The Vegetarian's Guide to Eating Meat

Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2011 The egetV arian's Guide to Eating Meat Marissa Landrigan Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Landrigan, Marissa, "The eV getarian's Guide to Eating Meat" (2011). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 12119. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/12119 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The vegetarian’s guide to eating meat by Marissa Landrigan A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing & Environment Program of Study Committee: Benjamin Percy, Major Professor Linda Hasselstrom Linda Shenk Michael Dahlstrom Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2011 Copyright © Marissa Landrigan, 2011. All rights reserved. 1 CHAPTER ONE I‘m standing in knee-high rubber boots, watching blood pool into translucent puddles, then drift slowly towards the drains in the center of the sloped concrete floor. My long hair is bunched up under a plastic shower cap, pulled down nearly over my eyebrows, and around my ears. I‘m not talking much because it‘s noisy in here: the hum and roar of an electric meat saw whirring through flesh; the metallic lurching 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‘m just watching, as the staff of six works the Wednesday morning slaughter line at Black Earth Meats in Mount Horab, Wisconsin. And I‘m staring at the skinned head of a steer. The lower half of the jaw has been removed, in order to preserve the tongue, a prized piece of meat, for later sale, and the entire head skinned. Not scalded clean—the eyeballs and all the muscle of the steer‘s head are still intact—but the hide has been removed, pulled gently backwards over itself to reveal the maze of tendon, sinew and blood veins just below the surface. The head hangs on a butcher hook not six feet from me, the sharp tongs of the hook punching up into what was the roof of the cow‘s mouth. The head just hangs there, half-removed mouth gaping, metal curves emerging from below its teeth like fangs. The eyeballs bulge without lids or skin to protect them, looking wild and scared and confused. I‘m completely fascinated with this head. I cannot stop staring at it, at the crazy sideways eyes, the webbing of deep red muscles crossing back and forth over themselves like gauze, a bandage wrapped around the white skull. I think it‘s rather beautiful, to see the inner life of a body exposed like that, to learn the under-skin mysteries of my food. But then, while I‘m staring this intently, the cheek of the dead steer twitches. 2 I jump a little bit, shaking in these borrowed rubber boots, and watch as one of the muscles in the steer‘s cheek pulses and flinches again and again, an involuntary muscle spasm, convulsing the entire skull. In half a beat, I regain my composure. I‘ve read enough to know that this is not an indication that the steer is still alive. Its head is fully severed, I remind myself, its skin is gone. Sometimes, after death, reflexive muscle spasms will occur. They mean nothing. I know all this, which is why I can continue staring at the skinned head of the steer, which goes on twitching and dancing, its feral eyes still casting out at me blindly, in death, perpetually half-eating the tongs of a meat hook. Why later, when recounting the story, I am able to say honestly that the skinned head of the steer provoked in me no visceral or emotional response. I remain curious, not disgusted. What the skinned steer head did provoke, however, is a constant, whirring question running through my mind: how the hell did I get here? What am I doing on this, a pleasantly cool early morning in May, in the fuzzy green hills of southwest Wisconsin, standing in a puddle of blood, watching a truck full of cattle get killed? ~ I don‘t know yet. But I think it has something to do with where I came from. I grew up in the kind of house where you have ravioli every Christmas Eve, where everyone makes it home for family dinner every night, where kids help their great-grandparents pick grapes from the backyard vineyard and spend their Saturdays ankle-deep in stomping barrels. I never considered that a pasta machine might not be a common piece of kitchen equipment. Or that a wooden folding rack is actually designed for drying clothes—because in my house, 3 we used it for drying homemade pasta. I grew up in an Italian household, where my grandparents were the first generation born on American soil and where food was central to the connection of our family to each other and to an older cultural memory. I think the reason I was drawn to the severed head of a dead steer was that I‘d spent my whole life operating under a heightened awareness of food as foundation for family and community, but feeling an enormous pressure from not quite being able to grasp and take hold of that power. I think the steer head symbolized, for me, what it means to vacillate between community and identity, between family and self, between inclusion and alienation. Standing in the slaughterhouse staring at the dead cattle reminded me of hiding under the kitchen table in my Nona‘s kitchen, wearing big coke-bottle glasses, walling myself in behind a pile of books, staring out at the flurry of action around me, sensing its importance, but too scared to join in. On any given Saturday of my childhood, we‘d drive the hour down south to Dedham, Massachusetts to visit my grandparents and great-grandparents, and the women would cook. Holed up in the small, steamy, kitchen with the humid scent of boiling water, they would speak—though it sounds like yelling, anyone from an Italian family will tell you that volume is just how we show we care—mostly English, with the occasional ingredient named in Italian. Thick hands would dig deep into bowls of ground beef, twisting and rolling out meatballs. Large, square fingers would gently pull strands of dough into tiny strips. Dots and smudges of white flour would stick against sweaty, olive forearms, and when they wiped the sweat out of their strong, arching black eyebrows, dry, white streaks would remain. This is what women mean when they jokingly refer to slaving all day over a hot stove, but these women, sweating and laughing, these women loved the cooking, because the cooking would 4 give way to the dinner. What I learned from watching, and later, from participating in these scenes was that cooking is work, and eating is reward. After my great-grandparents died, we moved the operation an hour north, into the kitchen of my parents‘ house, and incorporated us, the three daughters, as extra labor. Making pasta is group work, day-long group work, and you need all the hands you can get. The weather has to be right—not too cold, not rainy, or the dough will stay sticky and wet into the night, drooping on its wooden rack. Here‘s the scene: Dad‘s against the far wall, wrestling the drying rack open, sliding the wooden legs in place to hold it together. Nana and Mom work the chewy-tough spaghetti dough into long, flat strips, wide as a palm and about a quarter inch thick. My sisters, Meaghan and Caitlin, pretend to help, flicking handfuls of flour against the counter where it explodes in small dusty clouds. Gampi mans the pasta machine, clunks its metal heft against the chipped edge of the counter by the sliding glass door, his gnarled fingers working the knob to tighten its grip. I wait in the corner between the drying rack and the wall, waiting to catch the pasta. Once Mom and Nana have rolled the dough out, Gampi is ready. The two women carry the dough over to their husband, father, together, one on either end, their hands against each other at the sagging center. They lift it vertically, holding one swaying end, suspended, over the patient metal rollers of the pasta machine. Gampi begins turning the hand crank— nothing automatic here—and the dough is pulled down into the machine. Step one: flattening. The three of them run the floured dough through the machine three or four times, just to get it thin enough, thinner-than-tissue-paper thin, too thin for human hands or clunky rolling pins to achieve. The dough grows ever longer in their hands, as its excessive thickness 5 gets stretched and redistributed as length, until Mom calls me over, to drape the yard-long cool cloth of pasta over my waiting arms. Now, the cutting. Gampi lifts and unfolds the machine from itself, raising the slicing attachment into its place over the edge of the counter. These are the crucial moments that move so slowly, that require full cooperation and attention.

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