And you thought this was going to be a nice cooking blog about baked goods

(Warning: I'm still fairly blogspot-incompetent, and as such have no idea how to hide parts of posts. Thus, there are pictures of goat skinning down on that there bottom of the post. I find them fascinating, but if that's not really your thing, I suggest you page down with caution until someone explains to me the details of how I'm supposed to place the proper html into the damn post)

This morning, I received a phone call from my father.
“So, is he cute?”
I, oh-so-single, replied (confused), “Who?”
“You know, the guy who you blew us off for"
Oh. Apparently our conversation yesterday did not go so convincingly. When I called to inform him I wouldn’t be able to make it down to the beach to visit, I did so with an “I can’t come down because some kids on campus have got a USDA-approved goat and I’ve got a chance to help them skin and process it! They’re going to use every part of it!”
I guess that’s not what a parent generally expects to hear out of their kid’s mouth. But, unfortunately for my love life, that is indeed what happened, and here I am with a story about a goat and a bunch of college students.
To take a roundabout route: I started this blog with several plans in mind; one of the bigger ones being to explore where my food comes from. Or, considering the limitations of being a vegetarian: where food comes from, in general. My recent literature (namely Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which, by the way, are both informative page-turners, and such good fodder for your next over-educated dinner party. But, I digress...) has reinforced in my mind the idea that a large part of understanding a food chain is understanding where meat comes from. I’ve started to ponder backing away from vegetarianism itself, since the best way to support humanely-raised meat is to buy it, and for the sake of efficiency, consume it. The woman who is feeding Thanksgiving dinner to turkeys has some creative ideas, I’ll give you that, but it’s not really benefiting any turkeys except for the very few she’s managed to rescue and provide for.
But again, I digress. If you’re still reading this, I’m going to assume that you’re here for one reason, and that’s for goat-skinning stories.
We showed up at 11 a.m. on a gray Saturday morning. The skinning was already underway. It had taken some effort to convince the butcher that a group of college students did indeed want a goat with “the pelt on. And the limbs. And yeah, we want the head, too” (and do I blame the butcher for not understanding? Not one single bit). In the end, they had kindly disemboweled the goat for us, given us the guts in a bag, and left everything else intact. Our activity started with incising around the ankles (mid-leg), and the neck. I missed this part, but I assume the actually skinning began around the neck and gut incisions. I’m not sure how much detail is welcome here, but when skinning an animal, the majority of the fat goes with the pelt, and what remains is mostly what gets eaten. The skinning, aided by yours truly, took at least two and a half hours, but at the end of all of it, we were left with a skin and what now looked significantly more like what one might stick on a barbeque and eventually dish out for eating.
It was a motley crew of neo-hippies, my housemates and I, and two international students (leading to what was potentially my favorite moment of the entire experience... Neo-Hippie: “So, did you guys go hunting a lot with your dad when you were younger?” International Student, eyebrow raised: “... No. He’s from Ghana and I’m from India.”). That is to say, few of us really knew how to butcher a chicken, let alone a goat, so when the international students left us to go wash their hands, we made a proper mess of the meat. I’m not claiming to know much about the subject, but I do know that there probably isn’t any cut consisting entirely of the spine and an inch of flesh. But college students will eat just about anything, and the ribs looked pretty damn well-butchered.
We left soon after this, while people were beginning to debate how to best get at the brains, to tan the hide (to boil or not to boil? Hey, well, I figured if you made it this far, you’re not too squeamish for that particular detail).
So, no, this post does not include a recipe, and I didn’t even eat the rewards of everyone’s diligent knifework. But I got more than I expected out of the morning, such as the knowledge that “processing” an animal involves next to no blood, and is much, much less disgusting than most of my interactions with post-processed meat that I’ve had (for instance, slicing deli meats and removing chicken breasts from plastic at the bakery at which I used to work). The goat came from a pasture, I’m told, and the meat was something I had worked on. This was meat that I would have eaten if I had wanted to stick around until 5 p.m. Working with a group of people to prepare a meal of meat hit on something vital and connected to instinct (forgive me my inability to express that without sounding New Age-y to the point of no return). I enjoyed my Winter Break this year because I spent a lot of time preparing food with friends, and this was a logical, if pleasantly extreme, extension of that.
In conclusion, in the middle of all this, our favorite Community Safety Officer walking up and explaining that they’d had a complaint about “a group of students and what seemed to be a... dead animal?” And we shook our heads and said “Nooo, noooo, we’d seen nothing like that”. But my moral, I suppose, is something along the lines of how strange it is that a group of students preparing and using an entire goat is seen more along the lines of ritual slaughter than as communal, celebratory activity.




Photo by the generous and ever-lovely Emily F. Samstag.