Pork Soda

Seauxe… any fans of the television series “House” will appreciate this medical mystery. According to the New York Times, a mysterious neurological illness has been noted amongst workers in a pork processing plant in Minnesota. Specific targets include the workers whose job requires them to take a compressed air hose and blow the brains out of pig heads, causing the brains to vaporize. The Pig brain vapor is subsequently splattered on the exposed skin of workers, and also inhaled. Experts believe that the illness is a result of something in the pig brains that the human immune system violently reacts to – something that is similar enough to human nerve tissue to cause the immune system to attack it’s host, the pig brain blower.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05pork.html?pagewanted=1&ref=health

Whew. Ok, where do we start? These jobs are for real, yo. Reading stuff like this confirms my belief that the human carnivore is a carnivore by way of blissful ignorance alone. The longer I survive on this planet, the more disgusted I am by the idea of eating land animals. It could be because I am an air sign, and I prefer the flesh of things that ‘fly’ through the ocean. Flesh that is imposed upon by uniform pressure, not gravity. Flesh that comes from that mystical dreamy sea. When I look at a pig, I don’t see a meal.

Here’s where I’m going with this: if you can’t look the raw source of your meals in the living eye and lick your lips, best to stay away. That’s how it used to be! If you wanted pork for dinner, you’d find a boar in the woods, or walk outside to the pig pen with an axe and a grin.

Let’s see a show of hands: who’s hungry?

And now, the personal meat of this blog: my detailed explanation of my eating habits and how I justify the simultaneity of my love & fascination for all things aquatic and my fancy for their flesh in my mouth (marine mammals excluded, of course). I was a sushi chef for two years in Florida. In essence, a fish butcher. But I digress…

I was raised on Papy’s Bayou near Riviera Bay. By New York City standards, I was practically born in the everglades swamp, the midwife an alligator, the nurse a dolphin (the bay is a brackish mixture of salt and fresh water). My brother and father were inshore fishermen, experts at extracting the elusive inshore species of gamefish from the mazes of mangrove roots and salt flats. I fished too, but I was always more interested in seeing the creatures once they were landed – and often released to live again. Where my fellow fisherman sought the chase and the fight, I wanted the facts. I wanted to see the fish, handle it, watch it swim, swim among them. Not exactly knowing how to indulge my fishy desires, I just kept fishing, since it brought me closer to my goal.

I moved away from the swamp to go to school, and eventually disassociated myself from the fishing industry. I drew fish in my sketchbooks, I painted them on canvass… I was introduced to a cosmopolitan delicacy at a small restaurant in Gainesville – Sushi. Years later I found myself in front of a cutting board in the back of one such restaurant, learning the art of carving raw fish flesh and presenting it in a clean, aesthetically pleasing manor. I loved it, and excelled. I earned myself the honor of receiving the salmon whole from the distributor and making the first cuts from the fish, removing the head and skin and tails and fins. I felt no remorse, as the fish were already dead, and I’d witness many a cruel death of these beautiful creatures as a child of a fisherman. Raw salmon flesh is free of blood, vibrant in color, and interlaced with wonderful lines of off-white fat. I thought it a most delightful texture and color, a marvel of nature. And I loved eating it. When I ate sashimi, I meditated on every calorie, previously hunted and cultivated by a sharp toothed, free-swimming silver-blue speckled spirit or ghost of cold running waters (unfortunately I had not yet researched salmon farming and how potentially disgusting and environmentally disruptive it can be if practiced negligently, as it is of the coasts of Chile, Norway, UK, Canada).

I would often save the decapitated heads of these salmon and take them home to my roommates, extract the remaining meat and make delicious sautéed dishes. I would set the heads up on a wooden plank and photograph them. I would take the sheets of skin with the silvery blue black speckled shine and hold it, wondering what it would be like to glide through the water with this layer of aquadynamic armor covering me.

Ok, ok, I’m elaborating a bit… i don’t want this to sound like Silence of the Sealambs. But everyone who knows me is aware of my strange and complicated love of fish. But couple this with a childhood routine of such ghastly feats as pushing a hook through the eyes of a poor little whitebait to catch a larger fish and you get someone who can look a fish in the eye and lick his lips. Perhaps it’s the Gemini in me who simultaneously feels a deep love for this same fish and her ecosystem. I don’t see any discrepancy…

But show me a cow, or a pig, or a chicken, hand me an axe and call me hungry, and all I want is eggs n’ cheese on rye toast, please. We are so far removed from the processes that make our food what it is. I mean, even vegetarian delicacies like tofu and soy-meat products… I’m not particularly suspect of the safety of these processes, but who amongst the regular consumers of said food products knows how to prepare them from scratch? I always loved the simplicity of being able to eat raw fish, and felt especially lucky to be the one preparing my raw fish day after day for as long as I did. When I worked at these restaurants, I ate sushi / fish prepared by myself five nights a week... never tired of it.

I never used a compressed air hose, either. I am repulsed when I think of assembly line workers blowing pig brains all over themselves and their buddies for hours every day. The sushi “butchering” process was an art, very clean, and when executed at my own hands, not without respect.