LIVER REALITIES

     As a youth I never wanted to come home from school to smell bacon and onions cooking on the stove. Those smells were a portent to the dreaded liver dinner. Dredged in flour, fried, and served with mashed potatoes and canned peas and carrots. Each medallion of liver, topped with the aforementioned bacon and onions, was in my adolescent mind, the meal from hell. Mother, in a vain attempt to make dads paycheck stretch, would implore us to try a little bit, but my siblings and I would have none of it. To my unformed mind there was nothing to recommend the dish. It didn't taste like meat, it felt grainy against the tongue, and worst of all it was innards. INNARDS! The stuff from inside the beef.Hotdogs (made from pork by-products such as snout, tail, and the occasional meat cutters finger), or Spam sandwiches (made from even worse parts of the pig) did not repel me like liver. All of my mother's entreaties and no amount of ketchup could induce me to change my mind.

     A generation later I would taste my first Pate', and marvel at its wonderful flavors: liver, garlic, green peppercorns, herbs and spices, a little olive oil. Put it into the food processor, form it into loaves, wrap it in stomach epithelium, bake it in the oven and the result is an epicurean treat.

     It has taken me lifetime to understand this simple food rule: the food served in fancy restaurants is nothing more than peasant food with an attractive plate arrangement, in French: assiette dispositif.

We have lived In such abundance in my lifetime that we have lost track of the frugality of our ancestors. To them there could be no throw-away food. That frugality was packaged attractively for us neophyte gourmet's by Julia Child and other media chefs that were the gateway to the culinary wisdom of those ancient peasant artistes. A great many of our present-day alt-gourmets see no difference between this heritage food, and the tasteless hamburgers or too- salty fries of MacDonalds and its competitors (super-size anyone?) We consume this meal(?) While burning fossil-fuels in our SUVs and throw the scraps out the window. 

     My maternal grandparents, immigrants from the dust-bowl desparation of the midwest, had food serving and preparation habits ingrained in them from the frontier existance of their parent's, and reinforced by their experiences during the Depression and the Dust-Bowl. Everything had a use, nothing was wasted. Each fall, Grandpa would drive up in the mountains to his friend Abe Hoppman's where he purchased one of the pigs being culled. After enjoying some of Abes moonshine he and others fom their social group would kill the pigs, bleed and gut them, then carve them into roasts, porkchops, ribs, etc. Nothing went to waste; the blood some of the stringy meat, fat, and organs, went into sasage which was injected into casings made from the intestines. The ham hocks were salted and dried for soups, the head became head cheese, and the brain used to cure the hides. Nothing was wasted because, living on subsistence farms, they lived on the knife-edge of starvation. A bad crop, too much rain or too little rain, and many more of life's variables, taught them the necessity of thrift. Our distant ancestors, whether from Europe, the Mediterranian, Mongolia, the Pacific Islands, Africa or Central Asia, all had similar survival strategies. Every animal, plant, grain of salt, river or stream had a purpose.

     Millennia ago, someone in Egypt came home from a hard day at the Pyramids and found a jar of grain which had been soaked in a rain shower. Perhaps it had sat unnoticed for several days, and the ambient yeasts in the air had caused it to ferment. Our intrepid Egyptian laborer, unwilling to waste the grain, tasted it. Then he tasted it some more. After several additional tastes of this new beverage, a feeling of elation and well-being came over him. And thus beer was created. Perhaps some day soon an archeologist will find some cuneiform tablets which, when translated, will go something like this:

          Question: What were the last words of the Babylonian.       charioteer?           

           Answer: "Hold this flagon of fermented grain and watch this."

     Early in the development of man, people from widely divergent regions discovered that milk ( cow, goat, musk ox, or camel) that was carried in a pouch made from an animal stomach would curdle as it sloshed around on the beasts of burden. This product was cheese. Many centuries later, someone would discover that this curdling was caused by rennet, which occurs naturally in the stomach. By this time there were countless varieties of cheese. Velveeta is not recognized as one of them. They were enjoyed, not as an accompaniment to crackers and wine, but as a portable source of calcium and protein. A side benefit, the cheese improves with age.

     For centuries in Italy, the pommace (the skins of crushed grapes), was given to the peasant grape pickers at the end of the harvest. There must have been fewer Free-market economists in Italy at the time. After trying several ways to extract the nutrition remaining, someone got the brilliant idea to add some water and yeast and let that ferment. Later on, they ran this through a pot still and achieved an end result familiar to college students. Grappa!

     I present you these examples because food is such a powerful motivator, that we will endanger our lives to obtain it. Until recently there was no throw-away food. Not so today. Especially in America. We are choking valuable land with aluminum cans and plastic containers, styrofoam coffee cups and plastic grocery bags. This human detritus collects even in vast areas of the ocean, where it threatens sea life which would otherwise contribute some of their members to our nutrition.

     We must learn the lessons our early ancestors knew without thinking if our children are to survive us. That everything has a value; we must simply encourage a market.

     Let us re-learn the farming and harvesting practices of our forebears. Let us understand the costs and benefits of our manufacturing practices. Let us treat the people around us, who work in our stores, factories, schools, and yards, as if they too have value.

     Reduce the damage, restore the health and vigor, reuse what we have created, and recycle what can't be reused. We were on that path until a certain president has taken us backward to the 1960s, because it pleases his donors. We weren't excelling at this new ecological understanding before 2016, but we were serious about progressing. Perhaps this low point will cause us to see more clearly. 

     The economists would, in their sterile way, describe this as vertically integrated inputs; the layman would describe this as the building blocks of a healthy future. Whatever our description, let us find the uses for the things we have heretofore discarded.

     There are people like Julia Child that taught us that even liver has a use. Other people can teach us the value of those things that we are discarding. Are you willing to listen?