is the metaphorical thinking that will allow us to pass the torch to the next generation while maintaining eye contact, for we know that the lies of our environmental abuse have been unearthed and solved rather than buried under a mound of deceit. Our ancestors could then be proud.