Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [97]
I take great satisfaction from watching the pigs strip nettles and eat grapevines, or churn through the quack in their pen, nibbling out the tender white shoots so that next year the soil has half a shot at growing something more useful. I like to think some of that chlorophyll is somehow working its way into the protein. One begins to understand the cachet of “grass-fed beef.” Beyond the poetics, the stuff really does taste better, and regularly commands a premium price. That said, in the interest of stretching the food dollar, we happily feed the pigs whatever they’ll devour, which is pretty much anything. When Anneliese heard that a local bread distributorship made its expired goods available for sale as animal feed, she called and got on the list. Basically you pay ten bucks and take whatever’s on the shelves that day. I figured we’d get a few loaves, and that’d be good. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the back room and saw rack on rack. Now I’m pulling into the yard, and the rear of our thousand-dollar mini-van (refusing to utter the m-word aloud, I call it the fambulance) is full from the floor to the windows. The variety is astounding: white bread, whole wheat, cinnamon raisin bagels, English muffins, hamburger buns, frosted cinnamon rolls, and bags of mini-doughnuts. I park the van in front of the garage, where it is visible from the kitchen window, and go into the house, looking for Amy.
I find her at her schoolwork. “Hey, snort-burger, when I went to town I bought some bread. I forgot to bring it in. Would you please do that?”
“Sure!” she says innocently. She is a sweet child, and therefore vulnerable.
“It’s in the back of the van,” I say. The minute she is out the door I wave Anneliese over to the window. “Watch this!”
The poor kid. Happily she trips up the sidewalk and across the drive. At the rear of the van she pulls the handle, and as the hatch rises to release the smell of yeast and reveal a stack of baked goods the size of a refrigerator, her jaw drops just as I hoped it might. For a full three seconds she just stands there gobsmacked. Then a bag of hot dog buns slithers off the pile and lands at her feet and she turns back toward the house, fists on her hips and a squinchy smile-frown on her face. I rush out to meet her, and by the time I get there she is laughing.
It will take us weeks to feed all of this and we don’t want it to mold, so we jam as much of it as we can into our chest freezer, which is about half empty this time of the year. I cram it down (fascinated by store-bought bread after years of Mom’s homemade, my brothers dubbed it “Kleenex bread” because you could take a whole loaf and scrunch it into a tiny wad), but even so we have quite a bit that won’t fit. Anneliese keeps out several loaves of whole wheat and two bags of cinnamon-raisin bagels. Because they are technically expired, every single bag has been slashed with a razor—here in the land of overregulated plenty, people food becomes pig food at the stroke of midnight—but we trust our noses and are not picky. I make a mental note of which corner I stashed the doughnuts (those, I was careful not to crush) and liberate a tray of the cinnamon rolls.
Amy and I take two bags of bread down to the pigpen. They bite a few slices, then drift back disinterestedly to the wallow. When we come back later, most of the bread has been eaten, but a few slices remain. This is not typical piggishness. The following day we put the bread in a bucket, add water from the garden hose, and stir the whole works into a doughy mush. As soon as it splatters into the feeder they dive into it, smacking and snuffling and blowing bubbles, and in three minutes it is all gone. From then on, we always add the water.
I enjoy making trips to the feed mill in Fall Creek, and I enjoy lugging the bags down to the feeder, and I enjoy the sound of the feed slipping from the bag and the feel of the feed dust on my forearms, and when I replace the feeder cover and walk away I enjoy feeling that I have provided for my animals and