But at the recent Zócalo/UCLA event, “What’s So Bad about GMOs?”, held at MOCA Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, three food and agricultural experts argued that GMOs really shouldn’t be controversial at all. Indeed, getting hung up on genetic modifications in crops might be keeping us from solving food supply and environmental problems.

“Can you in fact feed the 9 billion people we’ll have by 2050 … and how do you do that with minimal ecological impact?” mused UCLA molecular biologist Bob Goldberg. “I think the way to do that is through food science.”

Kleiman, a sustainable food advocate, asked the panel what GMOs a consumer is likely to throw in the cart during a trip through the supermarket.

“Either everything or nothing,” said Russ Parsons, former food editor at the Los Angeles Times. A shopper buying a lot of processed foods might have a hard time avoiding GMOs in corn or soybeans; one seeking just fresh fruits and vegetables might find it “impossible to find anything” genetically modified—besides a few types of zucchini and Hawaiian papaya.

After finding that many audience members in the packed house didn’t know papayas were genetically modified, Kleiman asked Goldberg for a definition of GMOs.

“Those of us who do this think all plants are GMOs,” he said, pointing out that traditionally grown crops have also had genes altered. “There’s really no difference between manipulating a gene the classical way, through breeding, or by adding a gene.” Some of the technology that allows scientists to edit genes has been around for 40 years, he said. People you know personally may be technically GMOs, because they’ve had medical treatments that alter their genes. Ingredients in the dye that colors blue jeans are also genetically modified.

Turning to Edward Parson, a co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA who has advised the U.S. and Canadian governments on environmental policy, Kleiman asked, “How do we know that GMOs are safe?”

“You never know for sure, because you can’t prove a negative,” said Parson, who said he found it “puzzling how passionate people get about this.” The usual concerns about GMOs—that they might be unhealthy, or that they hurt the environment—have not been borne out after more than a quarter century of growing GMO crops in North America. There’s no known detrimental impact in North America compared to Europe, where people have been exposed very little to GMOs, he noted.

So why, asked Kleiman, are consumers opposed to them? How much of the discomfort with these products has to do with the businesses that created and market them—with an “economy that doesn’t respect ecology?”

The panel, by and large, thought that lens didn’t make much sense. Companies involved in producing genetically modified crops aren’t entirely bad, and aren’t necessarily working against a sustainable environment. Organic food producers aren’t entirely virtuous, either.

“It strikes me that when people question GMOs, they have broader concerns about food and the agricultural system,” said Parson. “They seek safe food, produced in sufficient quantities to nourish the world, in an environmentally sustainable way that also sustains the people who work on it.” He expressed his support for these “great” and “valid” concerns—but added that “focusing on GMOs is a lousy proxy for those concerns.” Instead, he thought consumers should focus on other levers: environmental regulation, workplace health, and safety regulation.

Goldberg added that originally, in the 1980s, it wasn’t the large chemical companies that pioneered GMOs—it was small entrepreneurial outfits. He explained that after the government started regulating GMOs and the costs of testing the products grew, giants like Dow and Monsanto took charge. “In some respects, we created these monsters,” he said. “There’s not a place in our agricultural economy for tiny little startups.”

Goldberg noted that the GMOs on grocery shelves have undergone 10 to 15 years of testing, while conventional crops have gone through none. He might engineer a hypoallergenic peanut that would take a decade to make it to market. A breeder using traditional methods could create a hyper-allergenic peanut and have no problem shipping it out to farmers, with no oversight. “It’s screwed up,” he said.

Talk turned to the aesthetics of GMOs. Food writer Parsons said opposition to GMOs he had encountered had a great deal to do with our uneasy relationship with modernity. “One of the reassuring things in food is farmers markets—they reinforce this idea of romantic pastoralism. But it really is just a romantic image,” he said. “For people who live on farms, for everything in nature to take its course is often the worst thing.”

Parsons said his personal journey from GMO skeptic to accepting the technology (“my apostasy”) began in the 1980s, as the organic movement emerged and he saw his peers viewing agricultural technology in black and white. “The image was, you were either buying stuff from barefoot baby Jesus or you might as well have been mainlining Agent Orange,” he said. “The agriculture I saw was happening in this gray area.”

So when GMOs started making headlines, he had a little more open mind. He mentioned two hot topics in agriculture today: Roundup Ready GMO crops, which are genetically modified to be resistant to the Monsanto herbicide Roundup and are loathed by many environmentalists, and “no-till” farming, which is seen as a boon to sustainability because it reduces erosion. It turns out that it’s very difficult to go no-till without an herbicide, because avoiding herbicides means a farmer must plow—the opposite of no-till.

“It’s not accurate to think of all of these [GMOs] as being tools for degrading the planet,” Parsons said. “There’s great promise for sustaining the planet.”

Goldberg said that his lab is studying genes of plants from all over the world to find DNA that could make crops better. “I see this as an organic farmer’s dream,” Goldberg said. “Fifty years from now I doubt we’ll be spraying tons of stuff. That’s what excites me.”

Audience members weren’t entirely convinced by the panelists’ arguments, challenging the assumptions that safety tests were sufficient, or that monoculture crops weren’t a danger.

One person asked if the nutritional value of organic food and non-organic food is the same. Would non-organic food make her more likely to become ill? Will she be healthier if she eats organic?

Parsons said avoiding conventionally grown food because it might provide “a 1 percent gain in vitamin K” seemed shortsighted. Studies suggest that the benefits of eating organic are marginal, he said.

“Also it’s a very privileged place to be,” Kleiman said. “It’s good to remember that. Boy, do we live in a series of concentric bubbles.”

The post Go Ahead<span class="colon">:</span> Eat Your Genetically Modified Vegetables appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

First, it’s famous for producing food. In 2014, it grew $7.5 billion worth of grapes, almonds, milk, citrus, and beef. The county’s carrots alone were worth $288 million.

Secondly, in a national survey by the Food Research and Action Center, the county seat of Bakersfield consistently comes in as the hungriest city in America, with about a quarter of families saying they struggle to pay for food.

In 2013, 13 organizations in Kern County came together as the Food Policy Council to grapple with the Golden Empire’s hunger-agriculture conundrum.

Members now include a science teacher, a mom who’s revving up her school district’s wellness policy council, a retired cop, a planning consultant, a farmers market manager, representatives from Public Health, Kaiser Permanente, Aging and Adult Services, and the Food Bank.

Zócalo spoke with Jill Egland, Vice President of Community Impact at United Way of Kern County about the Council and what they hope to accomplish.

Q: It sounds like one of the challenges in Kern County is choosing a problem where the Food Policy Council can really make a difference. Is that so?

A: Well, yes, but not in the way you might think. When we first convened, we were all over the place in terms of what we thought we should be focusing on. Most of us are direct service agencies—we think in terms of program delivery, right?—so, we automatically went into “doing” mode—coming up with new programs the Food Policy Council could implement. But the fact is, everyone sitting around the table already had an overwhelming workload. Our first meetings felt more like recruitment sessions—everyone had something going on that desperately needed volunteers, and the Council represented a new source of worker bees.

Finally, making the shift and looking at problems from a policy perspective at first was just as frustrating for us because nobody could see past the specific context of their agency. Diabetes is a great example. Statewide, there’s a big push for a tax on sugary drinks, which has been proven to be a huge contributing factor to diabetes. The logic for the tax is, you make sugary drinks more expensive than water, and people will drink water instead. Our county health-related council members—whose local work is influenced by state mandates—were for this. Others weren’t so convinced. My agency’s perspective, for instance, is that this sort of tax is regressive—essentially getting poor people to fund programs to study themselves.

Then it hit the news that the arsenic levels in the town of Arvin’s water was off the charts. People were told to stop using their tap water for anything. Kids were told to stop drinking from school drinking fountains. Local foundations have been paying to get filtration systems installed in the schools most directly affected, but they’re $1,500 a pop.

What we’ve come to see is that you can’t advocate for taxing the orange-colored sugar water that’s currently available by the gallon jug for a buck without also advocating for access to free, clean, uncontaminated water. Once Sacramento passes a bill to cover the costs of school filtration systems and laws that protect the further contamination of our groundwater, the Kern Food Policy Council will be happy to discuss a tax on sugary beverages.

Q: Why did you start the Food Policy Council?

A: We started it because we thought it would help us strengthen our county’s emergency food relief efforts. What we’ve discovered since, though, is that the underlying causes of the chronic hunger in this county are way more complicated to solve than just bolstering our food bank. Early on, we learned about other California communities actually identifying their food deserts, and then using the data picture as an advocacy tool. One of our members had the GIS software, so we brainstormed what we wanted on it, and he create a map that identified low-income neighborhoods and the locations of any shop that sold fresh produce. He included all the bus lines, and added circles around the shops showing a 2-mile radius, which is, I guess, considered a reasonable distance to walk. It was amazing to behold. But when we looked at it all together, it was like trying to come to an agreement on the meaning of a Rorschach inkblot. We realized that we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what we should be valuing, or really concerned about, or what assumptions we should be challenging. Take the 2-mile walking threshold, for instance. When it’s 110 outside, who’s walking 2 miles to get produce? Should we be advocating for more bus routes, then?

From the perspective of UWKC, food insecurity is a byproduct of financial instability. People can’t afford to eat well. United Way did a survey of families in Kern County and found that 34 percent can’t pay basic bills; and nine out of ten of those families have at least one member working. In order to make ends meet here, a family of four needs to have 2.25 minimum wage jobs. It’s important to have fresh produce at the food bank, but then again, everyone should make enough money to go to the store and buy whatever they want.

We decided to do a Food System Assessment to learn more about the whole system. We didn’t just want to know who didn’t have food; we also wanted to find out about food waste, food employment, and food processing and manufacturing in Kern. The whole picture.

Q: It sounds like the more traditional California food policy approach wasn’t really going to work here. How did you tailor it for Kern?

A: Kern County is different from other places: Big Ag and Big Oil influence just about everything. While public housing for low-income residents is usually financed by HUD, here a third of it is also financed by USDA, and is meant to be used as transitional housing for farmworkers.

We had to figure out how to get the other food system stakeholders in Kern to join us. We’d failed so far to get Big Ag at the table—there’s a history of acrimony between the agriculture industry and the labor movement, and a definite awkwardness between Big Ag, the second largest employer in the county, and the agencies making up the FPC, who essentially fill the gaps in services that exist due to the low wages earned by farmworkers.

We knew that nobody locally had the authority needed to facilitate a conversation between such diverse stakeholders. So, we asked Dr. Gail Feenstra, from UC Davis’s Sustainable Agriculture Research Education Project to help us. Everyone respects UC Davis in Kern County. Everyone sends their kids there—conservative and progressive alike. We invited the Wonderful Company, Kaiser, Kern Health System, the Farm Bureau, the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, city managers and planners, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, school districts, county agencies, our state legislators, and California State University Bakersfield to attend a meeting about the food system, facilitated by UC Davis. Twenty-eight stakeholders in all. Everyone said yes.

The first thing Gail asked us was to describe what we wanted our food system to look like. Everyone had a different vision, and was pretty passionate about it. Over the months, she helped us listen to each other, and build a picture of our food system that reflected everyone’s passion. And the group said yes. She asked, “What would you specifically need to see improve in order for you to agree that the system as a whole was improving?” and helped us focus on what was viable and measurable. At one point, The Wonderful Company and the Dolores Huerta Foundation disagreed over a particular set of indicators. There was a fierce debate; we all got into it. But by then, we had met enough times so that people genuinely liked each other. We had a civil discourse.

Q: What were the subjects of debate?

A: There was a big one around what is meant by a “healthy environment.” People in the schools wanted a decrease in pesticide/herbicide levels. The Cooperative Extension people said that since you can’t measure that accurately, we shouldn’t include it as an indicator. The public health people adamantly disagreed with Cooperative Extension. Then the planners in the room said they would be willing to get together and figure out a way to do it. Everyone walked away from the conversation feeling they’d been heard.

Q: How did the group come to like each other enough to work through this?

A: Gail constantly reconfigured everyone. Nobody stayed in the seat they started in. Everyone had the opportunity to work closely with everyone else at some point, to share information and brainstorm ideas. By the end of the first meeting, we were all on first name basis. The constant reconfiguring also made it really hard for anyone to stay locked in their cynicism. There were just too many perspectives and stories and, well, this overarching sense of hopefulness. Even the biggest cynics have come around.

We also always have a meal in the midst of our meeting. It sounds hokey, but there’s something really powerful about stopping one’s work in order to break bread together. It’s like, things can get really contentious, but then there you are, sitting across from the person you were certain you had absolutely nothing in common with, both of you chowing down on Mediterranean food, making happy grunting noises.

Q: What’s the big, complex problem you’re wrestling with?

A: People like to point to the irony between our abundant agriculture and our high level of food insecurity. But it’s really not any more ironic than having workers at a Toyota plant drive some cars that aren’t Toyotas. Our agriculture industry is part of a global market. Its importance to us here is not so much as a food generator as it is a wage generator. To understand the symbiotic relationship between workers, the local economy, and big agriculture—you have to see it as its own complex ecosystem. The unspoken question—the elephant in the room—is how sustainable is this ecosystem, truly? The drought is showing us just how vulnerable a system it is.

We understand the complicated relationship of the workers to industry. Nobody wants to see Big Ag fail. We’ve had a portent of what that would be like, with the downsizing of Big Oil here in Kern. The influx of unemployed oil workers has been a blow to the local economy, and to the agencies trying to provide relief. But everyone knows Big Ag needs to evolve. Kern’s relationship to agriculture needs to evolve. We can’t continue relating to food production primarily as a commodity. On the other hand, if the legislative landscape changes too quickly, and Big Ag destabilizes, we’ll have an emergency on our hands. So we have to start these conversations, getting everyone out of their siloes in economics, industry, or social services to talk about the future of Ag here.

Q: So part of this was making peace with Big Ag?

A: Well, if Wonderful decides to grow their pistachios in Texas, there’s just nothing to keep them here. Systemically speaking, we’ve got to figure out how our higher education, our technical and vocational training, doesn’t just feed the Big Ag labor force, but also fosters innovation and entrepreneurism. We need more small and mid-size farmers, more independent ag-related enterprise, in order to diversify our economic base. We also need to help farmworkers get more than just an increase in wage; they need a voice at the table.

Q: So what does this all have to do with food, aside from low wages and poverty for workers?

A: We’ve had to realize that we don’t have a functioning food system, despite the presence of Big Ag. How we get carrots is that they leave our fields, get processed in LA, and come back here in little sacks. Our real local food system is CISCO (the super market distributor).

At the same time, we have 60 small farmers who sell their produce outside of Kern because there isn’t enough local farm-to-fork activity to make it viable for them to stay. We know we have to build a local market through restaurants, farmers’ markets, other retail outlets. Schools could provide a market big enough to make it interesting for the larger ag enterprises to consider. But finding a price point that makes it worth it for both sides is difficult. We’re looking into how those small farms, and even gardeners, can get licensed to sell vegetables to their local convenience stores. We’re also realizing that we need to develop new investment options, and economic incentives that encourage people to innovate and be food entrepreneurs.

In the next few months we’ll get a report back from Gail Feenstra’s group and start to talk about what we can do.

Q: Are you hopeful?

A: Yes. Rich Harwood, who founded the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, says that there are five stages of community life, how quickly and easily can embrace change depends on which stage they’re in. First, a community is in The Waiting Place. People will tell you that change would be possible “if only we had the right mayor.” And so they do nothing. The next step is “Impasse, where everyone agrees something is wrong, but nobody can agree on what it is. If you can find a small group that agrees, maybe you get an isolated pocket of something happening. The next phase is Catalytic, with pockets of innovation starting to connect. But I think that Kern is now out of the Waiting Place and moving through “Impasse.” And that’s a great thing! The Food System stakeholders are an example of a small group of people who have figured out how to agree. Hopefully, the assessment will let us identify other small groups, connect with them, and help us move into the Catalytic stage.

Q: What happens after the catalytic phase?

A: Don’t know. We refer to them as the “Nirvana stages.”

The post We Grow the Country’s Carrots, but Ours Come in Bags appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And—they butcher ducks.

One of the most important parts of France’s national culinary heritage is the production of foie gras, the liver of a specially fattened duck or goose. It has long been prized as one of the greatest and most traditional delicacies of French cuisine. In 2005, it was even enshrined in law as part of the country’s “officially-protected cultural and gastronomic patrimony.” This protection was more than symbolic—it was also economic.

Foie gras belongs to the “terroir,” or taste of place, of Southwest France. According to French folklore, this localized practice is centuries old, and knowledge of it dates back even further to ancient Egypt and Rome. Today, about 80 percent of the world’s foie gras production occurs in the Southwest, which uses a European Union food labeling program to claim a “protected geographical indication” for foie gras. When I first traveled there nearly a decade ago, I observed professionally designed billboards for large foie gras companies lining the main highways. Signs inviting travelers to visit small foie gras farms—often hand-drawn to evoke rustic charm or showing cartoon ducks wearing bowties or playing musical instruments—peppered the countryside’s narrow, winding roads and picturesque rolling hills. Tourism information offices in historic town centers distributed fliers from nearby artisanal foie gras farms, entreating visitors to stop by and enjoy a tasting.

Fattening of ducks for the production of foie gras in France in 2012.

Since the early 2000s, however, the production of foie gras has become hotly contested on moral grounds and has even been outlawed in other European Union countries. The fattening process, called gavage, involves force-feeding the duck or goose with a tube (typically made of metal). This rapidly enlarges the liver six to 10 times in size and increases its fat content to 80 percent over the two-to-three week gavage period. Today, there are two types of gavage used in France: artisanal and industrial. The first method allows farmers to hand feed the birds, while the latter uses a feeding machine. The industrial method is usually contracted by large companies that distribute their brands around the country and world.

Opponents to gavage say it is cruel and inhumane because it causes the birds immense pain and suffering and inflicts disease upon their bodies. Foie gras producers and enthusiasts, on the other hand, argue that gavage takes advantage of specific biological features of ducks and geese, which overeat and store fat in their livers prior to long journeys and whose tough esophagi lack nerve endings and gag reflexes that would cause pain.

What does it mean for a food to be celebrated and marketed as part of national heritage when it is also morally polarizing worldwide?

Many French citizens told me they perceived attacks, symbolic or otherwise, against their nation’s celebrated food practices as assaults on its heritage, culture, and identity. When I asked about bans and critiques of foie gras outside of the country, almost everyone—from everyday consumers to the president of the national industry group—responded doggedly by calling it traditional, authentic, and a part of French heritage.

But it’s not quite that simple. How foie gras is marketed to the French public today conveniently obscures the industry’s expansion from a seasonal specialty item into a year-round, multi-billion euro industry. It ignores the fact that the industrial model, spurred by capital and state investment, now accounts for about 90 percent of the country’s total foie gras production. And it was only in the 1980s and 1990s, when France was growing into a larger role in European integration politics and markets, that the country’s southwestern regions also began establishing extensive agri-tourism activities celebrating “fat ducks” and decisively working to craft foie gras as a national treasure—one that needs state protection in the face of outsiders’ vociferous opposition—using the framework of terroir tourism.

Municipalities throughout the Southwest have created activities to encourage people not just to visit, but to also partake in the artisanal foie gras experience. If timed right, visitors to these foie gras farms are welcome to watch gavage and butchery. Visitors can also stroll through amateur-designed foie gras museums, shop at newly-created “fat markets” to purchase whole carcasses and livers, and attend “foie gras weekends,” staying in farm guest rooms where the main activity is butchering your own duck or goose to take home. Local officials use these campaigns to acquaint the French and foreigners alike with the production and the producers of foie gras, to increase consumption, and to prove foie gras’s national cultural value. But what is crucial to recognize is that this public face of foie gras—the picturesque, romanticized farms that are conspicuous and welcoming—only accounts for about 10 percent of total national production.

Interestingly, local histories and residents reveal that while tensions between artisanal and industrial foie gras producers were common in the past, both kinds of producers are now, for the large part, mutually supportive. Many are neighbors, some even friends, and see themselves as targeting discrete consumer markets. And each benefits from ongoing demand for the other.

Despite global opposition to foie gras, French producers of all sizes seem aware of needing to feed a “heritage mentality”—to safeguard this food as an endangered symbol of French national identity and cultural wealth, whether or not traditional production methods are used. French people become complicit through active participation as well as consumption. The work of preserving and promoting foie gras—by artisanal and industrial producers, consumers, and the French state—has become a small but significant way to defend the taste and place of “Frenchness” in the 21st century.

The post Why France Continues to Bitterly Defend Fatty Goose Livers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So every year we harvest about 950 animals raised to our criteria—100 of our own buffalo, 150 from conservation groups, about 300 belonging to Native American tribes, and about 400 from private ranchers. Our small, independent meat company, Wild Idea Buffalo Company, turns them into steaks, ribs, jerky, and ground products that we send all over the United States.

You’ll notice that I said “harvest” rather than kill or slaughter. This is partly out of respect for the animals and partly a delicate way of differentiating our intimate operation from the large industrial slaughterhouses. But the term is not really a euphemism because, more like a gardener than most modern livestock growers, we go to the field where the buffalo live and pluck them from the grasslands while they are completely at ease. For us killing is a sacred act—not only for the animals but also for the humans who perform the act—and thus for the people who eventually eat the meat.

During the 1980s and most of the 1990s I raised cattle in the standard industrial model. I had calves every year, separated them from their mothers at about six months of age, and sent them off on trucks to feedlots in Nebraska, where they were fed corn in confinement. The whole process put them through months of panic and stress, causing them to excrete stress hormones like cortisol, which changed the flavor of their meat, and also made them lose weight. The industry views this as an economic problem. I came to view these terrified calves as a moral problem.

After a 15-year stint as a biologist and then meeting Jill, I began to reject the economic paradigm of feedlots and industrial slaughter. My work as a biologist led me to understand that converting healthy grasslands to sterile corn fields was an irresponsible insanity. Hanging around with Jill—a chef who makes Sunday meals in the old tradition and insists on finding sustainably grown food—made me realize that our food system was similarly problematic. Now I cringe to think of all the calves I loaded into semi-trailers and shipped off to ignoble deaths at the industrial slaughterhouses. After fattening on corn, they’d proceed through a production line of chutes and hydraulic conveyors until they reached the stun guns that knocked them out. They were hoisted upside down, bled to death, and immediately disassembled. A Detroit car plant in reverse. Treated like so much rubber and steel rather than living beings.

Slaughter wasn’t always like this. In my youth in rural Ohio it was a community event. I remember somber men splitting carcasses with a hand saw and pigs being butchered on a door laid across the tailgate of a pickup truck. We children would take our turns squatting beside the gut piles, learning the basics of life by poking them with a stick.

Sometime in the 1960s and 70s the process of killing changed. The butchers who work for us say that in the big, efficient, industrial plants, the job becomes monotonous and the workers become callous.

But what was the alternative to industrial slaughterhouses for our buffalo? Once Jill and I decided to change, we had to find a realistic alternative. Government regulations define how we treat, kill, and process animals. Most of these well-intended regulations have to do with cleanliness.

As I combed through the mountain of regulations I found an obscure but promising paragraph that referred to field harvest—killing animals on farms where they were comfortable and unstressed. When I asked our state meat inspectors about this they were willing to listen.

We found a co-op in Washington state that had read the same obscure paragraph in the Meat Inspection Act that I had. They had set up a trailer that satisfied all of the regulations. Jill and I flew out to look at this mobile abattoir and found that the co-op members had already done the hard work of making it regulation compliant. We watched as the customized truck and trailer pulled up at the farm at about the same time the federal meat inspector arrived and the humane slaughter of cows, sheep, and pigs commenced. The next day we were talking to the company that had made the trailer.

Our hopes were soon tempered by the reality of cost: a cool $250,000 for a custom truck and trailer that would meet our needs. That was far beyond our budget but word spread about our nascent plan and a like-minded investor stepped up.

Our version of the mobile harvester was a semi with trailer fitted out for cold Great Plains winters with large tires and heated water lines. Our winches had to be heavy-duty enough to bring a 1,500 pound buffalo into the trailer and get it up onto the skinning cradle. We worked out a low-velocity copper bullet that would just hit hard enough to stun the buffalo without passing through and endangering other buffalo in the herd.

But the mechanics of the slaughter was only half the process: We wanted to make sure that the buffalo never panicked. Before we did our first harvest, we spent thousands of hours learning to move through the herd in a pickup truck, gently, slowly, moving at oblique angles—never rushing. Taking advantage of the naturally docile nature of buffalo, we had to learn to take our time, training ourselves as much as them.

We were coached by an old friend by the name of Rocke Afraid of Hawk. Rocke and I had worked on a ranch together as young men and even then he saw meaning in everything and believed in all sorts of supernatural events. I have never been much for religion and spiritualism but Rocke could make a guy a believer. For the next 40 years we did not see much of each other but we came back together just in time for him to help me understand what the relationship between buffalo and men could be.

On the first day of the buffalo harvest Rocke told me that if he sang and beat on a small buffalo hide drum the buffalo would become even more at ease. I humored Rocke by letting him drum softly from the bed of the pickup. A very skeptical meat inspector rolled his eyes as he sat in the cab beside me. But, when we stopped 30 yards from the herd, a two-year-old bull stepped away from the rest. He turned his head to me and presented an easy, perfect target. He went down with a single shot and none of the other buffalo moved. Rocke was still singing in the back. When the inspector’s eyes caught mine, they were full of surprise. All I could do was shrug and shake my head.

After I backed the pickup into place, we bled the unconscious bull, and then picked the body up with an old hay bale lifter that we’d rebuilt to do the job. “Well,” Rocke said, “I told you.” He spoke matter-of-factly as he pinched a bit of tobacco from his cigarette and sprinkled it into one of the buffalo’s nostrils. “You just got to respect them.”

And then we drove the buffalo over to the mobile harvester where our butchers got to work.

So respect them we do. The men we hired to do the harvesting understood what Rocke was talking about. They turned the job of killing back into the solemn celebration it has been for 99.9% of human history. We’ve been killing that way for 12 years now. We’ve worked out how to run an operation that doesn’t stress the buffalo or the humans, and along the way the buffalo have reconnected us to the sacred. Our harvest crew smudges the rifle, the knives, and themselves with the smoke from a smoldering sage bundle every day before they begin their work. Our meat cutters, office staff, and the folks who make the jerky and smoked meats thank the buffalo for the honest work they have given us. We rest easy knowing we’ve treated our meat like the sacrament that it is.

The post Do You Know How Your Steak Was Killed? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.