The annual Goschenhoppen Folk Life Festival happens this week–Friday and Saturday–and for the first time ever, neither of our now-grown children can participate. Nonetheless, my husband and I will be at our respective craft demonstrations, showing visitors how people a century or two ago solved the requirements of living in the region before there were highways, diesel shipping lanes, power grids, electric appliances, and cars–but after Europeans displaced indigenous people and started sawing down the forests. We had a taste of pre-power grid life ourselves early this week when a fast-moving storm made us lose electricity for 24 hours.
Visitors to the festival often marvel that they “never knew that’s how it was done.” They buy pickles or jam in a jar in the supermarket and figure it’s all made in a factory somewhere (which is true, today); meat comes packaged, and who thinks about how rope is made, or flour, or candles? One part of the festival demonstration includes butchering. I won’t post a photo (though there is one here), since some people get uncomfortable about it, but if you eat meat it might be worth remembering where it originated. In the late 1990s, I wrote the following poem about it. I may as well post it today! But the image I am adding is instead a nostalgic one of my daughter and me at the potato candy stand in 2016.
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Hog Butchering Demonstration, or Deconstructing Breakfast Cleaving bone and muscle beneath tough hide, the man with the knife starts his slow disassembly, describes cuts of meat, holds out intestines, uncoiled: “used for sausage casings”— removes the bladder to rinse and inflate— children’s game, an old-time balloon. The carcass resembles nothing the audience usually sees whose meat arrives in cellophane processed—slices, nuggets. The children, especially, have never watched the studious and useful taking-apart of a body, never witnessed anything dead but the flattened, nearly unrecognizable bodies of road-killed opossums. No comparison, this 600-pound hog, hooked and dangling, its interior opened with jigsaw precision. The man with the knife is a revelation. They stare fascinated at the butcher’s truth carving an exact history of their breakfast bacon. ~