The Hardcore Mennonite: It Was Not a Good Day for Pigs

Warning: if you are easily grossed out, this might not be a post for you.

It is very rare that my alarm goes off before six in the morning and I am excited to be awake. Yet, there I was, bright eyed at 5:45, piling on layers of old clothes - on the first day of Thanksgiving break. Why?

Tradition - that of my family, and of others.

Before I was even a thought in back of someone's mind, my grandfather was unhappy with the amount of fat in the hams he bought to smoke. Logically, he decided to raise his own pig. Since I can remember, butchering on Thanksgiving is a family affair at my grandparents' Arkansas home. The cleaning, anatomy lessons (we are a medical family, what do you expect?), the scrapple, chasing each other around with various "gross bits", wrapping the meat: I have memories of all of it.

However, for various reasons, including the fact that my grandfather is now almost 90 years old, we have not butchered a pig in several years. He did raise some, but they were taken to a butcher rather than butchered at home. Lucky for us, we have recently gained connections to another, rather closer and larger, pig butchering.

So, for the first time in a while, our Thanksgiving included pork rather than turkey. Yesterday morning we bundled up and headed to my boyfriend's grandparent's farm. When we rolled in the driveway at 7:30, the affair was in full swing: one pig being scraped, two others already down, and numbers four and five waiting on the trailer. Not being prone to shyness, I grabbed a knife and jumped in.

Let me tell you, this was a fine-tuned process that we simply did our best not to slow down. Once dead, the pig was scalded, scraped, hung, gutted, rinsed, and halved. Once this was done, the halves were brought into the garage where each household sectioned and cleaned their pig to their liking. My jobs included scraping, carrying organs to the "to be cooked" bucket, cleaning kidneys, skinning and cubing lard, watching the lard cook down, and grinding, mixing, casing and marking sausage.

But I can't talk about my jobs without also including "eating" in that list. Oh yeah, that is a duty. Before the pigs were even in the kettle, I was asked "you hungry?". Hunger really has nothing to do with it, though, when you have access to a table holding bacon-wrapped water chestnuts whoopie pies, veggies, apple cider, and three kinds of pie. A little after noon, one could hear the word being passed around: "The kettle's off, help yourself". The few interested in a liver sandwich (yes, I tried it, and it was good!) got theirs first, but everyone gradually gathered around the tray that the meat chunks were being forked onto. Each grabbed a potato roll and filled it with the bits they chose before adding butter or salt and digging in.

Once lunch was over, it was back to work, as we cranked out sausage, pon haus, and cracklins. By the time all the accoutrements were washed up and all the meat was packaged, it was around five o'clock. We talked, looked through the museum of farm equipment above the garage, gathered our share of the pig, and headed home. All were tired, but very happy.

Whether or not this sounds like fun, and regardless of how grossed out you are at this point, try to see how beautiful the bigger picture is. I'm not even talking about how cool it is that in a world of processing and lack of understanding as to the origin of what is on our plates, a family decided to go back to the home-grown way. I'm thinking of the joy of tradition, of teaching and learning, of an accomplishment that you can taste for months ahead, of coming together and working alongside each other. That is something to be thankful for - unless you're a pig.