Food For Thought

Mostly I cook dinner without any thought as to where the roast, hamburger, chicken or pork chops come from. It’s easier that way. Sometimes, when I pass a cattle liner on the highway and see the sorry critters inside, a pang of remorse hits me and I think maybe I should become a vegetarian. I think about how chickens are raised, where veal comes from, horses for slaughter and even puppies trussed up and ready for dinner in some parts of the world and it upsets me but sadly, not enough to change my ways. We have to eat, but somewhere along the way there has been a disconnect. The neatly packaged protein in the grocery store bears little resemblance to its former state – so much so that we never have to think about it, be grateful for it, or worry about the inhumanity of it.

When I was a kid, people knew where their dinner came from. Home gardens provided fresh produce in summer and vegetables to be stored or canned for winter meals. Chickens sometimes came minus their heads but often still feathered – no mistaking it for something else. It was definitely a chicken. Fish from the market looked exactly like…fish. And we were closer to our hamburger and steaks too. The stockyards were nearby and everyone knew that the cattle in those pens were going to walk in one packing plant door and come out another as dinner.

The local butcher had a walk-in freezer, and when the door opened, you could see carcasses hanging inside. They didn’t look as much like pigs or cows as headless chickens looked like chickens, but still, there was no denying that tonight’s hamburger had recently been oinking or mooing contentedly on a farm somewhere.

So, is it okay if we live in this sterile world of ignorant bliss? Is it okay if our children never know the origin of their hot dogs? (Well actually it’s better if no one knows the origin of their hot dogs but that’s another story.) There seems to be a trend to not upset the children by letting them know where the packages in the meat cooler start out. It’s a distasteful and somewhat out of control subject so let’s not go there.

Fast forward to last week. At first my grandsons didn’t ask why their Halloween Jack-o-lantern now sat on my kitchen counter smiling its slowly decaying smile. The large, jolly looking pumpkin had come to me for “processing” and had to be peeled, cut up and steamed in sections. During the procedure one small grandson popped into the kitchen and was quite upset and indignant that I was “killing” his pumpkin. I never thought of it that way but here we were, face to face with the “where does my food come from” question.

I did my best to explain that good old Jack was a pumpkin, that pumpkins along with a lot of other stuff, were raised to become food, and that we were thankful that we could cook the pumpkin and make good things out of it. Then we talked about pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin bundt cake and pumpkin loaf, and eventually the connection between what was and what will be became acceptable. Sometimes we have to lose something to gain something more important.

We ate pie later that day, there is loaf waiting in the fridge for lunch today, and there are packages of frozen pumpkin in the freezer. We will enjoy what this pumpkin has provided all winter. However, I do hope we don’t have to have the discussion about steaks and pork chops any time soon.