The Lives of Others

If you could boil our global problems down to seven words, they might be these: we don’t see where stuff comes from. We grow up staring at screens without ever seeing the coal plants that power them,  speed down motorways without ever visiting the oil derricks that fuel them, and eat the equivalent of several animals a year without having to wrestle them or smell blood. Like most things in our lives, our food just magically appears, brought by strangers.

That last example hit home for modern Irish several years ago, after the government tested frozen burgers from a major supplier and found that some of the alleged beef was actually horsemeat. The day after the story made headlines the top grocery chain here lost half a billion dollars in stock, and the next few months saw a reporter’s dream of press conferences, apologies, arrests, pledges and retests.

Of course, horsemeat is not harmful, and little different than cow, as evidenced by the fact that no one can tell which one they ate. Nor is it illegal; rather, the emotional punch – and inevitable punch-lines – that came from the idea of eating Black Beauty obscured more important details, like the fact that governments and stores can’t tell where much of the meat came from -- an especially sore point in the UK, which had already dealt with outbreaks of hoof-and-mouth and  mad cow disease. Restaurants and stores here proudly advertise their “Irish beef,” not only to support local farmers but to distance themselves from such disasters. Now, it turns out, it might not have been. (“How the horsemeat scandal unfolded – timeline,” Guardian newspaper, 15 Feb 2013.)

We accept buying meat from strangers for the same reasons we buy everything else in our lives from strangers these days; because we trust that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing. On the rare occasions we associate the food on our plates with actual animals, we tend to assume they must have come from some kind of farm, like the overall-and-pitchfork images of preschool toys. We don’t picture the vast mechanised factories of reality, or supply chains so long and cobwebby that we can’t find out what kind of animal it used to be, or in what part of the world.

Consider how strange this would seem to most of our ancestors, for thousands of generations back. For most of them meat was life; while most foods could be grown or picked, meat was the Leibig’s Minimum that forced our primate ancestors to become predators. Their craving for meat transformed the landscape, wiping out the planet’s large animals as thoroughly as an asteroid impact did the dinosaurs, and we now know Neanderthals or Clovis people by their meat-getting technologies. It was the main reason we domesticated animals, and that spurred empires and conquests – the Sanskrit word for “war,” I’m told, means “a desire for cows,” and the ancient Irish epic the Tain Bo Cuailnge involves a nationwide war over a single breeding bull. The very word “meat” meant “food” in Old English, so inextricable were the two.

Yet such concentrated nutrition comes with risks; many of our human diseases come from domesticated animals, from the Stone Age up to (perhaps) the COVID-19 pandemic. When Europeans first encountered the Americas and Australia, they inadvertently brought ten thousand years of accumulated diseases to which they had built up immunity but the natives had not; wiping out 95 per cent of the native population in the largest mass death in human history.

Meat means life and death, so many of our religions bind us with meat taboos -- Jews and Muslims ban pig meat, Hindus cow meat, and Catholics all meat on Fridays and through Lent. Our rituals invoke the body and blood of the Word made flesh.

Because meat was so precious, most of our ancestors appreciated a lot more variety than we do: frogs and snails, pigeons and ducks, liver and heart. Old women in Dublin talked about making the cheapest meats – sheep’s heads and cow’s heads – into stew, or buying rabbits for pennies, or giving the children the heart and liver as a treat, or munching on pig’s feet in the cinema. On farms men killed one of their pigs every fall to feed them over winter, all the local wives gathered to turn it into sausage and bacon, Francis Quinn said, and “there was none of the pig went to waste.”

Most people today could never endure such honesty about what we are eating. “The implications of having a pig in the window, head and all, could not be done nowadays,” said butcher Eugene Kierans. “People cannot tolerate the idea of what they are eating, yet they can turn on the telly and watch people getting blown up... I find it most peculiar.” (DocArchive: A Butcher's Tale – 2009)

In rural Ireland, most villages also have a butcher, and mine now features a sign about how he buys only from the local farmers. He actually gives me more meat than I ask for, knowing that I like the bones and cast-off meats for soups. Everyone here used to get their meat from people like him, if they didn’t slaughter it themselves; it was only recently that the globalised supermarkets, with their shelves of cheap frozen meat and opportunities for fraud, began to proliferate. In my native USA, though, one would have to rebuild the entire infrastructure – local farmers to local shops within walking distance to homes – from scratch.

But if we want to know where our meat comes from, we will need to backyard chickens, vacant-lot pigs and cows, and people who know how to make the most of them. And we need more people like my farmer friend, who I met bleary-eyed from staying up all night with a calf. He gives his animals a better life than any they would have seen in the wild, infinitely better than on a factory farm, before making sure their life ends quickly and painlessly. His small scale makes the butcher more expensive, but that’s as it should be. Meat needs to become hard work to get and precious to eat, so that we again put some sacral value in the lives we take.

Published in Front Porch Republic

 Front Porch Republic is one of the most under-appreciated magazines out there, and I've been proud to write for them since 2009. Today they published my piece about the changing face of farming here. Do check it out. 

A Craftsman's Day

Thatcher in County Kildare.

 

 

When I talk to my elderly neighbours here in Ireland about the jobs they did, or read their memoirs, one of the most striking differences is the enthusiasm for their jobs. They spoke of shaping wood and iron and leather in ways everyone could see and respect. Saddlers and scutchers, farriers and felters, cobblers and cordwainers – even grave-diggers and churchbell-ringers spoke of their jobs with an enthusiasm I rarely see today.

“I jump out of bed on a Sunday morning for my ringing day,” said bell-ringer Leslie Taylor. “I am the elected ringing master, chosen by my fellow ringers who are members of the society. This is a happy coincidence of loyalty and pleasure. I’m one of the people who have in one way or another serviced the cathedral in some way since its foundation in 1038. ... I’d like to die in the belfry … when I’m ringing.”

It’s worth examining why most people in traditional societies spoke so proudly of their jobs and modern people do not, since work would seem to be one area where life has unarguably improved in modern times. My elderly neighbours grew up in what we would consider extreme poverty; Patty Bolger said the local factory paid ten shillings (about 30 euros or $36 in 2023) per week, a fraction of the US minimum wage. Decades further back were the long hours, unsafe and toxic surroundings, and other horrors we remember from Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair, which caused workers to form unions and force through labour laws. Again, many things have improved, and for that we should be grateful.

Victorian factories and coal mines, though, were a historical anomaly, appearing only with the discovery of fossil fuels. Before the mid-1800s in Britain, and the mid-1900s in Ireland, most people were farmers or craftsmen like the elders I interviewed. Also, when people today compare them to modern jobs, we are weighing them against our own office jobs in the First World, not those of the near-slaves that made our clothes and laptops.

If we compare our eight-hour day in a cubicle to the 15-hour day of a Victorian factory worker, both working corporate jobs for hourly wages, of course we come out far ahead. As Jaques Ellul pointed out, though, we can’t compare our office job to the day of a village craftsman, who chooses his own tempo and rhythm, who mentors and is aided by apprentices or children, and who stops to chat with passers-by. We can praise the progress from 1850 to 1950, he said, but “we cannot say with assurance that there has been progress from 1250 to 1950. In so doing, we would be comparing things which are not comparable.”

Ellul was assuming that a traditional craftsman would be working 15 hours in a day off and on, and of course you might argue that most traditional peoples were farmers and not craftsmen. Yet historian James Thorold Rogers estimated that medieval peasants – whom we think of as the most menial peoples of the most backward age – worked no more than eight hours a day, a figure backed up by several other studies. Labourers rarely worked an entire day for a lord; half a solar day’s work was considered a full working day, so peasants who worked sunrise to sunset were credited for two days’ work. Medieval Christians,  moreover, had so many holidays – in the literal sense of “holy days” – that Nora Ritchie calculated they only worked half as many days per year as modern Americans. 

In Dublin into the 20th century, craftsmen continued to keep such flexible hours, as former master cooper Daniel O’Donnell recalled. “Coopers were well-paid craftsmen,” he said. “... you could go in to work whenever you liked provided that you could make your own week’s wages for yourself. You made so much for each cask. And you could go home whenever you wanted.” Walter Love, who drove a cart around his rural area, said that “the thing I liked best of all was the freedom. You were your own boss .. I was tired at the end of a hard day, but I was usually happy and when I think back the thoughts are usually happy ones.”

More information:

Walter Love, The Times of Our Lives, p. 24

 James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), 542-43. 

H.S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 104-6; 

Douglas Knoop and G.P. Jones, The Medieval Mason (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 105; 

R. Allen Brown, H.M. Colvin, and A.J. Taylor, The History of the King's Works, vol. I, the Middle Ages (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1963); 

Edith Rodgers, Discussion of Holidays in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 10-11; 

C.R. Cheney, "Rules for the observance of feast-days in medieval England", Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 34, 90, 117-29 (1961); 

Nora Ritchie, "Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II", in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, (London: Edward Arnold, 1962).

 

Sowing the fields

The farm year began as the crisp winter days began to grow and warm, when Mark McGaugh remembered taking the horses from the stables to the local blacksmith – whose father and grandfather were the village smiths before him – to shoe the horses before putting them in front of the plough. “The aroma still lingers of the moment when the smithy first tested the red-hot steel to the horses’ hooves to ascertain if it was a correct fitting,” he said. “Those steel shoes were essential for the animals to get a grip in the earth as they trudged along turning the deep heavy soil onto its side.”

The plough needed to be painted, sharpened and oiled, and set at the right depth for the crop. “To the amateur onlooker the process of ploughing appeared to be simple, but there had to be some technical preparation beforehand, as the headland area needed to be measured out in order to give the turning space to the horses at the end of each furrow,” McGaugh said. “The positioning of the two wheels of the plough determined the depth of the furrrow, and the depth was influenced by the crops; sugar beet or potatoes both required deeper soil, while turnips could thrive on a comparatively shallow drill.” (Around the Farm Gate, 97)

When the plough and horse were ready and relatives had come by to help, he said, “the pristine lea field would be scored with the precision of a surgical knife. As the curlews [birds] soared in ever increasing numbers on the exposed subsoil, the very heavens seemed to cry and lament. The solitary figure of the farmer against the enormity of the cumulus sky presented an awesome spectacle. Presently the unspoiled green field would be transformed into a canvas of burnt umber.” (Around the Farm Gate, 135)

When Marrie Walsh’s family readied to sow their wheat and barley, her job as a child was to fill the bags her family would wear around their waist, reaching in and flinging seeds all around them to “where the fresh soil was waiting to receive and nurture it,” she said. Such actions were once so familiar that when new technology appeared, people explained them with farming metaphors. When radio was invented, the signals spread in all directions from a tower like seeds scattered by Walsh’s father, so people described it using the same word; they were “broadcast.”

“It was a joyful sight; a biblical scene,” she said.“Man sowing the seed, throwing hope into the air, hopiing that when it fell that the God-given Earth and combination of the elements would yield a good harvest in due course.” (Irish Country Childhood, 122)