The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [181]
Angelo worked with a small cigar clamped between his teeth; the smoke discouraged the flies and yellow jackets, which had taken an avid interest in the dead animal. There were also a pair of turkey vultures circling high overhead, patiently waiting for us to finish. Whatever parts of this pig we didn’t take the local fauna were preparing to set upon and consume, weaving this bonanza of fat and protein back into the fabric of the land. Using a short knife, Angelo made another shallow incision the length of the animal’s belly, moving very slowly so as not to pierce any internal organs. A punctured bladder would give the meat a nasty, ineradicable taint, he explained, and cutting into the colon risked contaminating it with intestinal bacteria.
Angelo talked while he worked, mostly, if you can believe it, about food. As he cut into the thin visceral membrane that held all the organs in the body cavity in a translucent bag, he told me all about ventricina, a dish made in Abruzzi that involves stuffing the visceral membrane with various “noble cuts” of the pig and then hanging it to cure like a salami. “It’s tricky to keep the bag from tearing, but one of these days I’ll make some.”
I could not believe Angelo was still talking about food. The pig was splayed open now, all its internal organs glistening in their place like one of those cutaway anatomy dolls from biology: the bluish links of intestine coiled beneath the stout muscle of the heart, beribboned with its map of veins; the spongy pink pair of lungs like outspread wings behind; and below, the sleek chocolate slab of liver. I’d handled plenty of viscera in the chickens I’d gutted on Joel’s farm, but this was different and more disturbing, probably because the pig’s internal organs, in their proportions and arrangement and colors, looked exactly like human organs. Which is why, I recalled, surgeons hone their skills by operating on pigs.
I held the cavity open while Angelo reached in to pull out the mass of organs, hoping to save the liver, which had a jagged tear across it. The bullet had apparently crossed the rib cage diagonally from upper left to lower right, tearing through a lobe of the liver. But Angelo thought the liver was salvageable (“for a nice pâté”), so he cut it free and dropped it into a Ziploc bag. Then he reached in and pulled gently and the rest of the viscera tumbled out onto the ground in a heap, up from which rose a stench so awful it made me gag. This was not just the stink of pig shit or piss but those comparatively benign smells compounded by an odor so wretched and ancient that death alone could release it. I felt a wave of nausea begin to build in my gut. The clinical disinterest with which I had approached the whole process of cleaning my pig collapsed all at once: This was disgusting.
I still had my arms wrapped around the pig from behind, holding it steady and open, but I needed, badly, to break away for a moment to locate an uncontaminated breath. So I told Angelo I wanted to take a picture of him working on the pig. This was not a picture I particularly wanted (to the contrary), but the time and distance that snapping it now promised suddenly seemed precious beyond reason. I turned away and gulped a breath of clean air, then went off—blessed errand!—in search of Angelo’s camera.
Since it was my plan to cook, serve, and eat this animal, the revulsion at its sight and smell that now consumed me was discouraging, to say the least. That plan was no longer just a narrative conceit either, since the moment I killed this pig I felt it descend on me with the weight of a moral obligation. And yet now the prospect of sitting down to a meal of this animal was unthinkable. Pâté? Prosciutto? Ventricina? Just then I could have made myself vomit simply by picturing myself putting a fork to a bite of this pig. How was I ever going to get past