Story and photos by Elizabeth Del Negro and John Fonteyn

People might know, but the people don’t say… there is blood on the broccoli. Did I sing that out loud? Discussing this makes me wish we had never mentioned it in the first place. It makes me want to dodge yet another conversation and hide underneath one of those big rocks the Kubota found in the field while I was listening to the Dead. This is vegan country. This is a place of people who care a whole, whole lot about food choices and will let you know in a really strong, very personal way on Facebook. It’s a topic that requires tough skin and a gentle heart.

This is how the story of our hunt for honest meat begins.

It was a Sunday and we were still asleep when we heard loud knocking at the door. I jumped up out of bed and found David Del Nagro, chef in the late ’60s and father-in-law today, gesticulating wildly and pointing into the yard. “There’s a wild turkey in the field, get a blanket,” he shouted. He had come alive and gone primal. When father-in-law comes calling at 6:30 in the morning, I answer. Before I knew what I was in for, I grabbed the nearest bed sheet and went out running, still buttoning my cutoffs.

There he was by the fence-line, a juvenile tom trying to figure out how to cross the road and get to the other side, a classic chapter from Little House on the Prairie: two men crouched, trying to corner an animal with arms up like Where the Wild Things Are. My wife, giving advice from her supervisor’s seat on the porch, went back inside vexed by the scene. Within 15 minutes we came back to the house with puffed up feathers. Ma would be pleased, and Pa was finally gonna get some… turkey for Thanksgiving. The only thing worse than not catching the turkey at all was, moments later, accidentally letting it escape. There I went again flip-flop smacking the pavement running down Rice Road toward traffic, chasing the bird. If the turkey ran across Hwy 150 I would have to let it go. At the last minute it turned and ran up the bank, and even though chaparral, flapping wings and its one free leg were thrashing my arm, I wasn’t letting go this time. This bird was mine. After all, my manhood was on the line. I claimed my prize and named it Mr. Gobble.

If I’m going to eat meat, I want to know what it is like to raise an animal, love it like a child, honor it on the sacrificial stone and butcher it myself. Homegrown, pasture-fed, free-range, local organic meat is now trending not just with folks who read Sinclair’s The Jungle and former vegetarians, but locally and worldwide in a movement called Slow Food. For those who want to slow it down and bring it home, bacon—the gateway meat— may also be the bridge to urban homesteading. I’ve heard people talk in front of Rainbow Bridge referring to the recent rise in meat consumption as a backslide for vegetarians; specifically the faction built on spirituality, health and environmentalism. The one and only time The Farmer & the Cook, a vegetarian market and café, served chicken at a Valentine’s Day dinner, a customer welled up in tears, likening it to the experience of his little sister losing her virginity.

Does there have to be a deflowering to eat your steak and have it too? Perhaps there does. The practice of factory killing and animal husbandry in stock farms has earned an unpalatable reputation, deserving embittered distrust for human beings.

hus·band·ry1

1.   the cultivation and production of edible crops or of animals for food; agriculture; farming.

2.   the science of raising crops or food animals.

3.   careful or thrifty management; frugality, thrift or conservation.

Among these terms—production, science and thrifty management—there is no reference to compassionate stewardship, energetic imprinting or interdependent relationships in husbandry. I think maybe our wives were looking for a little more from us. We must allow for the possibility of those qualities in raising animals and killing them.

It was very Ojai and cosmically inclined that my father-in-law would be the instigator in my first DIY animal slaughter. David worked at the Ranch House restaurant under the mentorship of original owner Alan Hooker. The restaurant first opened in the ’50s offering a vegetarian menu decades before it was cool. The Hookers worked together with the Theosophical Society of Krotona, and David personally catered for J. Krishnamurti’s talks at the Oak Grove. Some years later, the Ranch House is a destination renowned for its extensive wine list, bamboo gardens and prime rib. What would K say? It’s easy to project, but he might not have said what we imagine.

There is a gentleman who walks his wiener dog by the farm in the mornings. He worked closely with Krishnamurti and sat on the board at Oak Grove School. We were talking over the fence about my perpetual ground squirrel problems, when he told me a story that comforted my conscience. Back in the day, the school groundskeeper was overwhelmed by squirrels and the damage they were causing. He had tried to lead them away with no-kill traps, repellants and nonviolent communication. His success was minimal but at least they understood each other. Ground squirrels multiply at a rapid rate and can exceed 100 rodents per acre. Imagine the number of ankle-breaking holes and lawsuits. He struggled with this dilemma and asked Krishnamurti what he should do; K’s response: “Well, sir, simply kill them.”

It might be easy to imagine a life without taking a life, but this doesn’t seem honest either. Everything must eat, and in exchange some things must die. There is blood on the broccoli and on the tractor but also on the bike we ride to the farmers’ market; it’s on the computer where we read recipes like food porn, on the light switch, the kitchen faucet and the cupboard where we keep the knives. California vegetarians tend to have a charge around dead meat in a way California meat eaters don’t about dead vegetables. Publicly eating meat in this town may even invoke shame. I’ve run into folks at the taqueria who I know from F&C; like smokers in an alley, they eat their carnitas fast and guarded with little eye contact. I have accidentally brought a sausage-based lentil potage to a French vegetarian potluck and felt so outrageously uncomfortable that I hid it under the table. When the weather turned cold, I planned an Argentinean-themed farm party; we would have an asado, roast a lamb on an open fire, and use the wood plates we got as a wedding present. We had to cancel. It was October—Vegetarian Awareness Month—and though we eat meat, it would be insensitive.

Sensitivity does not suffice. The no-meat argument is part of an unchangeable spiritual belief system. I did some Wiki-reading on faith-based vegetarianism. The world’s most extreme example is Jainism, where even root vegetables like potatoes, carrots and onions are forbidden because uprooting them kills the entire plant. Here’s Hinduism’s philosophy connected to nonviolence:1

The principle of nonviolence (ahimsa) applied to animals is connected with the intention to avoid negative karmic influences which result from violence. The suffering of all beings is believed to arise from craving and desire, conditioned by the karmic effects of both animal and human action. The violence of slaughtering animals for food, and its source in craving, reveal flesh eating as one mode in which humans enslave themselves to suffering. Hinduism holds that such influences affect he who permits the slaughter of an animal, he who cuts it up, he who kills it, he who buys or sells meat, he who cooks it, he who serves it up, and he who eats it.

Well, if that’s the case, I’m karmically screwed. No wonder starting a farm and working the fields has felt so sufferingly difficult at times. Still, I sort of want to come back as a farmer again, next time with land of my own.

I crave and desire to buy my meat from someone I trust to raise and harvest it in the most conscientious and compassionate way. Or at least someone who is willing to be accountable for all that death, not just some gal in a white paper hat behind a bloodstained apron. Like the boat captain on the river Styx, she’s carrying a heavy load, and I want to know who to thank.

I paid a visit to the newly certified Carpenter Squab Ranch meatprocessing facility (a USDA-certified processing plant in Ventura County). This is profoundly important for a true local meat industry. Prior to this place, although the cow may have been raised in the hills of Ventura, the kill and butchering had been taking place outside county lines—usually as far north as Paso. The packinghouse was collaboration between Carpenter Squab Ranch and the Watkins Cattle Company. Like Odysseus returning from Hades, I wanted to see John and Shane Watkins and judge for myself. When I walked in the door, there were John Watkins and employee Kristi Probst working a deer on a non-USDA butchering day. They weren’t transcendent beings free of karmic debt, but they slaughtered with awareness. That is to say, they accepted the responsibility of a bloody sink.

In talking to both John and Kristi, I got the feeling that they care. They care about what people think about them and their product; about their children and our children eating clean, honest meat; about how many times they wash their hands; about a good, swift stroke of the blade and about how the cow came to meet the slab. They care not because some clipboard and laminate told them they should care and not because someone sent from Washington, DC, inspects the room and probes their packages with a thermometer. They actually care about people having a good steak, a decent burger. They care because they want people to trust a butcher who cares enough. Their hell is the pretense that someone with a badge and some paperwork cares more about their craft— as if someone in a government-owned Prius is more heavily invested in proper, ethical killing than they are. John Watkins looks you straight in the eyes. Shane shakes your hand. Kristi shows you the sharpening steel on her hip and she’s not ashamed to use it.

The hunt for honest meat in Ventura County is not as simple as tracking it in the promised lands of the north. We have neither space nor resources to grow big meat. With the cost of real estate and our proximity to LA, we’re fortunate to hold on to the Oxnard Plains and produce the crops we do. Consider all that celery. I agree with Michael Pollan’s perspective in his book, Food Rules, we should “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Nobody can eat that much celery; but let’s be honest: It’s certainly not worse to eat a little real, local meat than a 1,000-mile, processed Tofurky.

A week before Thanksgiving we found out that Mr. Gobble belonged to a neighbor’s flock across the street. We had to give it back. It wasn’t our favorite punch line, but we understood now why the turkey was trying to cross the road.

Elizabeth Del Negro and John Fonteyn are co-conspirators in farming and writing. She is native to Ojai, he is a Bay Area transplant who found Ojai over a decade ago and is harder to dig out than nut grass. They created Rio Gozo Farm Ventura CSA under the mentorship of Steve Sprinkel, and like the soil, they share the arts of hospitality and good food. Learn more at riogozofarm. blogspot.com dictionary.reference.com/browse/husbandry 2 Walters, Kerry S. and Portmess, Lisa. Religious Vegetarianism: From Hesiod to the Dalai Lama. State University of New York Press. New York, 2001. pp. 41, 42, 61, 62, 187, 191. ISBN 0-7914-4972-6. www.handmgophercontrol.com/squirrel.html