Bona Fide

Africa has made me a bona fide meat eater.

Over the summer I ended my compulsory-if-you’re-going-to-call-yourself-a-liberal-college-student vegetarian stage, so I can eat meat in moderation now. The timing is perfect, because my family devoted our Christmas Eve to killing, exsanguinating, shaving and curing a pig raised on the Faraja farm not 200 yards from our house.

While living in Senegal, my religiously vegetarian college roommate, Molly, had to make some big exceptions to her non-animal diet. She woke up one day and realized there was no bleeting outside from their pet goat. She asked where her four-legged friend had gone: it was dinner the night before. Another time while she walked to and from school she witnessed a camel being butchered; freshly killed on the side of the road in the morning and hunks of meat strung up on market stalls at the end of the day. The human-animal bond in a developing country is one not so dependent on fraternity or friendship but on necessity and survival.

My brother - the voracious hunter - was in his element to kill the pig. Dad and Will walked right in to the stinking, squealing pen, chose their meaty target and grabbed her hind legs. Mom, Ann and I huddled behind a shed while they cracked the animal in the head with a hammer and dragged it to a tree where they hung her upside down and slit both carotid arteries.

Of course, quite a few of the farmers huddled around pointing and smiling about the prospect of smoked pig for dinner. After she bled out and the coagulated blood sloshed in to the bucket below, Will cut a long, straight line from her gut to her throat from which he extracted the steamy entrails. Dad gave a mini biology lesson on the limp lungs, tubular esophagus and bile- producing gallbladder. We gave the gilt’s head and intestines to the happy farmers and trudged back up the hill to our house reeking of the newly slaughtered beast.

Then we spent Christmas day shooing the dogs away from our succulent smoking swine.

Dedicated to the 2009 Lewis R. French crew, who knew the importance of a balanced diet: Swine, Lobstah, Swine.