Surviving on fat and fire
How ancient forestry and traditional food from the margins can sustain us, plus a brief history of Crisco.
One of our herds browsing the understory of a black locust planting, to be maintained as coppice.
The morning light here is dim yet. No sun has broken, and yet far off cocks crow, triumphantly hollering to the still-slumbering world that they are still here, still alive after a long night of wailing, frozen wind ushering in this most recent cold front. Soon, we will place last night’s greasy newspaper, the remnants of a day spent smoking and pasteurizing fat slabs of bacon, within a brittle nest of windfall twigs and thorns collected from the dead and fallen hulk of a honey locust cast down to earth from its canopy by a summer storm out at the head of the wooded draw to our north. Flames will grow as we offer dry chunks of oak and walnut to the flickering hearth, and soon the sizzle of fat in a hot skillet will drown out the scream of roosters as the sun breaks through. The summer has been long and I’m glad it’s gone. With some luck and enough lard-slathered biscuits, I will be able to keep my pants up without punching a new hole in this belt.
Surviving the winter here will always hinge upon one thing: the provision of calories. There’s nutritional calories, the energy we store in our bodies, provided by fat and carbohydrates, and external fuel calories, present in the wood we burn to keep our home reasonably warm. Obtaining these calories, in condensed form, is a large portion of the work of subsistence living in our context, the end goal of a season spent herding and slaughtering swine, tending to and harvesting from woodlands, salvaging forest floor windfall, construction scrap piles, releasing the wiggling blocks and blobs of lard from hog carcasses.
Lard and firewood, in an integrated land use system like ours, are inextricably linked to each other, as well as to our own survival. The pig, you see, is a woodland creature. Given the opportunity to roam freely, pigs will keep to the woods, for the cover they provide in harsh conditions. The forest floor contains debris to keep hogs engaged, and growing: nuts and seeds, roots, leaves, grubs and worms and bugs and soft duff for snoozing and snoring. Managed carefully, and with the cautious stewardship of humans engaged with their ecosystem, woodlot hogs can help improve management access and break down woodland litter in overgrown areas.
Those of y’all who’ve been following the Almanac this past year will have undoubtedly made note of my fixation of commons land models in Medieval Europe, and the deleterious effects that policies of enclosure have had on access to resources, in regards to grazing, gleaning, and pannage. (My main piece on the agrarian commons is in the archive, available to supporting readers, though this one on pannage is still free to all for about a month.) To briefly retread the topic, landowners in the middle ages, unlike most landowners today allowed peasants and impoverished classes certain rights of land use on their estates to provide the essentials for their survival: spilled grain, a place to graze stock, mineral rights, fishing rights, and among other things, the right to manage woodlands for fuel. Nowadays most grocery chains keep their dumpsters locked. Except for Aldi’s. Thank you Aldi’s for allowing folks to eat your waste.
The policy of allowing peasants to co-manage privately controlled land for mutual benefit of both the ownership and landless classes was inevitably strangled by policies of enclosure. Prior to this time, many woodlands were managed through coppicing, that is the intentional harvesting of timber from trees that will resprout from the base (or higher up the trunk in the case of pollarding). Coppicing is a practice that hearkens back at least 10,000 years, and in many locations has become (until widespread enclosure and the invention of trespassing as a concept) a key feature of anthropogenic ecosystems. In the medieval European woodlands, the combined impact of coppicing and pannage altered wooded areas to allow for light to reach forest floors, supporting ephemeral wildflowers, associated insect partners, and predatory songbirds. This would be an example of how not only human behavior and participation, but larger social and political policies of the time could impact ecosystems in a manner that enhanced biodiversity, as opposed to our current status quo. I should probably also state that I’m not advocating for a return to feudalism (we have enough elected officials already working on that), but I do believe that a return to a commons-centered land use system could yield positive ecological results.
Coppice in Europe was managed for a number of reasons: to provide easy to handle firewood and charcoal fuel-stock, as timber for wattle fencing, withies for wicker work, as tree hay or livestock fodder, as basketry material, and for the general acquisition of long straight poles. There are also examples of coppice and pollard management in other times and places, from Japanese daisugi, to indigenous North American forestry, and even some forms of cinnamon cultivation. In our (somewhat) modern context, coppice wood might well additionally play a role in biomass production, nutrient management, and biochar feedstock, but most relevant to the lifestyle and level of technology we’re interested in modeling here is the potential for coppice as livestock fodder, and a fuel for efficient rocket-stoves and mass heaters.
Anyone who has provisioned firewood for their own survival will certainly have an understanding of the time and strenuous labor required. Splitting firewood with an ax or maul is a young person’s game, a game my shoulders would rather not play any longer. Small diameter polewood, as provided by coppicing, can eliminate the need for splitting, and some mass heater designs can accommodate much longer fuel than a standard wood stove, minimizing bucking as well. Any home built rocket stove or mass heater must be constructed with safety, efficiency, and air quality at the forefront of all other considerations, a subject we won’t be going any deeper into for the purposes of this entry.
Returning to the relationship between swine herding, pannage, and coppice we come across the term coppice with standards. Back to Medieval Europe and Britain in particular, tracts of coppice set aside for rotational cutting were known as coups, and the simplest system of management was to move from coup to designated coup each dormant season and cut all growth down to the stool, or base of growth. Many ancient stools still remain, as the practice of repeated cutting keeps the tree in a somewhat infinite juvenile state. Coppicing with standards is a bit more complex. In order to squeeze more use from these otherwise marginal lands, a few seed bearing trees (oak, beech, chestnut and the like) would be allowed to reach maturity, making for a more diverse anthropogenic ecosystem with a regenerative seedbank (along with resident seed-eating animals) that could host fattening hogs. (You may recall the term “sow of privilege”, which I just wanted to say once again.)
And so, just as we do here today in 21st century Northeast Missouri, one marginal tract of land, commonly owned and maintained tract of marginal land could provide ample hog fat for keeping our pants from falling off in the calorically demanding frigid winter climate, as well as the hearth fuel to render and prepare it as shelf-stable lard.
The arrangement between pig and wood becomes all the more elegant when one considers how the careful and diligent herding of said pigs into otherwise under-managed or neglected wooded areas might benefit these tracts and margins. As prairie stewards, the edges and margins of our fields are a place where woody invasives will often take hold. Even with controlled burning, the high humidity of our woods and draws prevent hot fires from eliminating multiflora rose, autumn olive and honeysuckle from cropping up in the haven of the canopy. A dozen pigs set loose on this terrain will often root, rub, and waller in this brush, clearing vegetation and making it much easier to come through with an ax or saw to finish the job. A similar sized herd of goats can also set back these plants significantly, and to make the relationship altogether more elegant and complimentary, the hogs can be supplemented with whey gleaned from the manufacture of goat cheese, all while the fattened pigs can offer their own fat in the manufacture of otherwise overly-lean goat sausage. Both animals also do a number on poison ivy vines. It’s too bad that both goats and pigs are a pain in the ass to raise.
Fire heats us externally, but to keep the body operating, particularly in the calorie-intensive freeze of winter, human beings must have some fat in and on them… and this is where the marriage of hog herd and woodlot excel, at least in our climate. Marginal woodlands can not only harbor biodiversity, heat our homes and remain rooted for centuries, but they can support the generation of condensed energy in the form of lard.
I think of pigs as being batteries for nutritional energy. When a caloric glut presents itself as excess dairy waste, cull garden produce, or less edible or desirable forms of nutrition like flourishing spring grass, abundant tree mast, and proliferative grubs, a pig, when allowed to behave like one, will consume and store this excess energy for when humans need it most: winter. When the fat and flesh of a pig is harvested, it can be easily kept without refrigeration through rendering and curing.
The forest floor is tidy once our herd moves on, and it is easy to gather armloads of fallen branches and twigs out in the hogged-down duff, the crackling fuel with which to convert the firm fat to stable, refined lard. Naturally, misplacing a herd of pigs in, say, a concrete floored barn replete with severe energy costs and dangerous concentrations of nutrients (hog shit) and a ceaseless requirement for feed imports breaks this cycle, and makes pork and lard nothing more than a cruel and wasteful environmental liability. If this weren’t enough, the labor abuses and exploitation concerning the processing of pork merits deep examination as well, but as the old adage goes, nobody wants to see how the sausage is made.
Shelf-stable fat and protein in the form of pancetta
Nowadays, commercial hogs yield very little lard, as the desired standards of industry have crept ever towards leaner pork, as meaningless as a pig without bountiful, unctuous fat is in the schema of human subsistence and survival (let alone pleasure). How did this product, one of the nutritional building blocks of multiple civilizations (China, Rome, Europe, post-Columbian pre-modern North America, etc…) become so derided and besmirched? Is it all in the name?
Lard, when surreptitiously included in food, is well enjoyed by most who encounter it. But the word, lard, is a little unappetizing, am I right? Think about it. I have no data to back this up, nor any desire for research, but let’s just say a lot of folks enjoy a shapely booty… on themselves, on another. I may be pushing a few boundaries with my readership here, but in a non-objectifying way, sometimes it’s important to have a nice place to sit in a world of hard chairs. Take it from somebody who looks like a frog standing up and needs to run around in the shower to get wet. 15 years ago, the kids were calling it badunkadunk, but I’m out of touch anymore. I do remember watching The Goonies, and what I took from that Spielberg-produced ‘80’s classic is that “lard-ass” is not a nice thing to call somebody. The word lard has an unappetizing mouthfeel, as opposed to the product itself. I’ve often wondered, would lard be more appetizing with a different name? Pig butter somehow doesn’t work. Swine spread? Acorn-fed badunkadunk? Predictably, the drop in lard’s popularity has less to do with linguistic aesthetics, and more to do with industrial chemistry and surplus agricultural wastes.
Going back a century, electric light began to threaten the oil lamp and candle industry. Companies like Procter and Gamble had considerable investments in cottonseed mills, which provided cottonseed oil. Cottonseed oil, contains gossypol, a toxic polyphenolic compound that can be removed through refining, bleaching and deodorizing, with the addition of ferric chloride. At this point, cottonseed oil, a byproduct of cotton production (a whole other can of worms I’m not opening today) can be made edible to humans. In 1907, German chemist E.C. Kayser perfected the process for hydrogenating the surplus cottonseed oil and developed a very lard-like product that he pitched to Procter and Gamble: Crisco.
Prior to industrialization and mass urbanizing movements in the US, pork generally and lard particularly were staples of the common diet for the same reasons they have always been: pigs are efficient, hardy omnivores that can convert scraps into luxuries, and the hygienic and judicious application of salt can greatly improve the keeping quality of their flesh. Over time, the thrifty hog came to be associated with poverty, and perhaps more specifically, black, rural poverty. The marketing of Crisco played off the classist, urbanist notion of lab-produced foods being somehow safer and purer than lard, derived from that filthy and lowly omnivorous beast, the hog. Between the dramatization presented by Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” (intended to provide a critique of labor conditions in the meat processing industry) and general associations with lard and bumpkinism (not to mention the prominent role that pork fat has played in soul food), Crisco was pushed as an unadulterated replacement for lard.
A few decades later, as health and nutritional science became more studied and prevalent in popular understanding, doctors began to warn eaters of the danger of saturated fats and their link to heart disease, further embedding “vegetable shortening” in the American diet, though this view on saturated fats has softened recently. What cottonseed oil does contain is trans fats, which carry some associated health risks as well, though through further chemical processing these trans fats can be reduced in products like Crisco.
Of course hydrogenated oils no longer carry the same appeal as they once did, at least among those who can afford to not consume them. The pendulum swing of public demand is returning towards saturated fats and whole foods, but somehow directing the American diet towards coconut oil, a tropical import. I myself have tried and failed to convert coconut oil eaters into lard eaters in my own circle, but despite pasture-raised lard’s shorter food miles, nearer food dollars, higher nutritional content (pastured lard contains vitamin D and omega 3 fatty acids, unlike coconut oil), and the fact that it is unlikely to be harvested by enslaved monkeys, lard, or swine spread if you prefer, still does not carry the appeal I’d hoped. But if there’s one way to resurrect a potentially valuable food marred by public perception and associations with poverty, it’s probably just to charge a lot more money than it’s really worth. After all, the clean, pure, manufactured top-shelf cooking oils of yesteryear can’t be bought at a Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods anymore, can they? Much like lard before them, they are now relegated to energy-rich fodder for the poor.
It is true that tree crops like hazel and hickory hold massive potential for localized cooking oil production here in temperate North America, though admittedly this would require a considerable shift in infrastructure and investment. I do not write this potential future off, and in my own way have begun investing in perennial food systems, largely by planting these trees. But if that world doesn’t arrive, I will have excellent fodder for keeping my hogs fat, plus more than enough coppice wood to make it through long winters, if we still have those.
In the meantime, like lesser beasts, we will continue to happily eke out our survival here on the margins of the farmstead. Kicking around the draws, selecting a coup of black locust posts to begin coppicing this winter, admiring the roomy, leaf-lined tree houses built by the industrious claws of squirrels who’ve cached acorn seedbanks that may go on to feed future progeny and perhaps even a few generations of well-managed woodland swine, I am comfortable enough in the pressing wind and cold, knowing that the continued stewardship of marginal tracts of woodland like this can keep myself and those closest to me warm, sated, and not dead, even under the threat of all those days of ice, snow and cold sure to come. We’ll be living off the fat of the land, as they say, and specifically the fat of this land. And ultimately, that’s all we really need.
Warmly enough and able to keep my pants up,
BB
Badonkadonkalicious writing, Ben. Stoked to have just discovered your substack. Looking forward to plunging deeper into this one as well as your other stuff.
‘…soon the sizzle of fat in a hot skillet will drown out the scream of roosters as the sun breaks through.’ I read this line and prematurely decided it to be my favorite line from this piece, but then this experience just kept getting better. Opening my mind to new words and practices like daisugi. I had no idea. So happy to remember that there is so much to learn always. Thank you for sharing the pancetta photo. Thank you so much!