Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (8 page)

The practice of grilling whole pigs over
wood fires came to the American South with the slaves, many of whom passed through the
Caribbean, where they observed Indians cooking whole animals split and splayed out on
top of green branches stretched over fire pits. Along with this technique, which the
Indians called
barbacoa
(or at least that’s how it sounded to African and
European ears), the slaves brought
with them from the islands seeds of
the red chili pepper, which became a key ingredient of barbecue seasoning.

In the Carolinas the tradition of whole-hog
barbecue has long been bound up with the rhythms of the tobacco harvest, which enlisted
the entire community for a few crucial weeks every fall. After the men hauled the
tobacco into the curing sheds, the women sorted and “poled” the big leaves
on frames, and oak-wood fires were burned through the night to slowly dry them.
Retrieving the hot coals produced by these fires and shoveling them into a pit to
barbecue a whole hog became an autumn tradition, a way to celebrate the completion of
the harvest and thank the workers for their labors. The patient rhythms of hanging and
curing tobacco meshed neatly with the rhythms of slow cooking a pig over wood coals. I
met black pit masters in North Carolina whose own childhood reminiscences of barbecue
are tightly braided with memories of bringing in the tobacco in the fall, one of the
rare occasions when blacks and whites worked, and feasted, side by side.

Though barbecue is largely an African
American contribution to American culture, it has always been equally prized by white
Southerners, most of whom will freely acknowledge that the best pitmen have always been
black. (And were called “pit boys” until uncomfortably recently.) The
arrangement in place at the Skylight Inn—a white-owned establishment with a black pitman
out back—is not atypical. But “good barbecue” has always been one subject on
which black and white Southerners could agree, as the salt-and-pepper composition of the
clientele here at the Skylight Inn attested. Even during the darkest days of
segregation, blacks and whites patronized the same barbecue joints, despite the fact
that, prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, they could not eat their
barbecue in the same dining room. If the best barbecue in town happened to be at a black
establishment, whites would line up at the take-out window; if it
happened to be at a white joint, then blacks would line up at the window. Nowadays,
barbecue restaurants are, in the words of John Shelton Reed and Dale Voldberg Reed, the
preeminent historians of North Carolina barbecue, “a good deal more integrated
than most other places of worship.”

A large weight of significance for any one
plate of food to bear, it is true, but there it all was: the beloved pig, the smoky
traces of the local forest, the desultory rhythms of Southern life and labor, and the
knotted strands of race—all that, and probably more I didn’t know, seasoning this
most delicious and democratic sandwich, one that just about anybody could afford.

And yet. I’m sorry to report that all
was not sweetness and light here at the Skylight Inn. Well, sweetness, maybe: The slaw,
finely ground and snowy white, was tooth-achingly sweet; so was the tea. The cornbread,
steeped in grease, was imposingly leaden, albeit tasty. (Lard will do that.) But there
was something else that threw a shadow over my meal, tasty as it was, something I was
forcibly reminded of by Jeff Jones when he told me a little story about the lard in the
cornbread. It made me realize that the Joneses’ proud efforts to stand their
ground against the tide of modernity had failed in one important respect. Something
had
changed since 1947, and though it wasn’t so easy to see, it could
not be overlooked.

While we were in the cookhouse, Jeff had
mentioned how in the old days he could put a pan beneath a pig roasting on the pit and
by morning have collected all the lard he needed to make his cornbread. Not anymore. Now
the pigs had so little fat on them that the restaurant had to purchase the lard for its
cornbread. His point was that the
hog had been reengineered in recent
years to be a much leaner and faster-growing animal, one that, thanks to genetics,
modern feed, and pharmaceuticals, is ready for slaughter several months before its first
birthday. Jeff didn’t much like the modern hog—it wasn’t nearly as flavorful
as the ones he remembered—but he reckoned we were stuck with it.

“Pigs today, they live their whole
lives indoors, standing on concrete, and they eat only what they’re fed. No wonder
they don’t taste like they used to.” Samuel chimed in: “They’re
all bulked up on steroids, too”—the hormones farmers often use to speed their
growth.

The Joneses seemed to know all about the
brutal efficiencies of industrial pork production; it would be hard not to, living here
on the coastal plain of North Carolina. In the CAFOs that have sprung up around Ayden,
hundreds of thousands of pigs live accelerated lives jammed up against one another in
gridded steel pens suspended over cesspools of their waste—animals, keep in mind, that
are the equal of dogs in intelligence and sensitivity. To make them easier to
inseminate, the breeding sows spend their lives in metal crates too small for them ever
to turn around in. Following standard industry practice, farmers dock their
piglets’ tails—clip them off with a pair of pliers—to create stubs so sensitive
that the discouraged creatures will raise an objection when their fellow pigs, driven
mad by the stress of their confinement, attempt to cannibalize them. I once paid a visit
to such a CAFO—one not too far from here, in fact—and it was a place I won’t soon
forget: a deep circle of porcine hell the stench and shrieking squeals of which I can
still vividly recall.

I suppose it is a testament to the Joneses,
and all the signifiers of an earlier time they have so lovingly preserved, that I was
able to suppress these thoughts and images long enough to enjoy my barbecue sandwich. We
moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry. But there
it is, the question I wanted very
much to avoid since I’d first
learned that the Skylight Inn was serving commodity pork: How authentic could
“authentic barbecue” really be if the object of its tender ministrations was
now this re-engineered and brutalized animal—the modern creation of science, industry,
and inhumanity? Had the Skylight Inn’s elaborate fetish of tradition—the wood
fires burning through the night, the smoldering coals so carefully arranged in the pits,
the old-timey pitman tending to the pigs—become a cover for something very different,
the moral and aesthetic equivalent of barbecue sauce?

The Joneses didn’t think there was
much to be done about the modern pig, and in this they fall very much into the
mainstream of modern barbecue men: By now, “commodity pork” is the rule in
Southern barbecue, and people old enough to remember something better, people like Jeff
Jones, are few and far between. Sure, there are still a handful of farmers in North
Carolina raising hogs outdoors the old-fashioned way, and, as I would discover, their
meat was superior in every respect (yield of lard included). But there was just no way a
restaurant could afford that kind of pork and still charge $2.75 for a barbecue
sandwich. Today, that most democratic sandwich is underwritten by the most brutal kind
of agriculture.

But I guess that, with enough smoke, time,
and maybe a little barbecue sauce, you can redeem any kind of pork, or at least seem to,
because that sandwich did taste awfully good. One way to think about cooking, or the
cooking of meat anyway, is that it is always doing something like this: effecting a
transformation, psychological and chemical, that helps us (or at least most of us) enjoy
something we might otherwise not be able to stomach, whether literally or figuratively.
Cooking puts several kinds of distance between the brutal facts
of the
matter (
dead animal for dinner
) and the dining-room table set with crisp linens
and polished silver. In this, CAFO meat may be just an extreme instance of the general
case, which has never been pretty. “You have just dined,” Ralph Waldo
Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in
the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

The problem is not a new one, and we flatter
ourselves if we think we’re the first people to feel moral or spiritual qualms
about killing animals for our supper. The ancient and widespread practice of ritual
animal sacrifice suggests that such qualms have assailed humans for a very, very long
time. Before drawing knife against throat, the Greek priests would sprinkle water on the
sacrificial animal’s brow, causing it to shake its head in a gesture they chose to
interpret as a sign of assent. Indeed, viewed in the coldest light, many of the elements
of ritual sacrifice begin to look like a set of convenient rationalizations for doing
something we feel uneasy about, but need or want to do anyway. The ritual lets us tell
ourselves that we kill animals not for our dining pleasure but because God demands it;
that we cook their meat over a fire not to make it tastier but because the rising smoke
conveys the offering to the heavens; and that we eat the prime cuts not because
they’re the most succulent, but because the smoke is all the gods really want.

Alone among the animals, we humans insist
that our food be not only “good to eat”—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but
also, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, “good to think,” for among all
the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas. Animal sacrifice has been a way to make
animal flesh “good to think”—to help people feel better about killing,
cooking, and eating animals, which has never been anything less than a momentous,
spiritually freighted, and deeply ambivalent occasion. That might explain why, whether
in Homer or Leviticus, the work of slaughter, butchery, and cooking all had to be
performed
by a priest; these were all equally solemn operations.
Nowadays, we think of sacrifice as a primitive rite, and snicker at the underlying
rationalizations, but the cultures that practiced such rituals before eating were at
least acknowledging that something important was going on, something that demanded their
full attention. Just because we no longer pay that kind of attention when we eat meat
doesn’t mean that something momentous—in fact, a kind of sacrifice—hasn’t
taken place. You have to wonder, who is really the more “primitive”
character here? In our failure to attend to the processes that put meat on our plates,
we moderns eat more like the animals than the ancients did.

This points to something else ritual
sacrifice did for people: It drew sharp lines of distinction between humans and other
animals on the one side, and between humans and the gods on the other. Other animals
don’t clothe their killing or eating in ritual; nor do they cook their food over
fires they control. When people participate in a ritual sacrifice, they’re
situating themselves in the cosmos at a precise point halfway between the gods, whose
power over them they acknowledge by making the sacred offering, and the animals, over
whom the ceremonial killing demonstrates their own godlike powers. The recipe for the
ritual tells us exactly where we stand.