Wendy Without Borders: Field Course Themes Pt. 1: Food

Introduction/Itinerary

Hello friends! I'm [temporarily] back online, and I must admit its been a stressful return to the city. It's loud and smelly and I had a lot of emails to attend to. I sit here having completed my first of three 3-week long field course expeditions with so many thoughts and stories and pictures. Instead of listing all of the activities we did, I'm going to try to focus on two themes: food and culture.

[Author's note: This post turned out way long, so I have split it into two parts. Also, there is some talk of pig guts, not graphic though.]

Just so everyone has some context, here is a brief itinerary of my field course:

10/7-10/13: Live and Learn at the Upland Holistic Development Project (UHDP), an NGO that runs and agroecology demonstration and resource farm and works with local communities for capacity building.
10/13: Travel to Chiang Dao, a subdistrict of Maerim. Stop at Bahn Dang Nauk for a community meeting and then hike to Bahn Dang Nai where we will live and learn for two days.
10/15: Hike BD Nai to Bahn Huay Pong
10/16: Hike Ban Huay Pond to a temple, drive to Chiang Dao and take Song Tows to Bahn Mae Meh
10/17: Midcourse seminar at Fair Earth Farm, the farm of our teacher Ajan Jeff
10/18: Travel by van to Mae Ta, live and learn with people there.

I know there are a lot of confusing terms in there. Essentially Thailand city-planning goes, Jamwhat, Tahmbohne, Amphur, Moobahn, or Province, District, Subdistrict, Village. Anywhere you see Bahn, it means a village (though village can also mean neighborhood or area). All of our studies this course were in the Chiang Mai Province. Additionally, all of our stays were home-stays except at Bahn Huay Pong where we stayed in a long house.

Food

Though we read many relevant articles throughout field course (and carried them all in a giant textbook through the whole course), the Omnivore's Dillema, written by Michael Pollan, was the bulk of our reading on this course. Having no other leisure books, I immeidately began reading and quickly became immersed in Pollan's writing and ideas. On the bus ride up to UHDP, I counted how many products on the ingredients list of my snickers came from corn, something Pollan discusses in Chapter 1. From Day 1, my emerging question for this course was, "Where does my food come from?"

This is not the first time this question has entered my brain. Summer of 2010, I read Jonathon Safron Foer's book Eating Animals in in 2013 I heard a presentation by Dr. Melanie Joy, author of Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pig, and Wear Cows. Each experience led me to a brief stint as a retail vegetarian, but I always inevitably returned to meat, letting the voices of disgust and protest fade away to a partitioned area of my mind.

To know the truth of our chemically sprayed vegetables and factory farmed animals is uncomfortable and unappetizing. Eating meat, but even eating in an industrialized food system, requires "an almost heroic act of not knowing, or now, forgetting" (Pollan, 84). It requires significant cognitive dissoancnce. In the past, I'd always managed to keep that black veil between my knowledge and my eating habits so I could continue enjoying my meat. I went into the agroecology course with the goal of removing that veil and the cognitive dissonance.

UHDP was a great place to start my food journey. After introductions and activities about the agroforest and organic farming (including making compost and natural bug repellants) on Monday and Tuesday; Wednesday, we took part in a pig slaughter.

Wednesday morning we woke up, ate breakfast then went to clean and feed some of the many pigs UHDP raises. By 8:30 in the morning we were standing in front of our pig.

My friends saying hello to our pig.

The whole process is rather simple. First, the pig is hit with a bat and knocked out, next his throat is slit and blood drained into a silver bowl. The pig is then carried to a metal sheet where hot water is dumped on him to ease hair and top-layer-of-skin removal. The butchering begins and the pig slowly transforms from animal to meat.

Students could take part in a number of ways, but the UHDP staff took care of the more technical parts of the day so that the pig would be killed as humanely and quickly as possible.

I could go into more details, but for this moment, I won't. By Wednesday afternoon students and community members were working together to prepare a delicious meal and the smell of BBQ wafted through the air. Throughout the day, I had concerns about my ability to eat dinner, but any concerns I had disappeared with the first cheem (taste) of meat.

Thursday, it hit me. The day started off with a really cool activity, "Food from the Forest." Along with UHDP staff, we went into the UHDP agroforest to gather edible food for making lunch. My group's job was to gather bamboo. The bamboo can be cut and used to cook rice in as well as cut thinly and used for twist ties. Bamboo is the coolest. We also had to gather banana leaves for a variety of uses in preparing the meal, mostly as containers for lop, a Thai minced meat dish that we cooked in the banana leaves over the fire.

Banana leaf!

The rice goes inside the bamboo with water.
The banana leaf acts as a plug and the rice gets steamed.

I was hanging out by the fire waiting for the food to cook when a Mae came up to the table with a giant metal pot of pork rinds.

Wanting to help, I grabbed a spoon and started to help stir the congealed mass of skin and fat, but the smell and sight were too much and I walked away feeling queazy. I started to flash to the killing and butchering and bloody parts of Wednesday and feeling queazier and queazier. By the time lunch was done, a feast of pork, pork rinds, frogs, catfish and rice--all gathered by us from UHDP--I couldn't bring myself to eat any of it. I couldn't even eat the rice, the physical act of chewing disgusted me. I excused myself and slowly walked to our cabin. As soon as my head hit the pillow, tears came.

Rationally, I understood. Killing a pig serves multiple families meat for several days, especially since people who kill the pigs use every part of the animal, even parts people in the US would usually throw away. This pig had been realised for food. It had lived a good pig-ife at UHDP and we killed him humanely, giving him dignity even in death. Despite knowing all this rationally, I was upset and felt like vomiting.

Michael Pollan also kills a pig and feels delayed remore and disgust. Disgust, "the fear of incorporating offending substances into ones body" is an emotional response due to evolution. It is meant to keep omnivores from eating food that would make us sick. Pollan accounts his disgust to the sights and smells of pig guts, something humans shouldn't eat, but then he goes farther; quoting Paul Rozin, Pollan writes that eating animals, "confronts us with the reality of our own animal nature."

I think this is where my disgust came from. The killing process is messy, bloody, violent, and even barbarics as we club the pig over the head and throw our machetes full force onto chopping blocks. All of the UHDP staff readily admitted that they disliked the killing, and only 1 of the 3 staff we worked with had ever even actually done the clubbing and killing part.

I went into the course wanting to remove my veil and once I did, I was't sure I made the right choice allowing myself to be so vulnerable.

Quoting Peter Singer, Pollan writes that we can either "stop eating animals, or look away." Here in Thailand, I am trapped between these two choices, unable to commit to either, but maybe there is another option.

In Bahn Huay Pong, we happened to be there on a day of celebration. We watched as several families took part in a pig slaughter. Watching the families doing everything so skillfully, it seemed so normal. In Mae Ta, my family had been given meat from their family that had recently killed a pig and all of our meat from the week there was from that pig. In Thailand, where I can neither look away, nor stop eating meat, maybe I can look closer. Maybe I can understand where my food is coming from and see the value in knowing and thus enjoy the meal even more.

This is the conclusion Pollan ends up reaching in his book saying that meals based on nearly perfect knowledge of the food could be the perfect meals. For now, this is my conclusion as well and I have been so thankful for The Omnivore's Dillemma for helping me through my food journey.

Agro course has been about far more than meat though. I've learned about native species of Thailand and growing forests to collect non-timber products like medicine, food, and household goods. I've eaten locally rasied and harvested, fish, milk, rattan, bamboo, chili peppers, passion fruit, palmello, longan, lamyai, banana, black sugar palm shoot, black sugar palm fruit, fishtail palm, pumpkin, beans, cassava (yucca), sugar cane, tea rice, papaya, butterfly flowers (fried!) and many other cooking spices. And those are just the ones that come to mind immediately!

I've picked my own fruit and I can tell you where exactly nearly everything on my plates the past few weeks is from and what the plant it comes from looks like. For some things, I even know the market value, what season its grown in, and how to save the seeds for future growing seasons. I've also been inspired to garden in the future and maybe even have a few egg laying hens.

I also learned a bit about cooking along the way and how to get out of or into any situation with bamboo and chili peppers. They are seriously the macgyvers of plants.

Agro has been super cool in so many respects. Also, I encourage anyone who hasn't read Pollan yet to pick up his book and read it, take a few things to heart, and hit up your local farmer's markets. I know I will certainly be eating more local and organic food in the states because of this course.