Eating Bugs

Quito, 1954. My mother comes excitedly home from the market with a package of shrimp, the first she’s found since we arrived from Barcelona, where shrimp was only one of several marine species in our Sunday paella. She places the package in the sink and asks the indigenous maid, Maria—black braids, embroidered blouse, felt skirt—to wash them in preparation for cooking. Maria opens the package, takes one look at the contents, and runs out of the kitchen, her braids streaming behind her, screaming that those bugs in the sink are just like the bugs with many legs that you find curled up under a stone, and she would rather die than touch one, much less eat it. 

It’s my first lesson in gastronomic relativity, in which I realize that what we like to eat or can’t bear to even think of eating is determined more by where we come from than by the merits of the thing on our plate. Ecuador is replete with challenges to gastronomic provincialism. There is the Andean village where at dusk small flying beetles take to the air, and are chased by swarms of little boys who catch and eat them. “They are sweet,” they tell us, munching. And there is the Saturday afternoon ritual when native families sit in front of their houses ridding each other’s scalp of lice, which they eat--a practice that supposedly helps to protect them against typhoid. And in the Amazon basin, we are told, people hunt monkeys with blow guns and boil them whole…. 

In Spain, before we went to South America, everything that I ate was anatomically correct: small fish were served entire on my plate, and I don’t remember being grossed out by their fishy eyes looking up at me, or by the knee caps and hip joints of rabbits and chickens, or by the chicken’s comb, which my  grandmother used to save for me. 

But the years have changed me. Long before I became vegetarian I stopped eating chicken thighs, because I couldn’t bear the sight of all the muscles and tendons; then I stopped eating chicken breasts (those ribs!); and then I stopped eating chicken altogether. Now, wishing I had the energy and resourcefulness to be vegan, I make-do with vegetables and dairy products, with an occasional can of salmon or sardines to boost my protein intake. 

I recently read “Grub,” an article in the September 6 issue of The New Yorker about entomophagy, or the practice of eating insects. Given the expanding human population and the diminishing resources of the planet, insects offer an ecologically sustainable source of high-quality protein, so it becomes almost a moral duty for us all to support the companies that are working to make entomophagous cuisine available to the world at large—and that includes actually eating their products. 

This is something that I will happily do as long as I cannot tell what I am eating. That means no legs, no antennae, no compound eyes, no diaphanous wings, no chewy bits of exoskeleton. Give me bugs ground into anonymous, homogeneous powder, and I will ingest not only cute, small things like ants and ladybugs but Luna moths, tarantulas, locusts, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Shared by most Americans, this preference for bugs in powder form presents a problem for the “tiny livestock” industry, because insect protein, as you know if you’ve ever squashed a bug, is gooey instead of solid. But they’re working on it. 

Note that I haven’t said anything about flavor. But mix some insect powder with an egg substitute, dredge in bread crumbs, fry lightly in olive oil, and what’s not to like? I just celebrated Labor Day with a sad little vegetarian patty made of mostly beans and corn. After that, critter croquettes don’t sound half bad to me. 

New Gloves, Etc.

My old black leather gloves were falling apart, so when the sun came out for a couple of hours the other day I drove to T.J. Maxx, which is not too far from where I now live.

Lined with car dealerships and fast-food restaurants, the road between my house and TJM is not what I think of as the real Vermont, but I reminded myself that in the decade I spent in my beloved, store-free village, I had to shop for most of my clothes at the church rummage sale.

None of the leather gloves at TJM fit me. When had women evolved five-inch-long fingers?  Might this be a sign from the universe that I should forego leather in favor of artificial fabric? After all, if I refuse to eat a dead cow, it makes no sense to clothe my fingers with the skin of one.

Luckily, the non-leather gloves on the rack weren’t all fuzzy and bulky. I found a sleek pair that fit perfectly. It even had a frivolous little strip of black faux fur (no rabbits harmed) around the wrist.

At home, I got scissors and went to separate the gloves, which were tightly bound together with those annoying bits of plastic filament. (One end is always easy to grasp, cut, and throw in the trash--you can’t recycle the things--but the shorter end invariably springs out of my hands and disappears into the carpet.)

Attached to the gloves by more plastic ties were four labels of various thicknesses. One announced, in gold-embossed letters on stiff black cardboard, that the gloves were weatherproof. Another assured me that the strip of fur around the wrist was faux. (Wouldn’t it be great if the manufacturers of faux news felt equally obliged to describe it as such?)

The third label stated the price, $14.99 (compare at $20). And the fourth explained that those reinforcing bits on the tips of the index and thumb made the gloves “touch screen compatible,” so that, should I need to check my Facebook page while standing in the middle of a blizzard, I won’t have to take them off.

By the time I had disposed of the four labels, I was feeling less sanguine about my purchase. Sure, neither cows nor rabbits had perished for the sake of the gloves, but some tree somewhere had been amputated to make those tags.

That wasn’t the only reason I felt guilty, however: I had bought more than gloves on my shopping trip.

We all know about the environmental cost of the clothing trade. I once heard a researcher describe the rivers near the manufacturing centers in China, which run all the colors of the rainbow with the dyes used on the fabrics.  Every time I walk into a clothing store, I think about those rivers.

But as I pushed my cart along the aisles of TJM, the profusion of colors, textures, and shapes made my head spin. And the prices! When did clothes get so cheap? When I was a teenager, getting a new sweater was a memorable occasion, but now sweaters, unaffected by trumpian sanctions, are practically a dime a dozen.

Outside, there was snow on the ground and the wind was blowing. The old sweaters in my closet had all sprouted a crop of pills, while here in the store, at easy reach of my hand and wallet, hung hundreds of sweaters, unpilled, just my size, just my colors, fresh all the way from China.

Reader, I caved. I bought not one, not two, but three.

At the checkout, I handed the clerk the sweaters and gloves, and my canvas New Yorker bag.

“What is this?” the clerk asked, pointing to the bag.

“It’s my bag,” I said.

“You want me to put your things in there?”

“Yes, please.”

She sighed. She folded the sweaters and began stuffing them and the cruelty-free gloves into the bag. “It’s hard to get it all in,” she said, as the line of customers behind me grew.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

But I really wasn’t. I felt guilty about the sweaters, but at least I’d saved a plastic bag.

Golfing Bees

I heard it on NPR, so it must be true: scientists trained bees to play a golf-like game in which the bee pushed a ball into a little hole in order to get a sugar-water reward. The trained bees then demonstrated before novice bees, who not only learned from them but quickly figured out ways to put the ball in the hole more efficiently than the trained bees.

Half a century ago Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees used twigs to get tasty termites out of their mounds. Instances of tool use further “down” the evolutionary scale, among monkeys, birds, and even octopuses, soon followed.

One by one, the flags that once marked us as unique are going up in flames as animal behaviorists show that, when given appropriate tools such as computers, certain primates can use language, albeit in a rudimentary way. And if you paint a dot on the face of a monkey, an elephant, a dolphin, a magpie, or even an ant, and then stand them in front of a mirror, they will touch the paint spot, thus demonstrating a kind of self-awareness.

And now bees, despite their tiny brains, have shown that they can readily learn, and improve on, behaviors that in the wild are totally outside their repertoire.What are we supposed to do with all this information? Fret and feel guilty, obviously.

I can’t spray soapy water on the ants on my kitchen counter without feeling like some vengeful deity massacring innocent beings. And what about my nemesis, those mouse-sized, appalling wolf spiders that come into my warm house in the fall, hoping in their little spider hearts that this year I’ll let them hang out in a corner of the mud room? Am I a monster for going after them with a broom?

How can I justify anything but the strictest veganism when I know that eating eggs (even ones from free-range hens) and dairy is predicated on the sacrifice of male chickens and calves? Yet even vegans must think twice before sitting down to dinner, now that it has been revealed that trees communicate with each other, warning of dangers such as invasive insects. Mother trees, bless their hearts, do their best to protect and nourish their little saplings. If trees are sentient, what about other plants? How does a lettuce feel as it is yanked out of its native soil?

I don’t know where this will end, and perhaps some human-made disaster will close this chapter in the development of our consciousness. But one outcome is that, albeit slowly, our treatment of animals is improving.

Many years ago, before the advent of PETA, I worked for a few months in a respected laboratory where, with the goal of curing cancer, thousands of mice, hamsters, and rats were subjected to great suffering. Today those conditions would be unthinkable, and a place like that would be closed down.

Every spring, in Vermont, when the moon is in a certain phase and the salamanders march to their breeding grounds, hundreds of people spend the night at designated spots on country roads, acting as crossing guards for the amphibians.

Not so long ago, in both rich and poor neighborhoods , dogs and cats used to run loose, breeding, fighting, and getting run over. Leash laws and spay/neuter programs have rendered the lifestyle of our pets far less “natural” than in the old days, but as a result they live longer, healthier lives. It used to be that you never heard of a cat living into her late teens, but I now personally know of several.

Not a moment too soon, we humans are beginning to abandon our cherished spot at the top of the evolutionary scale. As science demonstrates that sentience and cognition are more widely distributed than we ever imagined, the great chain of being is morphing into a circle, a dance that Brother Wolf and Brother Rabbit (and even Sister Spider) can join in, along with us.

Verging on Vegan

Having just watched Forks Over Knives for the second time, I'm verging on going vegan.  The stars of the film are Drs. Campbell and Esselstyn.  Silver-haired, ultra-fit, and bursting with energy in their eighties, they made me think that perhaps, if I ate a "whole-food, plant-based diet...centered on whole, unrefined, or minimally refined plants" I too could be ultra-fit and bursting with energy.

For a long time now I have been mostly vegetarian, using meat only as a "condiment," in deference to my spouse's carnivorous preferences.  And since coming to Wake Robin, which offers a mind-boggling variety of food choices, I have almost completely banished animals from my plate.

I have not, however, abandoned animal products.  It would not be impossible to eat a vegan diet at Wake Robin, but it wouldn't be much fun.  However, since the Forks Over Knives diet "excludes or  minimizes (italics mine)" animal products (as well as highly refined foods, and oils),  I figured that a reasonable compromise would be to eat a daily vegetarian meal in the dining hall, and make the two other meals, which I prepare in the cottage, as vegan as possible.  And while I was at it, I would give up desserts other than fruit.

The problem with a vegan diet, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's time consuming.  It makes sense that, if you take the heavy foods--meat, fish, eggs, cheese, butter, oils, sugar--out of the diet, you have to put a lot of light foods in.  This means a lot of shopping, and a lot of chopping.

The Forks Over Knives site gives a plethora of vegan (as well as mostly gluten- and sugar-free) recipes, all of which sound tasty to me.  But oh, the lists of ingredients!  A seemingly simple  Burrito Bake includes shredded potatoes, nutritional yeast, onion, bell pepper, zucchini, crimini mushrooms, a handful of beans, a lime, basil, garlic powder, oregano, chili powder, pepper flakes, diced tomatoes, black beans, and fresh cilantro.  But that is nothing compared to the Shepherd's Pie, which calls for twenty-seven ingredients.

Being an enthusiastic undertaker of projects, I can see myself heading out to the store with a two-page shopping list.  I can even see myself doing all that chopping--I rather enjoy chopping, actually.  But what gives me pause is what to do with the leftover ingredients. 

Say I wanted to make a simple batch of vegan blueberry muffins, which calls for twelve Medjool dates, non-dairy milk, oats, millet, baking powder, cardamom, applesauce, lemon zest, blueberries and walnuts.  I assume that Medjool dates, whatever they are, come in packages of more than twelve, so that after eating the muffins I would be left with a considerable number of highly caloric dates which, like the non-dairy milk, won't last forever.  I can envision the jar of applesauce moldering in the back of the fridge along with the forgotten remains of the zested lemon.  The oats, blueberries and walnuts wouldn't be a problem to dispose of, but I have my doubts about the cardamom.  As for the leftover millet, maybe I could buy a canary--canaries will sing for millet.

Still, the radiant health and exuberant vitality of Drs. Campbell and Esselstyn made such an impression on me that I'm willing to give this almost-vegan way of life a try.  I'll share my impressions along the way--if suddenly you see me posting daily, you'll know it's working.

My Carnivorous Childhood

I grew up on the Mediterranean diet--the real thing, not the kinder, gentler version popularized in the U.S. by a culinary and nutritional establishment compensating for decades of over-consumption of beef products.  In my Mediterranean diet, we ate animals twice a day.  (Here, I am counting eggs--which we typically ate for dinner--as animals, since my grandmother's hens ran with roosters, which meant the eggs were fertile.  Michelle B. and her legions will applaud me for this, I'm sure.)

Most of these animals appeared on my plate with many of their attributes intact:  fresh little sardines with eyes and heads and fins and tails;  whole baby octopuses, less than two inches long, swimming in my favorite soup;  squid, cut into rings but slathered in a magnificent black sauce made from their ink, which made the serving platter look like something from Goya's black period.  And the mussels, clams, crayfish and tiny lobsters that inhabited the Sunday paella, complete with the black, gray, ecru, or translucent shells in which they had lived.

That was just the first course, for which my mother shopped in Barcelona's fabulous fish markets.  It was my grandmother, from her farm in western Catalonia, who sent us the birds and beasts we consumed next.  My grandparents kept pigs--huge, pink, sausage-shaped beasts--and slaughtered  a couple every autumn.  I was never present at this ceremony, but I loved every ounce of the results:  rich, greasy serrano hams (today one of the most expensive foods in the world);  crisp little cubes of fatback that brought to life a serving of beans;  and garlands of sausages made by my grandmother's hands:  butifarra blanca, butifarra negra (blood pudding), xorisso....

My grandmother kept rabbits--cheap to feed, prolific, and a source of high-quality protein.  In the summer, I would watch her slaughter one in the courtyard of the farm house.  It was like a speeded-up film sequence:  grab rabbit by hind legs, stun with blow to head, cut off same.  Hang body from hook.  Cut circles around hocks, and somehow (my vision was hampered by my short stature) yank off skin in a single motion, like a glove.  Cut open abdomen, scoop out entrails, call cats to feast.

An hour later, a rabbit arm lay on my plate, reddish-brown and transmuted by a sauce made with mortar-chopped almonds.  Next to the arm lay a special treat for me, the single child among twelve adults:  two small bean-shaped organs, what my grandmother called the ouets, the little eggs.  Were they kidneys, testes, ovaries?  I never thought to ask.  Were they good?  I don't remember.

There were chickens, too, and for Christmas, a couple of capons instead of a turkey.  Not a part of these was wasted.  Breasts and thighs and legs were brought to the table, but while we ate them, the next day's soup was simmering on the stove, made up of chicken backs, and heads, and legs.  For some reason, the comb---la cresta--perhaps because of its decorative merits, was brought to the table.  And yes, served to me.  Can't remember how it tasted.

What else did we eat?  Very little beef.  No milk after age two.  Gallons of olive oil, entire braids of garlic, ovenfuls of crusty bread to soak up all that oil and all those sauces.  Seasonal vegetables in moderation.  Every month or so, there was a religious holiday with its own special dessert, which you always bought ready-made:  turrons at Christmas;  tortell for the January feast of the Epiphany;  crema catalana on St. Joseph's day, in March;  la mona de Pascua at Easter....Otherwise, it was fruit and nuts.

If she knew what I eat today, my grandmother would be mystified.  For some reason, I have become reluctant to eat anything that looks like an animal.  Anything remotely anatomically accurate, I'd rather do without:  chicken knees, turkey wishbones, the blood of a cow oozing off a steak.  Is this hypocrisy?  Does it mean I'm o.k. eating meat--say, "chicken tenders"--as long as it doesn't remind me of the death of a living being?  Do I think eating meat is immoral?

I want to make it clear that I don't think eating meat is morally wrong--or I would be a hypocrite for drinking milk and eating eggs, which condemn to death 99.9% of the males of the species.  I do think that consuming the meat (or the eggs, or the milk) of animals that have been kept in inhumane circumstances is immoral for those of us who have the resources to make other choices.

I don't know what's right--do you?  It's possible that some people's physiology makes it impossible for them to thrive without daily servings of meat.  On the other hand, other people's preferences/philosophies/aesthetics make it important for them to avoid animal products.  This is a uniquely contemporary debate:  never before have such choices been available in such abundance.

How do you feel about eating animals?

Requiem For Three Hens

Last Monday I did my least favorite farm chore, one that I dislike even more than cleaning the chicken house:  I took my three oldest layers to be slaughtered.

They hadn't done anything wrong.  They'd just grown old--perimenopausal, to be exact.  They still laid an egg every once in a while, but not often enough to warrant feeding them through the cold months, at which time their laying would decrease even more.  I had anticipated this back in the spring, when I bought eight day-old pullets whom I expected to begin laying in the fall.  This has now happened, and these teenage hens are laying like a house on fire.

The perimenopausal hens were only three years old--time passes quickly if you're a chicken.  They were Buff Orpingtons, big-boned, blond and plump like Walkyries, with calm dispositions seldom found in the operatic world.  Orpingtons are a "heritage" breed.  This means that they don't lay as early or as long or as consistently as modern hybrid hens.  They also exhibit a strong tendency to become broody, to sit on eggs for weeks at a time in the hopes that something will hatch.  They don't care that there's no rooster in sight, and the eggs are therefore infertile.  All they care about is sitting with Buddha-like concentration on the nest, keeping all the other hens at bay.  This results in broken eggs and in eggs laid in odd corners of the coop by desperate hens.  And while a hen is broody, she doesn't lay eggs.

I hope I have convinced you by now that slaughtering the three Buff Orpingtons was the rational and sensible thing to do.

In our many years together, my husband and I have occasionally slaughtered a chicken or two.  The slaughtering part we do beautifully, choreographing each step so the chicken is hardly aware of anything (I keep my hand over her eyes the whole time).  The plucking and gutting and cleaning, however, are a mess.  I know that this is something that our grandmothers did routinely every Sunday, in the interval between church and dinner, but the reason they did it so efficiently is that for them, unlike for us, it was routine.  When we did it, it was hard, sweaty, smelly, uncertain work ("What is this thing on the liver?  Don't nick it, it might be the gall bladder!").

Slaughtering our chickens at home, I believe, is the humane thing to do.  The chicken dies in familiar surroundings, by familiar hands--as happy a death as a chicken can hope for.  So in opting to take my hens to be slaughtered elsewhere, I was thinking not of them, but of myself.  My comfort and convenience, because I am human, overrode the chicken's quality of death, because she was a bird. This was not a decision I felt good about, though I made it anyway.

The night before the slaughtering, in the dark, I went into the chicken house and plucked the three hens, one by one, from the roost and put them in a roomy, ventilated box without waking them.  First thing the next day my husband put the box in the car and we drove a few miles to the farm where they were to be killed.

The friendly chicken-slaughterer offered to do them right away, while we waited, so we handed him the box and went to sit in the car.  We listened on Morning Edition to news of other slaughters all over the globe, and eventually the man emerged with our hens in plastic bags, pre-cooled and looking just like supermarket chickens.  We handed him $9 and took the hens home and put them in the freezer.

It will be a while before I can look at them again.  But one day I will put them in a pot with onions, celery and carrots and simmer them for twenty-four hours.  Then I will strain the broth and freeze it, and bone the carcases and save the meat for the dogs.  And our three friendly hens will become part of our bodies.

But I'm not there yet.  Right now, left to my own devices I would become not just a vegetarian (because milk and eggs imply the slaughter of bull calves and rooster chicks), but a vegan.  And I would steer clear of all the writings that prove that plants too are sentient, want to avoid pain, and want to live and prosper.

Tales Of The Porcupine: Final Chapter

As you may recall, a porcupine has, for the last several months, been doing his or her best to eat the post between our garage doors.  We have tried to dissuade him with hardware cloth, through which he has chewed;  with sprigs of mint, which he has ignored;  and with a humane trap, baited with salted apple slices, which ditto.

Finally, two weeks ago, my spouse rigged up a motion detector which turned on a radio inside the house whenever anything passed in front of it.  Then he retrieved the .410 shotgun with which his Southern grandmother hunted pheasants in the Al-Can Highway in 1944, and propped it just inside the front door.

Days passed, and whenever people came to the house, the gun was secreted out of sight.  Also during that time, dozens of birds flew in front of the motion detector and caused the radio to come on, but only for an instant.  Of the porcupine there was no sign, and we theorized that the motion detecting apparatus had accomplished what hardware cloth and sprigs of mint had failed to do.

Then, last night, shortly after midnight, a BBC interview with a British novelist roused us from sleep.  The radio was on, and it was staying on.  It was the porcupine.

My spouse leaped from the bed, ran downstairs, loaded his grandmother's gun and stepped silently into the moonlit night.  It was the porcupine all right, big as a Cocker Spaniel, gnawing away at our garage post.  Not wishing to cause further damage to the post, he first shooed the creature away, and then, Bam!  The porcupine was no more.

What between the blast of the shotgun and the thought of the porcupine lying dead in the moonlight, it took us a long time to get back to sleep.

This morning, after breakfast, my husband carried the beast into the woods, down the hill and beyond the swamp, where I hope he will provide some other creature's tasty dinner (but who eats a porcupine?) and not be found by our dogs.

I have a B.A. in Biology, so I felt honor-bound to take a look at the corpus before it was taken away.  It's amazing how squeamish I've become over time.  There were quills all over the ground, a little blood, a wound I could hardly bear to look at.

We're having broccoli quiche and a green salad for dinner tonight, and going to bed early.

Sentient Beings Everywhere

I read somewhere--I think it was in a book by the herbalist Stephen Buehner--that when a field of clover is being overgrazed by sheep, the plants increase their production of phytoestrogens, which causes the sheep to miscarry.  At the moment, our fields are still covered in snow, but when it thaws and I resume walking in them, I will be apologizing to the clover with every step.

I don't know about you, but over the last few years, I have become painfully sensitive to the feelings of the beings that surround me.  I was eating lunch with a friend today, and a skinny fly-like bug landed next to her plate.  She brushed it off the table and stepped on it--and I had to hold back from mewling some insanity like "oh, the poor little thiiing!" 

I used to laugh at people who carried house-invading bugs to the door on a paper napkin and set them free, but I have joined the ranks of the bug liberators.  I do kill some bugs, such as the big, hairy wolf spiders that scuttle indoors in the fall.  But I do it in self defense--I am so creeped out by the things, that knowing that there was one in the room with me would drive me mad. 

Pretty soon, it will be ant season in our kitchen.  Legions of tiny workers will stream over the counter and across the sink in search of a grain of sugar, a molecule of fat.  Armed with a spray bottle of soapy water, I will stand above them and rain death upon them.  (The soap clogs up their breathing holes and coats the pheromones they leave on their trails, so other ants can't follow.)  But I hate doing it.  I feel like some merciless god wreaking havoc on the innocent.  For all I know, and I think of this every single time I spritz the ants, there is an angry and much bigger deity standing in the clouds above me with his finger on the nozzle....

Of course I am not alone in this.  Our generation thinks very differently about animals these days.  Where as children we tolerated the idea that free-roaming family dogs regularly got run over and were as regularly replaced, now we hire dog nannies to walk our soul mates so they won't be bored while we're away at work.  At dinner, many of us think about the animal whose body part we are about to dig into.  Many have stopped eating animals altogether.

And some of us--though we tend to be quiet about this, lest we be sent away from the table--think about the plants who were once alive and now lie limp on our plates, anointed with the blood of dead olives and the crushed remains of the fruit of the pepper plant.

The Little Calves

I see them no matter what direction I take whenever I leave the house: the calf hutches aligned close to the road, next to the big cow barns. A calf hutch is a plastic structure the size of a very large dog house, with a big opening on one end, and a little gizmo on the side to hold a large nursing bottle. Each hutch has its own pen, made of sturdy wire attached to the front of the hutch. The pen is about the same size as the hutch.

Every few months, as I drive by, there is a new batch of little calves in the hutches. Fresh from the womb, they sparkle in the sun, their white spots spotless, their black spots almost an iridescent blue. Their bodies are short, their legs long, and made for running. They stand in their little pens and their big eyes watch me drive by. In cold weather, the calves wear little coats.

As the weeks go by, the calves grow bigger in their pens, less cute, and dirtier. Their white spots are smeared with manure, their black spots look dull. Then one day I drive by and all the pens are empty.

I know that until I am ready to give up not only meat, but cheese and eggs as well, I will be supporting an industry that kills 50% of its infants--the cockerels and bull calves that don't lay eggs or give milk. I also know that the farms I drive by are family farms struggling to survive under increasing burdens of high taxes, low milk prices, and federal and state regulations.

Some day perhaps science will come up with a way to ensure that eggs contain only female embryos, and that dairy animals give birth to females only. Until that day, however, I hope that we can at least strive to give the males destined for slaughter a decent quality of life.

I once visited a dairy farm near one of Vermont's ski resorts. It was small--fewer than 200 cows--and run if not on strict organic principles, in as natural and humane a way as possible. The farmer, who also happens to be a premier cheese maker, told me that, whereas in a "regular" dairy operation cows are spent by their fourth birthday, his cows produce milk until they are thirteen or fourteen years old.

But what about the calves, I asked? There, he said, he was experimenting with "baby beef." The reason that veal calves are confined in hutches and pens is that if they eat grass or hay their flesh loses that prized whiteness. They are kept on a milk-only diet and slaughtered at eight weeks, the age at which they can no longer survive on milk alone. Calves destined for baby beef, on the other hand, can eat grass and hay, and thus need not be confined. Their meat is not pale white veal, but is nevertheless tender and flavorful.

The farmer took me to see his calves. Because it was winter, they were inside the barn, but would go out on pasture, he said, in the spring. There in a roomy pen, bedded in abundant hay, were five or six calves of different ages, as well as a couple of sheep. It was cold inside the barn, and the calves were asleep snuggled together, like a litter of puppies. It was, despite the chill, a heart-warming scene.

I don't know how that farmer's experiment with baby beef turned out. I did read some months later that his cow barn had gone up in flames, and all the neighbors had gotten together and built him a new one. I should check up on him one of these days, and see if he is still in business.