Mechanically Separated Turkey
Creative nonfiction your way out of it
Today I had an annoying bureaucratic problem that I made worse through impatience, and then panic. I needed to find identity documents but all of these are stored away in the same drawers and shelves that contain the photographs of my dead human loved ones, and all the vet records of dead dogs that really should be thrown away, not to mention all the folders of personal writings that I've produced as part of being alive. Ug! The Real Life Writing of Real Life! There is just piles and piles of it. Old cards, letters, diaries, notebooks, magazines, zines, print outs.
Where, in all this, was my birth certificate? After tearing my house apart, I ordered a new license in order to order a new birth certificate and promptly found the old license, now no longer valid because blah blah, pneumatic tubes criss-cross the sky, form a knot to cradles Baby Kafka in a crown of thorns.
I thought, catastrophically, of the various implications of not being able to produce these ID documents and then thought, fantastically, of chucking everything on a bonfire and taking my Eat Pray Love season (I can make up some new verbs en route but the pitch stands unchallenged)
Over the weekend, I saw piles and piles of the new Elizabeth Gilbert memoir stacked in airport bookstores. My neighbor on the plane ––a white, married and employed 30 something woman, presumably with much to be grateful for and much to run from–– was ripping through it. The memoir weaves an inspirational story from Gilbert's love affair with post-punk drug-fiend hair dresser Rayya Elias as the latter dies of cancer.
I know something of Rayya's story, not via Gilbert but because I once unsuccessfully propositioned Rayya's nephew and his best friend during a comparatively diminutive NYC bender of my own. Perhaps to soften the rejection, one of them gave me Rayya's not so best-selling autobiography Harley Loco - a memoir of hard living, hair, and postpunk from the Middle East to the Lower East Side which plots her life from Syria, to Detroit, to NYC. It’s full of bitchy comments about cheap dye jobs and dry, funny lines like 'I was a full blown garbage head by then', and 'everything about Kim was wrong for me, not least that she was straight and engaged'.
In one memorable scene Rayya heads out to St Mark’s Place early to pan for gold in the street trash of last night's revelry. From the litter she retrieves a toy gun. Later, in a bodega/drug front, a shop assistant thinks it's real and hands over a stash of coke. Harley Loco is a memoir about a loose and unusual life. Elia’s tone is tough, arch, problematic. The message is: ‘you will never be as cool as me’.
Gilbert's All The Way to The River, on the other hand, is like Eat Pray Love, a memoir come self-help organized around––as Jia Tolentino put it in The New Yorker––'the premise that Gilbert, a woman who is profoundly and obviously exceptional, could function as a blueprint for the ordinary woman.' For Gilbert our lives are the same even when they share no common characteristics, because we all experience the same human emotions. Gilbert’s tone is kooky, funny, problematic. She’s skilled at pulling universalisms from very specific situations. At her most compelling she's a wellness Hunter S Thompson, writing her way out of grandiose side-quests. She gives well storied hot mess and makes bank by cladding it with ‘spirit’.
Once, a writer friend whose proposed book project led them to some shocking discoveries that could both ruin their family and were too hard to fact check with legal remarked: 'I can't creative nonfiction my way out of this one'. It's a sage and important observation leading to a counter-question posed, Carrie Bradshaw style, 'what can you creative nonfiction your way out of?'
It’s a long-con, but I’ve found I can creative nonfiction my way out of big life panic by researching contexts, talking to people, making connections. I have not, ala Gilbert, been able to creative nonfiction my way out of a day job and the associated banal but no less panicky hours spent sifting through documents in order to maintain the bureaucratic self.
Such is life. Sometimes you dance on the bar, sometimes the bar dances on you.
This week's essay is Mechanically Separated Turkey from 2017, in which I try to creative nonfiction my way out of eating and living with animals. Also, tourism. These are popular topics in the genre as they are profoundly destabilizing and also fun.
This substack has a name now, too. I hope there is something useful for you in this week’s Deep Archival Action.
Mechanically Separated Turkey (2017 TLB)
1. Pumpkin spice is not extracted from pumpkins. I thought about this for a long time before I googled it. A pumpkin is a bland thing—how do you get spice out of it? This question might make a few things clear. It’s Halloween. I am in America. I am not American. Being a foreigner manifests acutely at the level of consumption. The money is different and so are the things you buy with it. Many interactions are framed through purchases. You feel better about yourself in a place you don’t know when you discover what you like to buy and how to buy it. I do not like pumpkin spice, though I do share that intense craving for local and seasonal traditions. I foolishly roast and eat a bitter, watery, carving pumpkin.
Outside a juice store a woman offers me a sample of pumpkin smoothie. I take it and smile gratefully (in America I act grateful for many things I would not be grateful for at home—catcalls, unsolicited advice, advertising flyers). The smoothie is predictably revolting but unpredictably sweet. I feel guilty as I throw away the little plastic cup. Part of being a tourist is hating yourself just a little more than you do at home. This is your ethical responsibility.
2. Earlier this year the Australian current affairs show 7:30 reported on an investigation into the dog meat trade in Bali. Australian holidaymakers were unwittingly eating dog satay on the beach, they revealed. They lead with this fact—the tourists, the swindle—as though it were as or more shocking than the horrific details of how the dogs were tortured and killed. There was outcry. And then there was outcry over the outcry. Who were these tourists but privileged Aussie louts living large on their dollar and demands? The tourists were hypocrites, people argued. If you would eat a cow, why would you be shocked about eating a dog? Wasn’t this touristic privilege writ large––begrudging poor locals the living to be made from catching, killing and cooking neighbourhood dogs? I quaked. I eat poultry. A chicken is not the same as a dog, not even the same as a stray or nuisance dog. If I am a tourist, can I still make this statement? Do I give up the right to separate and categorise when I leave my cultural lexicon?
When I was eighteen, I asked my boyfriend if he would still be vegan when he travelled overseas. Of course, he said. I was shocked. Wasn’t food such an important cultural experience? And wasn’t the point of travel to be immersed in this experience? His answer was immanently sensible: “It would just be one part of the culture I wouldn’t know.”
I have been to Bali and eaten chicken satay. Part of being a tourist of any kind is not knowing. Tourism is a theatre of unknown, or partially known, or ignored things.
3. “You are in the food bowl of America, I gather,” writes my friend in an email. At home politicians use the term ‘food bowl’ rhetorically when insisting Australia could feed all of Asia. According to the ABS though, after we produce 93 per cent of our own food, there’s only enough left to feed 40 million people in foreign markets. To me that seems like a lot. But the population of Indonesia is 261 million, and Indonesia is only one part of Asia. In the USA there are more people, more farms, and more specific metaphors. There is a corn belt, a wheat belt, a chicken belt and a bread basket. The corn belt, which runs through the Great Lakes, is the highest photosynthesis site on earth. Absorbing the sun, the corn emits a subtle glow. We can’t see it with our eyes but the corn belt lights up in satellite images, proclaiming a dietary glut to space.
Technically, I am staying in the salad bowl. “The salad bowl of the USA!” I tell my friend. Her food politics are nostalgic-omnivorous. She is against factory farming but talks about ‘being able’ to kill animals herself. We discussed this in her kitchen before I left. I could not kill an animal unless I was in a survival situation, I said. She would eat a dog if it was killed humanely, or if it was a cultural thing. It was a strange conversation to be having because we were also making arrangements for her to care for my foster dog while I travelled to America. The dog sat at my feet. I scratched its chin. I would never, ever eat this dog whom I love or any of her species, though I feel they should be free to eat mine, if the need arose.
My friend used to collect strawberry paraphernalia and the remnants of her collection are all over her kitchen. Yesterday I watched workers with dusty jeans running baskets of strawberries across the fields of the Salinas Valley. It looked like hard work. They were probably being paid by the basket. I tried to pick fruit once—mangoes, in the Northern Territory. It was 40 degrees and my brain felt swollen like bruised fruit. Mango sap burns, but the foreman preferred it on my hands than on his product so gloves were forbidden. When I picked mangoes I was a tourist. I had a romantic understanding of fruit picking and seasonal labour. But I did not have to pick mangoes to support myself or my family so I left at the end of the day. I went back to Darwin and drank and took amphetamines. My hands itched. The skin bubbled. In the heat, in my drug haze, I ran cold water over my hands and the skin split and peeled like shrink-wrap on grey sausage.
“I’ve eaten so many strawberries I’ll probably get a rash,” I tell my friend in the salad bowl email.
She has the dog now, and the dog has a rash that might be from the dried food she eats, or it might be from an invasive weed known colloquially as ‘wandering Jew’—though I’ve heard there’s a push to rename it ‘happy wanderer’. Some plants are transplanted for harvest, some are loathed for thriving. Plants migrate, as do birds and ocean mammals. Other animals travel via export, live or dead. I could not export the dog as a companion on this trip, and so I resent all of the tiny dogs at the airport, happily taking their domestic trips, their fur a vehicle for seeds and insects.
4. In California, I am friends with a Russian geneticist. She studies wild horses.
“Brumbies,” she says, in her thick Russian accent, laced with mirth. “Symbol of the American West.”
In fact, wild horses in North America became extinct hundreds of years ago. The brumbies that are there now are descendants of the horses of the Spanish conquistadors.
“Post-domestic,” I offer.
“Yes! They are post-domestic,” she writes this down. (Outside my discipline a post prefix can still be a revelation.)
The non-native, post-domestic symbols of the American West are flourishing on the plains, my friend tells me. They are eating all the grass. But Big Agriculture needs this land for livestock. You can’t farm and eat the non-native symbols of the American West. But you should shoot them, say lobbyists, because they are invasive pests. Like rabbits in Australia, I think.
Canhorses be like rabbits? The answer is different if you are a conquistador, or an agricultural lobbyist. My friend works on the genes of the horses. If she can prove that the genes of these non-native post-domestic brumbies are the same as the genes of their extinct ancestors, then they will be re-nativised. They will still be pests, but they will be native pests. The horses will be. like wombats, or possums.
There is a pile of buffalo wings on the table between us. Buffalo, the American Bison, nearly met extinction in the nineteenth century but these wings are made of chicken. We talk about American food. We are both eating well and gaining weight. We like the abundant fresh fruit and vegetables (more novel for her than me) and the many varieties of pre-prepared supermarket foods equally. She suggests a very good pork-based product from a big yuppie supermarket chain and I confess I don’t eat mammals. People usually laugh when I tell them this. It is inconsistent hocus. But not to a biologist.
“That makes sense,” she says. “You are a mammal.”
She eats cows. But there is no way she would eat a horse. No way. Consumption isn’t moral, it’s emotional. We have emotions everywhere, right across state lines. Australians eat more meat than any other nation. The average is 93 kg per year according to the World Economic Forum. That's 3 large dogs per year. If I wanted to explain this to an American I would say ‘more than two quarter pounders a day’. Lots of things are measured in burger patties here.
If Australia is a bowl of anything, it’s lamb. Beef is our biggest agricultural export but we only produce three per cent of the world’s supply. We are the second biggest supplier of lamb. Lamb is so delicious it was the last mammal that I quit eating. This, despite Hungry, my childhood pet lamb. Hungry was bottle-raised, and came to believe he was a dog. He jumped up and chased cars. When Hungry grew to full size I became very afraid of him. A sheep could not be a dog to me, but Hungry disagreed and would leap up to lick my face, toppling me into the dry grass. Only domestic sheep show pain when you dock their tails. Only domestic dogs bark. Do post-domestic horses still communicate with humans? Will the non-native post-domestic brumbies cry when they are captured and culled? Will they feel betrayed?
5. It’s a relief to be in a salad bowl.
In Santa Cruz the front yards are fenceless andbrimming with fruit and vegetables. I walk around my neighbourhood eating. The figs on the corner of Emeline and Berry are dry. When I arrive it’s a tomato jungle. A month later there are persimmons and grapefruit everywhere. The lemons on my neighbours’ tree are Meyers, my favourite. The tree is cut into a decorative cube and I have gotten over my xenophobic fear that every American is sitting behind their partially drawn blind, aiming a sawn-off at their front yard. I fill my bag with lemons. I am an invasive species. I am thriving in the salad bowl. I think about migration. I could bring the dog over and stay forever.
In California there are pet dogs in the malls, in the fancy department stores, on the Greyhound bus. They look well-treated. Spoiled even. Because they go everywhere they have become unflappable. This abundance of dogs feels linked to consumption, too. People talk about the dogs they have or want using terms of breed hybridity I have never heard of. There are litters of abandoned sneagles, horgis and chugs with adorable little vests that read ‘I’m a rescue’. These animals are consumed but not through the digestive system. Since I started working with rescue organisations at home, I’ve decided it’s wrong to sell an animal for profit. This is incompatible with meat-eating unless meat and animal remain in their discrete categories. I will keep eating some meat and keep rescuing dogs and keep feeling the way I feel even though it is incompatible. I will hate myself as is my ethical responsibility.
In San Francisco, I saw a guy who was either carrying a kitten in a brown paper bag, or a shockingly talented mime. I was reminded of that encounter a week later when a dirty blonde stoner in Pacific Mall asked me, chillaxedly, if I “needed any kittens.” “No!” I exclaimed in horror.
He shrugged and moved onto the next passer-by who answered, as casually as he was asked, “No, not today man,” as if he were handing out flyers or collecting for charity.
Giving out kittens isn’t a problem, I suppose, if we assume no one is throwing them onto the train tracks or dunking them in glue or carrying them around in lunch bags. My feelings about animals are linked so closely to my feelings about humans that sometimes they are impossible to distinguish.
6. I love the big yuppie supermarket chain here, the one my friend recommends. All the check-out people are so attractive. They wear Hawaiian shirts and give out pumpkin risotto samples. I sing along to Neil Young and The Beach Boys and fill my basket with peanut butter cups and gourmet single-serve frozen dinners that do not make me feel lonely at all. Opening them and putting them in the microwave feels like participating in a local tradition.
I also love the abundance of turkey. Turkey is rarely an option in Australia. I used to get so excited when Mum roasted a turkey at Christmas. She was a vegetarian but always cooked meat for her child. I have not had roast turkey since I was that child. In America there is turkey bacon and turkey steak, you can order a turkey quarter pounder and know something about the culture without consuming any mammals. A turkey is not a cow but it can behave like one on a grill.
When I first arrived in Santa Cruz, two turkeys bailed me up in the car park. They chased my car across the lot like dogs, pecking at the shiny hubcaps. Later, at the university farm, I watched three students trying to catch a turkey. I never knew turkeys were so agile, could fly so high. They are prehistoric and fierce. Famously, Benjamin Franklin advocated the turkey as a “much more respectable bird” than the designated national bird of America. While the bald eagle had “bad moral character” and was “too lazy to fish for himself,” the turkey was “a true original Native of America[…] though a little vain & silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.”
In the big yuppie supermarket I read the back of a packet of frozen turkey meatballs. It lists the usual things like maltodextrin and corn syrup and onion powder. My gaze snags on the main ingredient: mechanically separated turkey.
I suppose most separations are mechanical, at least to some degree. To eat, to travel, to think, we need to agree on categories and parts. We cleave bodies. We divide and destroy. We thrive. But this phrase—mechanically separated—is enough to make me put the turkey meatballs back. I don’t want to look it up. There are some aspects of human culture I do not want to know.
NB: This 2017 essay originally appeared in The Lifted Brow, a small magazine that published a lot of amazing writing. TLB was produced using the mostly unpaid labour of young people. In 2019/2020 the publisher was outed for various abuses of power including sexual misconduct. A new board made serious attempts to save the venture but ultimately the community that held it together fell apart and the magazine and its book publishing imprint ceased production. It was fucking heart breaking.