Trauma Farm (7 page)
I had no idea what to do. “Are you all right?” I asked when she finally slowed down. A dumb question under the circumstances.
“Yes . . . yes . . . ,” she gasped. “No . . . no . . . that was extreme . . . . Oh man, I had no idea . . . . Oh, that was awesome . . . .” She finally choked back her shock and smiled shyly at me, embarrassed. “Wow, I had no idea it would be that real.”
“Well, of course. Death is always real.”
WITH LAYERS WE OCCASIONALLY
found ourselves renewing the flock, slaughtering them for soup or stewing birds, then bringing in fresh chicks. Chicks need a hen and a rooster to guide them through both diets and dangers. If it’s a whole new flock, we take those roles, scaring them when we see eagles or luring them to food. Sharon is brilliant at this. She collects worms and beetles and bugs, and drops them into the brood under the heat lamp. At first they are frightened. But there’s always a brave one. A first tentative peck. Then a chase and, before long, a chick fleeing with a worm while being pursued by the rest of the flock darting for the worm. It’s a sight.
Chickens raised by hens often have an aversion to sow-bugs. Someone once told me the birds find them sour tasting. I’ve never eaten a sowbug myself, so I have no idea, but we discovered that we could feed the bugs to young, undiscerning chicks and they would eventually show a real appetite for them, which gave us a laugh and was useful too, because the sowbugs are a menace to seedlings in the garden.
Here, now, standing beside my coop, I’m comforted listening to the clucking hens who always keep one eye to the sky and one eye to the ground where, with soothing conversations, they direct their little chicks to grains and grasses and insects. While I know the bureaucrats are diagramming scenarios for the elimination of all domestic fowl from the open air and the raising of commercial poultry in sealed “biosecure” environments, I also know all is still right with the world when you can stand in the meadow, even if temporarily, and admire the birds living their lives with their fullest attention.
Distantly, down by the pond, the peacock cries merely to honour the sun, and the heron spreads the canopy of his wings, sunning himself like an ancient pope blessing the fishes. The sheep stand a few feet away with a kind of awed, dumbstruck gaze. And I think that somehow in the shade-dappled highlands of the remaining forests of Bolivia or Uttar Pradesh—after we and our chicken factories have all faded into dust and smoke—in that last jungle of the world, there will be the distant crow of the rooster of celebration, and the dynamic flock will begin rebuilding itself again.
F
ARMERS TEND TO
eat their breakfasts late. Livestock are eager for the dawn, and if you have a cow in milk, she’ll be calling. First light is the time to open the corrals, check there’s hay in the bins, release the chickens, confirm no deer have broken into the vegetable garden, fix the overflowing water trough, and so on. There’s always a couple of hours of work in the morning on most farms, though since we’ve designed Trauma Farm to be less schedule intensive, I can write in the morning, and others can farmsit easily when we’re away.
When I’m not writing or there’s an emergency repair in the morning I find that breakfast after a few hours’ labour has more joy than just stuffing the stomach within a half-hour of waking up, and rushing off to work. Besides, as the French say—hunger is the best sauce.
I BOIL A RIDICULOUS
mush. We even have a spurtle—a carved Scottish stick designed to stir mush, which you are supposed to stir clockwise with your right hand or you’ll invoke the devil. Living on the bounty of the raincoast economy I make a show-off breakfast cereal for my health-fanatic friends and family. It consists of rolled and quarter-cut oats, cracked wheat, barley and wheat berries in various stages of cracking and baking (like bulgur or kasha), quinoa, pumpkin seeds, cracked flax and millet, sunflower seeds, and amaranth in small quantities. If it’s a grain it’s in there. Then later, when the grains are cooked, I add raisins and chunks of apple. It’s so rich that Sharon practically goes cross-eyed trying to digest a small bowl. I tell her that’s because she doesn’t eat it standing up with a bone spoon, the way a good Scot should. When I eat my mush with brown sugar and heart-clogging milk and butter, I almost feel guilty, remembering the boring quick oatmeal porridges of my childhood. Also, I know what I jokingly refer to as my “death porridge” is a symptom of globalization. I might be poor by the standards of my wealthier neighbours—fighting to pay the endless debts of a poet—but I’m also pillaging the world, and if I had any real moral qualities I’d be eating my flatted oats cold and plain with water, as a health-conscious friend does, to my horror. Actually, I have several friends who have dodged the standard quick-fix cholesterol medications just by cutting out the fats and sticking to porridge in the morning. It scours the stomach clean.
Generally, we lean toward a Western breakfast, yet I sometimes veer into a version of the dawn meals I ate in the cheap hotels in Beijing, where I was served a boiled millet, cooked all night in enormous pots and flavoured with a weak broth, alongside thin-sliced preserved vegetables that resemble miniature, pickled kohlrabi mutations but are a form of mustard stem, and a flat lump of fried dough. Sharon glances at this meal and flees the kitchen. It looks and sounds disgusting, yet the combination of flavours is exquisite. Its origins are ancient.
If I describe this breakfast to North Americans they invariably react with the same suspicion as Sharon, but I have different food values. I’m still notorious for too enthusiastically hurling a box of Froot Loops out the kitchen window while the startled kids watched in horror. Even the crows wouldn’t eat that cereal, and it took days to decay in the backyard. I’ve become a little calmer over the years, and now I figure you can eat your strange food if I can eat mine, but I still wouldn’t wish that stuff on children.
I had the unfortunate experience, several months ago, of visiting a superstore while I was in a small city on Vancouver Island. I thought I’d renew my millet supply. To my shock, no one knew what millet was, and the store certainly didn’t stock it. Such is the fate of one of humankind’s earliest crops—breakfast, lunch, and dinner for millions. Finally, on my third try with the staff, an elderly store clerk’s eyes lit up. “Oh, you mean food for birds.”
“No,” I said. “I mean food for me.”
She gave me a suspicious look and politely got rid of me. It was apparent I had to find the sole organic-grain supplier in town.
BREAKFAST WAS ONCE A
sip of water at a stream and some scratchy grasses from the south side of a hill. Since then, it’s evolved, like the rest of our inventions—faster than we have. Early hunter-gatherer societies picked at leftover grains and roots scooped from their leather storage bags or chugged down a few seeds when the day began. After we stopped dragging chunks of burnt meat from the fire and nibbling on barely washed roots, breakfast evolved into leftover mushes and gruels in the first subsistence farming communities, whose breakfasts were equally boring.
One can only wonder how many generations of farmers glared at their cold barley mush until someone said, “I need an egg.” Thus began the evolution from those first tasteless quick gulps before a day in the hardscrabble field to the Dutch seventeen-course breakfast that would probably give an Afghani farmer a heart attack. A statistical study shows that what’s now regarded as the traditional breakfast by a middle-class Swedish family involves so many trade and food miles that the earth must be circumnavigated every day in order for that family to sit down to eat.
That ancient, leftover gruel has changed hugely and often for the worse. The world’s poor have even less to eat, and in North America the Walmart generation eats a different cereal altogether: immense quantities of grain are now boiled, beaten, and dried, then pressed into nutrition-free ornamental shapes—the taste provided at the end of the manufacturing process by an artificial flavour factory in an industrial park. North Americans are also eating on the run, either at home or idling in the drive-by at the local fast-food franchise—pumping artificial flavour, sugar, fat, salt, and a spike of caffeine into their bloodstreams.
HISTORICALLY, LOCAL CROPS MADE
for a great diversity of breakfasts that became even more diverse during the era of exploration and world trade that began in the Renaissance. But free trade and the globalization of the multinationals during the past fifty years is now shrinking breakfast fare. Still, breakfasts around the world demonstrate the magic of local produce supplemented by imported foods. Oh, what strange breakfasts we have grown and still eat. There’s falafel, the deep-fried fava bean or chickpea mashes of the Mideast, wrapped in
khubz
bread and slathered in yogourt. In Africa it’s cassava or corn gruel with coconuts and bananas. Cornmeal gruel,
uji,
is often mixed with ground peanuts. In Madagascar you might snack on
kitoza
—dried beef grilled over charcoal—along with your gruel. And in Cameroon you can eat an omelette confected with beans, sardines, and eggs.
West, across the Atlantic, you can drink
tascalate,
hot chocolate with ground pine nuts, sugar, and vanilla. The magnificent
huevos rancheros
are eggs with fried tomatoes;
huevos motulenos
are refried beans, scrambled eggs, ham, peas, and cheese wrapped up in a corn tortilla. Costa Ricans eat
gallo pinto,
or spotted rooster—fried rice and black beans served with sour cream and fried eggs. In Bolivia there’s the
salteña,
a pastry filled with chopped hard-boiled eggs, raisins, olives, peas, and meat. Farther south you can have a
submarino
—steamed milk rich with a melted bittersweet-chocolate bar.
Mushy rice has colonized Eurasia and spread to Africa and Spain. Wild strains exist on every continent except Antarctica. The breakfast of the Chinese farmer usually revolves around leftover rice congee or noodles. I love rice slightly burnt brown in the pot, soaked overnight in a weak chicken broth and eaten, warmed up, with soy sauce in the morning. The same for the gooey noodles. The Japanese sometimes top their breakfast rice with green onions, salmon, ginger-pickled fruit, or roe, flavouring it with chicken stock or miso, as I do. They call this
okayu.
