Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Conversation about relearning the kinship worldview with author, horse-drawn woodwright, and renowned storyteller, D. Firth Griffith. Unshod is a podcast and community that believes to rebel, we must pause, that we live with Earth as Earthlings, that we must approach creativity, curiosity, and compassion in conversation.… but we must approach this ground UNSHOD. This has nothing to do with "saving the world." It has everything to do with leaving the right kind of tracts in the mud.
Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Blood and Fire in The Sacred Grief of Butchery with Anna Borgman
What if adapting to nature's unpredictability could redefine our sense of resilience and beauty? Kinship. Join Anna Borgman and I as we share this raw, visceral journey of blood and harvests to fire and culinary arts. We explore how embracing the honesty of natural forces can lead to a deeper appreciation for the unique trials and unparalleled beauty the land in and around us.
Join our online community to discuss this episode with us and more!
Anna also delves into the complex relationship with wildfires, examining historical fire suppression policies and their unintended consequences. We traverse the emotional and psychological aspects of confronting uncontrollable forces, drawing parallels between land management practices and human experiences with life and death. From cathartic irreversible moments to the transformative power of grief, this episode unpacks the importance of respecting natural processes and the interconnectedness of all life forms.
Anna Borgman: is a butcher and slaughterwoman living in the Jefferson Valley of Montana. She owns Chaos Farms where her partner and her do mobile slaughter, wild game processing, and butchery classes. They also sell eggs and have a small herd of weed-eating goats.
Visit Anna's Instagram HERE and HERE and learn more about Chaos Farms HERE.
And then thinking about what you're saying, that anger is a secondary emotion. It is as though we crave the honesty of these two processes, like the harvest, the metabolism, the metamorphosis, the blood, and then also the fire, which also could be metamorphosis and metabolism and blood. Just in a different way, like the honesty of these two things is not only revealing but like deep, deep, deep, deep down maybe deeper in some than others is like that honest crave for true honesty, fullness I feel like that maybe comes from watching something be destroyed, whether it's by fire or death.
Anna Borgman:You know, watching something irreversible happen and you can't, you can't pretend it's not happening. So that honesty piece, you can't reverse it, you know it's about as true as it gets. Watching something be burned or watching the blood come out of an animal, that's it.
D. Firth Griffith:Thanks for joining.
Anna Borgman:Yeah, thanks for having me.
D. Firth Griffith:I'm excited to chat. I really am. Um, you're in Montana, right?
Anna Borgman:Yeah, yep About an hour.
D. Firth Griffith:What arezeman, an hour west of bozeman?
Anna Borgman:very cool yeah yeah, so like right between bozeman and butte basically got it very cool and what's a little more affordable what's the the structure behind you, you guys, in the middle of this?
Anna Borgman:yeah, this is the house we're building. We, um, we bought a little spot, I think, two years ago and thought we'd live there and it was, uh, turned out to be unlivable. So we kind of I always say we accidentally are building a house and no one can believe that's true, but it was was a complete accident. So, yeah, we're in, I'm sitting in what will be the sort of like spare bedroom office someday.
D. Firth Griffith:So that's awesome One day.
Anna Borgman:Yeah, yeah, it's been. It's been nuts. I mean like I never had any desire to build a house and my boyfriend did. So he's kind of I'm like I designed the whole thing and then he said, I mean he knows every stud and nail in this whole, this whole building, very well. So it's been a project and I think we're about we knocked the other place down about a year ago. So, yeah, we're deep in it.
D. Firth Griffith:Wow, where are you guys living in between?
Anna Borgman:Just well, we have in the spare bedroom basically he uh, jesse, my boyfriend, is a knife maker and he and his dad built a little shed a couple years ago it's like I think it's 8 by 20 or something, 8 by 16, um and he moved that out here and so he built a little lofted area and that's what our bed, where our bed is, and so we've been in that for about a year, the two of us and three dogs, and we haven't had plumbing in a year and oh my god, it's nuts what's the uh?
D. Firth Griffith:what's the landscape around you?
Anna Borgman:it's there's, so the tobacco root mountains are really close, um, and then the jefferson river goes right past us but we have four acres, we have a canal, but other than that it's like native grasses and super rocky and a bunch of cactus everywhere. Wow, yeah, it's pretty interesting. It's weird it feels like high prairie but we're in a valley, so it's kind of cool. I've never lived I'm from Oregon originally and kind of grew up, you know, in the forest and I've never lived in a place like this, where it's a learning experience every day, trying to figure out what will grow, what won't grow, what I should. You know what we should be doing, if anything. I mean, everything's super dry. There was a grass fire about half a mile from us two days ago, I think. And it's interesting being in the grass and, you know, having grown up kind of like right by national forest and being scared of wildfires growing up, and then, uh, now you know thinking like, oh, we'll be safe out here, and then not even being safe out here, it's kind of wild.
D. Firth Griffith:So the fire reaches where she reaches. Exactly.
Anna Borgman:It's everywhere.
D. Firth Griffith:Seems to be the case. Yeah, we're. I mean, we're in the neck of fire season for you guys, aren't we?
Anna Borgman:Or are we just tailing off maybe? Um, hard to say, I don't know. It's, I mean, the forecast stays pretty warm. The next, as far as I can see and it is where we live is crazy, crazy windy. Um, I think that's probably why not many people live out here, and it's like you know, in the winter it'll hit negative 60 with wind chill, and then it I mean, we had 40 mile an hour winds that knocked over my beehives a couple weeks ago. So it's crazy out here.
Anna Borgman:And so the fire. Like we had smoke yesterday and then within an hour it blew out, and then we can see a fire probably a couple miles north of us. But it seems, yeah, it's. It's crazy like we sit in this little basin that just fills with smoke and then empties out every few days and you just never know what it's going to be when you wake up it's a little bit virtuous though, I mean when you think about it, that's exciting it is like are we going to be able to see the mountains today, or you know, know, take a deep breath.
Anna Borgman:I don't know.
D. Firth Griffith:So much of modern life is the antithesis of that, I think, or at least the life that I see growing and bubbling and humming all around us. It's this like undeniable, undeniably well set expectations about what's to come and then like one person cuts you off in traffic and your whole day is just ruined because it just deviates from expectation. So I don't know, I think. I think it's one of the nicer things, one of the kinder things that nature gives us, when we can sit quietly enough and fire season in the middle of nowhere. Montana sounds like a fine place to sit quietly.
Anna Borgman:Yeah, that's a really interesting way to put it, that, like, the little things inconvenience us are catastrophic now, whereas you, you know, it used to just be constantly kind of big things. You never knew what was coming. I that's interesting that you say that, because I was reading something about how, um, like most of the us, most rural spots really don't havea reliable weather forecast. I mean, it'll you know, you'll look at the 10-day forecast and it's not necessarily true. And it's really interesting being out here where you know our forecast will say it'll be cloudy and 80 degrees, you know, and then it ends up 40 mile an hour winds, and then it's raining and then it's super hot and it's just like you can look at the forecast, you're like, oh, that's a nice thought, you know, and then you just learn to deal with whatever happens. It's kind of fun.
D. Firth Griffith:There's so much peace in that, like you could get lost in it. You know, and like like yourself or like myself, where we live very close to the land and all of our lives rotate around the lands, like dailiness, you know, how she presents herself is just, it's so daily and you have to live with it and accept it. You can do very little to change it, um, but like it is like it can be annoying, I guess, but it's also like wonderful, because like what, if, what, if we could predict the weather? Like what a boring world that would live.
Anna Borgman:You know that would that we would live in yeah, if you knew what was gonna happen every day for the next month or something like what, almost? What's the point? It just gets? Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, if we I mean, it's the same thing with our whole lives, you know if you knew what was going to happen, I, I don't know that we'd have the joy that we do and or the fear, you know, whatever it is, but just the, the full experience of being alive yeah, I think we would dream less.
Anna Borgman:I think that's something that's interesting I think about.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah yeah, I think we would dream less.
Anna Borgman:Do you mean like actually like sleeping, dreaming, or like daydreaming?
D. Firth Griffith:I think both, I do, I do, I think, I think both, I think dreams are really wonderful.
Anna Borgman:Yeah yeah, that's a whole other conversation.
D. Firth Griffith:I'm like I don't know, I have so many other things.
Anna Borgman:I want to talk to you about. No, the dreaming thing is really interesting. I uh, I've the last year has been really rough. I've I've had a lot of I don't know. I've been like mildly depressed for the last year, just being stressed about, you know, the house and I quit a job that I loved about well a little over a year ago and it's just been kind of rough. And I noticed that for a while, when I was kind of at my worst, I didn't dream and I it was like I didn't sleep very well, I didn't dream about things. I wouldn't fall asleep thinking about things I was excited about, which used to be a thing that I, like I almost couldn't sleep because I'd be so excited about things. And then, yeah, for a while I didn't dream and I didn't realize that that was what was happening. Until I did start dreaming again, it was like, oh, okay. Until I did start dreaming again, it was like, oh, wow, okay, I think I'm coming back to normal.
D. Firth Griffith:This feels, this feels good when, when you're dreaming, you're able to believe that which, like, maybe, your other senses couldn't, and so it opens up a lot of possibilities, just like the eradication of a weather forecast like just opens up a lot of possibilities.
Anna Borgman:What if tomorrow it finally rains?
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, what if? And then we can dream about that, and then we can dream about all the things that would happen. Speaking of fire, though, it is interesting here in the East because we're in central Virginia, so on the East side of the Appalachian mountains, right as the Appalachians fall into the like introductory coastal plains, and so I always joke that 30 miles to our left or to our West, I guess I'm sitting facing a particular direction. It's to my left, west is to my left, but you know, 30 miles to our West is the height of the Appalachians and about 30 miles to our East is like sandy coastal plains and bogs and marshes and things. So it's a really weird place which also causes great amounts of weather forecasting errors where, as you know, it'll call for great amounts of rain and then we don't even have a cloud, and it's just there's a huge river system that runs through it it's the James River, from like the headwaters in the Appalachians to the Atlantic coast and the Chesapeake Bay.
D. Firth Griffith:But this year we've had a horrible drought and we've had I think it's officially four times the acreage under wildfires this summer than we've ever had, at least in modern times, and we think fires are such a Western problem, and they are, of course. I mean there's issues out there, as there are everywhere, and also at the same time. Not all the fires are issues, but in the East it's like a reality, unobserved or unacknowledged, becomes problems, but that same reality, observed or acknowledged, all of a sudden transforms into something else, maybe problematic, but maybe not, I don't know. That's just a thought, I have no question there.
Anna Borgman:The wildfire thing is super interesting to me. I don't know, it's one of those things where, like, because I lived, I've lived with it my whole life, I mean like where I live in Montana right now is the furthest East I've ever lived and which is, you know, not that far East, but having grown up around it, I I feel like I don't, I still don't know anything about fire and you know where it's good, where it's bad. If that's even a thing, necessarily, it's just a thing we've made up, I mean, and it's like and that's not for lack of trying to learn, it just feels so huge and so I don't know. There's so many perspectives on it, I guess, and I feel like the dominant one. I mean like I I went to school for natural resource management and policy and it was and it was really interesting.
Anna Borgman:One of the things we talked about a lot was just how dangerous Smokey the Bear was without knowing it right, that just preventing every single wildfire has kind of led to where we are now, and that perspective of growing up and just seeing Smokey Bear everywhere. And you know, it's like I don't know. Just this huge perspective shift where I'm like, oh, I don't really know anything you know and and not really knowing who to even ask or talk to, and but I don't know. Yeah, fire is just fascinating, it's scary, it's awesome, it's. It's something we're going to have to learn to live with, more and more, I think, which is I don't know. You can only do so much.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, well, I think. I mean I was in conversation with somebody last night um about this and I think it's it's really paradigm challenging, and obviously I have no idea what I'm really talking about. It's just indigenous oral mythology that I'm trying to understand and work through, I guess and then a little bit of like observable reality that I've lived through, but it's not.
D. Firth Griffith:It's not like I carry this wisdom at all, it's just an observation to some large degree. But I think this you know, especially here in the east, I think we've overburdened animals, especially herbivores, in the shaping of, like, the ecotone or ecosystem functioning and things like this, by the removal of fire, like when you actually talk to the indigenous of this region and you look at the history, you look at the geology, the archaeobotany, all of these other things, these other ways of you know, creating those touch points into a more ancient past. You have indigenous fire that opened up a grazeable ecotone. You don't have grazing animals that opened up a fire ecotone and so like by taking out the fire. Now we look at goats or cattle or sheep or horses, all animals that we have in this land, and we're like there's this, there's this meme where these two sticks, these two stick figures, are horribly drawn on this little white piece of paper and it's a meme and the one stick figure has the arm of the other stick figure and is poking the stick figure that is armless now with that person's arms with its stick, and it's like poking it, it's like do something. Like you, pull, get up and do something. It's just a two stick figure, it's just it's. It's a marvelous meme, but sometimes I feel like that's what we're do with animals.
D. Firth Griffith:I'm not saying that, obviously animals aren't integral into the landscape, but I think we've placed a really heavy burden on them to shape the ecosystem when to some large degree, they are beneficiaries of a burnt ecosystem or a civilization or community that has long burned it.
D. Firth Griffith:And so as you enter fire back into that, you also shift, I think, your understanding of animal management and opportunities and wildlife and wildlife migrations and the system becomes much more holistic. But I think a lot of us are afraid to do this, especially. I'm sure you studied this in resource management. But, like, for instance, we did a 200 acre prescribed burn here this spring and everybody was all up in arms about all the carbon that it emitted. Like how dare you emit all this carbon and do these other things, you know? And then you have, like, the local indigenous people who are like, yeah, this is cool, great, thank you, guys. You know, and it's just like wow, this is really two different worldviews, two different paradigms that we have to start to reconcile, and maybe that means actually being a little bit more humble, or you know, what have you? How do you see these things? Did you, did you get to study in any of this kind of stuff in in university?
Anna Borgman:yeah, well, so I, I was the school I was, it was just a graduate certificate that I finished after I went to grad school and I was just really interested in how food systems kind of intersected with natural resource policy and I, I really I don't like the term natural resources. I think that's it just removes us from what we're actually talking about as far as, like it, just it centers humans, you know, calling it a natural resource. I wish we had. I think language is so important and I wish that we could come up with a different term for for all kinds of things. But natural resources is one where I'm like there's gotta be some other way of talking about this that doesn't make humans the center of this, the, the center beneficiaries of this thing. Right.
Anna Borgman:But it was through university of Florida, which was kind of interesting. I mean, the stuff that we talked about with stuff received Florida, which was kind of interesting. I mean, the stuff that we talked about was stuff. It was landscapes I've never seen. There was a lot of issues that I couldn't quite connect to because I didn't, I didn't know enough about them. But yeah, like doing that and at the same time doing a lot of reading, that was kind of antithetical to the things we were learning about. So reading about indigenous fire management and stuff like that, and and thinking and and at the same time, man, just while you were talking, I was like there were ideas just popping up and I was like I'm going to forget all of these as we keep going. But the last one that you've pointed to about being humble, and I, I I've kind of come to I don't know I this is probably going to be make some people mad, but I'm just really tired of the word regenerative and the and the way that we're talking about it, because and I was thinking about this, and it's like you can learn a lot from books and from taking courses, you know, and going to talks, and from books and from taking courses, you know, and going to talks, and and and people are doing that. Then they're latching on to this idea of regenerative, but most of those people are not living in these places where that sort of management is happening or or where something like that needs to happen, right, or they're not doing the work of it. They're reading about it and hearing about it and it becomes the thing that they want to talk about and promote and whatever. But in book learning versus lived learning, it's kind of like you know us doing this podcast and someone can listen to this podcast and think they know either of us or any of the podcasts that we do. Or they could come live with us for a year and then they'd really know. You know who we were, and it would be an extremely different experience and so you can listen to what someone says and you can think you know what that means and who they are and what this thing is versus living with the thing and, and I think, the indigenous management. I mean it. Really it did take me a while.
Anna Borgman:Coming from, I remember going to Yosemite for the first time about 10 years ago and reading about how the tribes there would burn the valley floor. Then I couldn't, I couldn't fathom that that was a thing. It's like what? Like? You know you're not supposed to burn any of this, why would you burn 70? It just I, I just hadn't thought about it. You know I hadn't that. It was such a foreign concept to me.
Anna Borgman:And now to think about it it's like duh, you know. I mean like to think that somehow the people that came in here, you know, 300 years ago, 400 years ago, know how to manage this land better than people who have been here since time immemorial? You know it's like. Why are we not listening to the people who have lived this and we're thinking that we can learn it? We're basing it in? I don't know what the term is. It's like a science knowledge versus a lived knowledge. I guess I don't know how to differentiate, but I think we've just I don't know, we're losing touch with what we know, I think, in our bones, about what nature wants to be, and we are ignoring that. For what books tell us that nature wants to be, if that makes any sense?
D. Firth Griffith:Completely. You are in a really safe space with me. I don't know about our listeners. I have been an outspoken fella against the idea of the popularization and general use of the term regeneration in the last year or two, in another conversation for another time. So I'm smiling widely when you said that. But let me ask you this question in response.
D. Firth Griffith:To some degree I think we're afraid of fire. I mean again, this is to some degree. There's many degrees that I'm just picking on one of them to anchor the question. To some degree I think we are afraid of fire because we cannot control the outcome.
D. Firth Griffith:But through herbivore management, let's call it regenerative agriculture through managing herbivores we have the ability through overt control over the impact to some large degree control to the outcome.
D. Firth Griffith:For instance, if I had a grassland that was progressing in this eco-tone here into more of a lower story shrubland briarland early stage forest, I could take the animals, I can throw them out there in a particular stock density and I can graze them in such a way to prevent that forest from coming, and so I could lock in the idea of a grassland in an area that maybe doesn't want to be a grassland.
D. Firth Griffith:So I have that ability to control, and let's for now say that's neither good or bad.
D. Firth Griffith:But if I were to light a match in a controlled burn, in an appropriate way, and I would have burned that as soon as that match was lit, excuse me or like the drip torch was, was was dripped I lose the ability to decide what lives and what dies where this landscape goes, what the fire burns, what the fire misses, because, as you know, I mean walk through a wildfire that was a canopy fire all the way through, walk through a really well done, prescribed burn by modern scientists or indigenous peoples, and every single instance you will see that the fire burned trees or plants that it shouldn't have burned, and it over burned or under burned the exact same tree in the exact same situation or exact same plant in a different area, and so it's clearly being able to make the decisions on its own.
D. Firth Griffith:We, we step away from that overt control, and so I guess what I'm asking is I wonder if, one, we've stepped away from fire because we truly can't control it and two, we've stepped headlong into a much more control-based land management because we can't control it. What do you think?
Anna Borgman:Yeah, that's a really wonderful way of putting it. I think the I don't know. I think about our desire to control everything. I mean, I think, just when you were, when you're talking about fearing something because you can't control the outcome of it. I think about that with people's fear of death. Right, you know it's, you can't control when it happens, how it happens, the outcome of of any of it, and it's scary. But I think we also crave being around it and thinking about it in a way that we don't really understand. And I think the same is true of fire. I mean, I love like it's, like it feels perverse sometimes, but I remember, you know, growing up in Oregon and there would be fires going on or even prescribed burns, and I would go drive as close to them as I could. It's like I wanted to see it. I wanted to see the sort of chaos of it, I guess, and like the power of it. And I think that is really scary when we I mean, yeah, when we realize that we can't control this thing, anything, something that has the power to just be so wildly destructive to so many people and to you know this these ways of lives, ways of life that we've built. But yeah, I don't know, there's something about giving up that control that I think, I think would be really good for all of us and and it's, it's something that well, it's like the weather right, the weather forecast. It's something that we used to have to do. We didn't have the control that we have now over just about everything, and so it's just, we've gotten used to being able to control every single thing.
Anna Borgman:If we want, you know, our 20 acres to be a grassland, we can keep it that way. If we want it to turn into a forest, we can do that. You know, I, I, jesse and I, my boyfriend and I were planting trees yesterday, and this is all I mean. It's just there's more rocks and there is dirt out here. There's it's prickly pear cactus everywhere, and we're out there planting spruce and we're planting aspen and I'm like these might all die. I don't know, you know, know what's going to happen. I'm just craving trees right now and I know that in 10 or 20 years we'll figure out what we want or don't want or what the land wants or doesn't want. But he was talking about a guy that he worked for at some point, that had a lot of land and wanted the whole thing turned into a forest, and so he paid to have thousands of trees planted and he turned it into a forest. He said I went back 10 years later and it was a forest. It's like you can do that, you can do that and it's wild.
Anna Borgman:And I think that it is just messed with our heads so bad that we're terrified of losing that ability or realizing that we don't actually have control. And the animal thing is really interesting. I mean, we're doing the same thing out here. We have six goats and there's a lot of leafy spurge and there's Russian thistle and I don't want to spray, and a lot of our neighbors around us are spraying and mowing acres upon acres and I'm like I love this, I love this grass, you know, it's gorgeous, it's sparse and it's harsh, and I step on cactus every day, but having the goats out here to eat the spurge is my way of controlling it and I'm like, oh, these are invasive plants, right, there's this invasive spurge and there's all these invasive weeds and it's like I guess we've decided that, you know, and we, we did it to an extent, but this is me deciding what I think I want for you know this little plot of land that we've got and how I'm choosing to control it instead of just letting it be what it's going to be.
Anna Borgman:And so I totally to control it, instead of just letting it be what it's going to be, and so I totally I'm doing the thing that I see other people doing and might, like you know, talk about in whatever way, and then it's like, oh yeah, well, I do the exact same thing. So I get it. I do get it.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, and I think it's improper for us to believe that any species can live, you know, as a relation here on earth, in earth, of earth, and not control it to some degree. When the wind blows, the leaves wrinkle period, right like that. That's control, but for some reason we don't see that as negative. I was talking to somebody recently and they were telling me about the predator prey connection, how predators, you know, just hate prey and whatever. All they want to do is eat them and kill them and such. And I asked them, I said, listen, when a plant photosynthesizes, it produces let's say, for all sense and purposes, science aside, it produces a little sugar packet and it trades that sugar packet with fungi. And then it's like, hey, go swim around in this little aqueous solution that we saw, you know, called soil, organic matter, and bring back some plant available nutrients. But then, like the fungi is swimming and then out of nowhere, predatory nematode comes out and just goes like and eats it, you know, and it's like a complete predator prey, like, wait a second. And the plant knew this. We have to believe that the plant understands completely that it doesn't get food unless it sacrifices fungi to the nematode so that the nematode can poop out plant available calcium back to the plant. But like we don't want to believe that plants are doing this, we want to believe the big bad. The same time, we want to start to like taxonomically define what that and segregate and like make you know into certain columns what that control looks like.
D. Firth Griffith:But and I'm going to use this as a transition into a conversation that I really want to have with you the last 30 minutes has been an intro, so, thank you, but I think, both with fire and blood.
D. Firth Griffith:So, like the harvest, I think and I agree with you there's something about our humanity drawn to both, like we might fear death but we yearn for it. Like you get a group of humans, domesticated, civilized or otherwise, around a field, harvest and all of them become alive, and the same thing is true for fire, right, and and? And I. What I wonder is and I just want to open this as as a playing field for you, and I don't care where the conversation goes you, you lead and I'll follow and we'll go from there, but I wonder if it's in fire and in blood, or next to fire and covered in blood, that humanity, for the first time, is unable to be anywhere else, it's just complete, like when you set something aflame, it's burning, and when something starts to bleed out, it's dying, and you can't stop it, you can't wash it off yourself, and it's just presentness beyond what the human species really gets in their modern life, like true, unequivocal, full, whole presentness. Yeah, I'm done, it's yours.
Anna Borgman:I, I love that, I, I and yeah, in thinking about the presentness part, I think I was saying for the last year I've been kind of depressed, and a lot of that had to do with quitting this job that I loved, and that job was working on a slaughter floor at a meat shop just about an hour away, and I quit for a number of reasons but it was my favorite job I've ever had and I there wasn't a single day that I woke up and thought I don't want to go to work, ever, ever. I cannot remember ever, you know, even at 5am, driving to work, there was never a time where I thought I'd rather be in bed or I don't want to do this and and leaving that job, I think because I was, we were, we were slaughtering, I mean three days a week and butchering on those other two days. But there was something about that closeness to death all day, every day. That was. It was like a I don't want to say like a high, because that sounds, it doesn't. That doesn't mean what I, what I mean. It it's not like I find like a pleasure in killing at all, but it there is something about being. I think of it as like a. It's like a screen that we can't reach through and we can't really see it, but being near it, you know that transition from life to to death when you watch it over and over and over again and you're part of it.
Anna Borgman:At the slaughterhouse, really, the Kill Floor was so peaceful because the three of us that were out there we loved what we were doing, we loved the animals, we all got along and it was like we really had the best time out there every day and there was a somberness to it, there's a real seriousness to it that we all understood, but we had all done it long enough that we could sort of hold all of that at the same time and I think there there was something, a real energy that we all got from being out there and dealing with death all day, every day. And then when I left, that it was like it was really really painful and it's been really really painful and and part of it is not is is a lack of control. You know, I really I liked being the person that was there for the animals when on their last day and in their last seconds. Um, because I knew we were doing a good job and and we tried really, really hard to do that and to make it just as easy as possible, if that's a thing. Um, so that was hard, but it's just been a year of like separating from that extreme presentness of every day and trying to find that in other ways, whether it's, you know, like not being on.
Anna Borgman:I mean, I opened my computer maybe once a month. These days, like I just don't. I can use my phone for the things I need to do, but I'm really I'm like I'm doing stuff on our land, I'm with our chickens, I'm with our dogs, I'm with our goats and it's like that's sort of a way that I've brought myself back to that presentness. But it's still not the same as doing slaughter and you know, to your point of bringing people around a field harvest that have never experienced it.
Anna Borgman:That is my favorite thing in the world is watching people experience that for the first time, and no one has the same reaction. You know, and I know you know that you've seen plenty of people watch that, but for some people, some people end up smiling at the end of it and I think they it's like a weird reaction to them where they don't know why they're doing that, and it's like you feel probably more human than you ever have, maybe or since you were a kid, right, you know like it's a really it's a really powerful thing, and it's one of my favorite things to to witness is watching people internalize that and be surprised by their own reactions and and often end up wanting to do it more or be closer to it more often. It's, it's fascinating.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah.
Anna Borgman:And I don't know if you've probably witnessed that same thing.
D. Firth Griffith:Absolutely. I think there's. There's a lot there that we can unpack. I mean number one. As you probably very well know, any field harvest course that I've attended or hosted here cause we host many a year they fill up unbelievably quickly it's the easiest course that we've ever taught to fill up with tickets and students and there's always so just there's so many people who are just dying because they've eaten their whole life.
D. Firth Griffith:They've gone through that and they're starting to realize this was actually said recently in a in a in a episode here on Unshod that metabolism is metamorphosis and I love that and it's just like we're dying for the metamorphosis. You're right Like our metabolism, the thing that we interact with all day, every day, the thing that regulates our own bodily hormones and adrenals and ourselves, like the operations of our own body as a living, energetic you know clay meat suit, like it's through metamorphosis, it's through that death process and we're dying to see that. I wonder your thoughts on this. Why do you think it's so humanizing to be a part of that process at any level, regardless if it's with really good food, which I know you have experience with, and like the culinary background, maybe it's the harvest, like the death, true metamorphosis of a living body undergoing that, that unbelievably enigmatic and strange release of that last exhale. You know, or maybe it's the butchery where you're taking that you know primal or whatever the quarter, and you're you're actually bringing it down into like, oh my God, that's a, that's a ribeye Like that, that, that was in there. Wow, you know, or like for.
D. Firth Griffith:Sorry, I'm going to interrupt my own question, which has been long enough, but we, we just taught a processing workshop with a, with a full beef, and, uh, one of the students found the uh, I round roast in the in the hind quarter and in the hind quarter, and he was like Whoa, there's, there's just a round piece of meat in there, like he couldn't believe that it was right there, like it's real, you know, like it's. It's literally this round, marvelous, whatever you want to call roast, I don't know. You know slab of meat, and he lost his brain. He's like it's right there, you know, like. Well, anyways, the question is it just like fell out? Yeah, it just falls out, there it is.
Anna Borgman:Why do you think it's so human to be a part of that process. I think I mean it's definitely more intense in the, in the field, harvest and sort of slaughter classes or whenever you know. I would tell my friends to come visit me at the shop, especially if we were doing sheep, because it was just quiet. I mean, it's about as chill as it can get when you're doing slaughter and people would be hesitant and then they'd stand there and they'd see it happen and be like huh, that was not bad. I promise we're not doing something bad back here. You know me, but you know that I wouldn't be doing something bad back here and if we were I wouldn't be here and I wouldn't enjoy it, you know. So I'm not lying to you when I tell you that it's not a terrible thing that's happening and I think that in itself is reassuring to people, not just for their food but for themselves, because you see something die and it's not a horrific end, and you think maybe that's possible for me or for my loved ones. You know, like witnessing death and whether we realize it or not, I think we're always internalizing it and thinking about ourselves or the people or animals that we know and worrying about them or worrying about our own end, and I think seeing it done in a setting like what you or I do is really reassuring, even if it's still scary. You're seeing something that our culture has made so taboo and so scary and so far away, and to have it up close and to not have it be as terrifying as you have, you know, decided it is in your head or the people tell you it is, is just like, I think, the biggest relief. And then I think the same thing kind of comes, not necessarily the fear, but I think in processing it's really interesting to see the inside of a body and to see it kind of come apart into these pieces and like I'll explain to people when they're like, well, you know what is eye around? I'm like, well, think about, like the back of your hamstring right, like, or what's your back strap? Well, when you get a massage and you're like your back straps hurt, you know, maybe it's the two muscles running down the sides of your spine.
Anna Borgman:We're not so different and you're coming to this conclusion, or this understanding that you are a part of whatever you want to call nature. There is no nature separate from you. It's you, yeah, it's a cow or it's a pig or it's a sheep or whatever it is, but like you have a lot of the same parts and your internals that you don't have a room in, but you know a lot of that same stuff is in you and it's not gross and it's not scary, it's beautiful, you know. And I think there's a real internalization of that of like, oh, this isn't gross, this't scary. I I kind of look like this, which is interesting and I don't know.
Anna Borgman:I think there's maybe some like self-acceptance or some more self-understanding that comes from from seeing that and getting to touch it and and not be afraid. I think just the, the fear that we have of ourselves and the world around us and death, and just I mean, if you watch the news all day, I don't know how you wouldn't be afraid of everything you know and social media, and if I didn't know any better, I think that the world is going to end tomorrow. The world is going to end tomorrow and slowing down and watching slaughter and processing an animal I don't think there's any more grounding thing that you can do, especially these days.
D. Firth Griffith:That's beautiful.
D. Firth Griffith:I think it's almost like, subconsciously, we have this very ugly understanding of ourselves as this big, bad, mean, predator.
D. Firth Griffith:Because when we think of the wolf, like it has to hate the bison, you know it has to hate the, you know hate the pronghorn or the elk or the moose whatever you want to say or out here, like the mountain lions and the coyotes, like they have to hate the things in which they prey upon, the things in which they consume but I also consume.
D. Firth Griffith:And then you're participating in that process and all of a sudden, I think not only do you meet yourself, like you so very well describe, but you also meet the other, ourselves, in the world around us, the coyotes or the wolves and everything else, and you start to get this massively large, you know very high, high, high view picture of the thing. And now you can actually start off like deeper questions. For instance, do wolves hate the bison or the elk or the pronghorn? Do the elk or the pronghorn and the bison hate the wolves? Did this sheep hate me at the slaughterhouse? Did I hate the sheep? None of this terminology, none of this language makes any sense when you actually participate with it, and so it provides that reviewreview, revisioning of our own lives, not only internally but in our internal body, writ, you know, in the world around us yeah, I.
Anna Borgman:There's something that um, the steve ranella hunter, hunter, and he has me either. He said something it was in a video years ago and it was, I think, a book reading that he did. But someone in the audience asked him how he could proclaim to love these animals that he was hunting and he was saying I love deer. The guy asking the question I love deer, I could never kill them. And Steve said I'm going to stop you and I'm going to say something that might not make sense. But he said I bet I love those animals more than you could ever understand. I observe them. They feed my family. You know, he's like. I know those animals on a more intimate level than someone who has never hunted and would proclaim to love those animals. It's a different relationship wolves and grizzly bears and you know, whatever it is, it's like those predators have watched and learned their prey better than any other creature ever could or will. And I don't know how you could not, after observing something for so long, how you could not come to love it in some manner, especially if it's what's keeping you alive. How could there be hatred there? And it's like there's the anthropomorphization of animals, which a lot of people will say you shouldn't do, and I completely disagree. Animals, plants, whatever it is, it's like. I don't know, that's a whole different topic. But in even thinking about like, in the mountains near my house they just found the first grizzly bear that they've seen there and I thought, you know, it's like we go up and hike in there and I could be afraid of that, which I'm wary of it. But I have a real love for grizzly bears and I know that they could kill me with a swipe if they wanted to. That doesn't make me hate them, you know there's no, there's no hatred there. So I think there's a real misunderstanding about what it means to kill or be killed and how that relationship can be revolving around. If you want to call it love or just this bigger thing of like, I don't know that there's a word, at least in the English language, to describe it, but I think hate is about the furthest thing from anything that happens in those sorts of relationships. And you know I may be with people, I know I I have worked with people who do slaughter, who proclaim to hate pigs or hate cows, and it's like maybe they have a hard time. Honestly, I think that that sort of that language comes up when you are not fully embracing how you actually feel, which is maybe it does make you sad, maybe you're frustrated with this animal because you see that it's afraid and it's not doing what you want it to do and instead of acknowledging that this animal is scared and that it might know what's about to happen, and feeling sadness about that, which is totally fine, I mean, there were plenty of days on the kill floor where it just was kind of hard. And it's not that anything happened in particular. It would just maybe be a rough day because something else was going on in my life or I don't know. It didn't really seem to matter. Some days it would just come up. But resisting those feelings can, I think, lead to.
Anna Borgman:I had this therapist who was so fantastic. I used to have a really terrible temper when I was young and she would tell me and I don't know how true this is, but it was a good way for me to learn to deal with that she said anger is a secondary emotion. There's something else behind that and I think about that. When people think about hatred behind, I mean there's plenty of hatred behind, I think, human on human killing, but especially when we're talking about slaughter and predator prey relationships, we can't imagine that you would kill without hate, right, and and maybe there's something behind that that we're not acknowledging to think that there has to be hate or anger.
Anna Borgman:I don't know, I'm probably rambling now, but I think those people that say oh I hate pigs, it's like pigs are. They can be difficult to slaughter, right, you know to do it well, you really have to know the anatomy of a pig and you have to understand pigs to get them into the place where you're going to do the thing, and it can be loud and scary Sometimes. Pigs are big animals and I think that anyone that would say, oh I hate pigs, it's like, I think there's something else there. I think maybe it's fear, maybe it's sadness, I don't know, but I think that the anger or the hatred comes up as a secondary emotion to something that's not being acknowledged, but I don't think that exists in in a, you know, predator prey, more natural relationship yeah, yeah, it's like kind of a lot.
D. Firth Griffith:No, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot of beautiful things. The image in in my mind that you're giving me is like it's calling back to that fire and blood comment that I made earlier and then thinking about what you're saying, that anger is a secondary emotion. It is as though we crave the honesty of these two processes, like the harvest, the metabolism, the metamorphosis, the blood, and then also the fire, which also could be metamorphosis and metabolism and blood, just in a different way. The honesty of these two things is not only revealing, but deep, deep, deep, deep down. Maybe deeper in some than others. Is that honest crave for true honesty, fullness, either with ourselves or with our world? Maybe there's something there.
Anna Borgman:I feel like that maybe comes from watching something be destroyed, whether it's by fire or death. You know watching something irreversible happen and you can't, you can't pretend it's not happening. So that honesty piece, you can't reverse it. You know it's about as true as it gets. Watching something be burned or watching the blood come out of an animal, that's it.
D. Firth Griffith:This is so bad. My wife and I we joke about this, and so this is why I can say it, but it is. It is a little jarring, I think, but you know, we have three children, her and I, and all of them have been pretty much home births. They've been home births at a midwife's house, which we live about an hour and a half away from any civilized infrastructure, and so our midwife lives closer, near the hospitals and such, and is our end midwife and everything else, and so she has like a room set up in our house to facilitate these things, a home birth experience, but still not in the middle of nowhere.
D. Firth Griffith:Just in case, and uh, after our oldest was born ellen parker is her name um, it was like the first time in my life because, you know, I was there the whole time and was helping in the way that the midwives and everybody else needed, and it was like the first time that I had truly interacted with something so honest and real, like, like, like, irreversible that that word that you use is what conjured this up in my memory and it was just irreversible. Like there's nothing reversible about this, right, you know, and and I think death is very similar Like there's a lot of ideas and people speaking about this, there's books that have been written about death and birth and birth and death and how similar it is, and maybe that should call our attention. Maybe it shouldn't, I don't know, but it is similar regardless. And I never forget. About an hour after it was complete, and when he was, you know, nursing and laying with Morgan and such, my wife, the midwife, was like how are you doing, daniel? You know what's going on, and I was like I was just complete joy, you know, and uh, and I and I said in the moment, and again, this is something my wife and I joke about now, but in the moment, so energized I was, just like we got to do that again, like that was, that was amazing and you know, obviously the joke being that Maureen looked at me probably and probably said you know, I need a minute, um but it was just like yeah, you go ahead and uh, and we kind of did, we did it, you know two more times and you know whatever.
D. Firth Griffith:But like so, so rarely does our very modern human bodies and society that is also crafting our bodies get to participate in something that is so irreversible as either death or birth or fire. And then, when you start to and when you start to touch it, you know like I've had a friend of mine is a uh medicine carrier of the uh waitaha people or the waitaha nation in new zealand, a maori um medicine woman, I guess, and and she talks a lot about how, like in some of these situations, like you, you need somebody like that, just like helping people work through, like the trauma that wells up. Like you're saying, like I hate pigs, like, well, you don't hate pigs. There's something infinitely deeper inside of there that that we're not talking about. And I think it's true.
D. Firth Griffith:Like in those irreversible moments we meet ourselves and it's a huge step not just into understanding what is next, but also like in memory, like in in. Like this two-way dream walking where, like, we're able to dream forward but also backwards, like we have to do these deeper tasks and and maybe that's why we stay away from it, like maybe that's why regeneration is so easy, because, like, manage your animals in this way, grow better grass, soil, but like you don't have to deal with this other irreversible stuff, like you don't actually have to look at yourself, just do these things. But then you get into, like your work, you know, and you get into fire and you get into this idea of, like I said, you know, metabolism being metamorphosis and all of a a sudden, like the way you manage doesn't really matter. It's like the relationship and the kinship and all these other things that start to matter. But it's very uncomfortable for a lot of people, which is why they smile, like you said.
D. Firth Griffith:It's so true, and now I'm rambling. But like half the people smile, they don't know what to do with their face, you know, and it's just this joy welling up and you're like yes, feel that joy, or sadness, or weep, or cry, or sing Some people have broken out into song and you're like okay, cool, sounds good.
Anna Borgman:I think that, seeing like the honesty that you're talking about and the irreversible things, I think the word that I'm trying to find is cathartic. It is so cathartic and whatever it is that comes out is so real. It's about the realest thing that will come out of you because you're seeing this thing that, whether you remember it, I don't know. I'm really interested in the idea of sort of I guess it's epigenetics, but like thinking about things that my body might remember that I didn't actually experience. I really like this idea and I think about it in terms of like foods that we like, or you know, I really like learning languages, and some of them are easier for me and some of them are more difficult, and like I am learning German and Norwegian and it just turns out that a lot of my ancestors are German and Norwegian and it's like it comes easy to me and I think, am I just making that up or is there something to that, right? And so I think about those sorts of things in terms of just watching butchery or watching a birth or a death or, you know, being present for slaughter. It's like we might not be remembering something we have personally experienced, but there is something there that we're remembering and have needed and have not had and have not had and I don't know. I was thinking about this last night and I think about it a lot, but sort of the evolutionary benefits of why we feel certain ways. And I think for you, like you experiencing the birth of your first child and feeling that feeling there is a real evolutionary benefit to you feeling that way. Right, let's do this again. Well, that's kind of the point, right, like you, we need to all keep doing this again, if you look at it from a very biological standpoint. But I think about, like, witnessing death or feeling grief, and I think about grief a lot, I, because I felt it a lot on the kill floor. It's like I don't know these animals other than you know the hour or two that I've spent with them since they got dropped off in the morning and I do try to spend time with them beforehand. But there's always a grief every time, every day, and I've done this for a long time and I I never don't feel it. And you know, like my dog is getting older and I was talking to my friend yesterday about the anticipatory grief of that. You know, like my dog is getting older and I was talking to my friend yesterday about the anticipatory grief of that you know like, and it's so frustrating sometimes where you think this is so painful. Why, why do we still feel this way? If it's so painful, why do we still have to deal with this? Why haven't we evolved out of it Like we've evolved out of? You know, whatever other sort of mental or physical thing didn't serve us, so it has to serve us, and I think the reason grief serves us is because it's the same thing as love. It's the exact same thing.
Anna Borgman:If we didn't have grief, that would mean that we didn't have love anymore, you know. And so I think about, like, slaughter can be really hard for me, and I think it's hard for people to understand how I can do this thing and say that I love these animals and still kill them. It's like it's not easy, it's never been easy. There's not a day that goes by that I do slaughter, that it's like, well, that was easy, that was fine, I didn't feel anything, you know, and I think I would probably quit if I started to not feel anything, because it would mean I wasn't doing the service to the animals that I want to do and that I wasn't doing the service to the people who are either there with me or who raise the animals, you know. And so these feelings that come up, it's never anger. It's never anger Again.
Anna Borgman:That's, I think, the secondary part of that. If I weren't to acknowledge any grief or any sort of sadness that I felt doing this or that I think anyone feels when they watch a death, it's like acknowledging that grief is just acknowledging the love you had or have for that creature, that person, whatever it is. So there's a real evolutionary benefit to grief. For death to be sad, you know, it's not a weird thing, it's a really good thing. And so embracing the sadness along with, like, the deep need, I think, to be around death and to internalize it, whether it's for ourselves or just for our understanding of the world, and how brief we are and how brief everything is, I don't know. I think it's all entwined and I think that that sort of grief or sadness can also erupt as joy when someone smiles during a field harvest. It's just, it's a pure catharsis.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, it's like grief, like if, when you eat, that body metamorphosizes into yours Speaking scientifically, we know this is true energetically, spiritually, emotionally. We also feel like that is true viewpoint. The grief, to some degree, is the respect that after this occurs, that it's going to be reborn as energy, as muscle right, it's going to have a new life. But if you don't experience that grief and we talk about this a lot in our own processing and field harvesting workshops like the meal that takes place after the harvest, because it's always two or three days and you harvest and you dry, age and you hang and such and you do something else, the first meal after the harvest, like that death process, like it is solemn, people are quiet in the beginning and then it just erupts in laughter and it's serious.
D. Firth Griffith:And you see people you know putting food onto their plates in a very thinking way. They're not just shoveling I mean, it's just what am I going to eat? I can't waste it. Like I just experienced this for the first time and so it's very serious, but like only because there's grief. So the grief is like this forced respect of the metamorphosis that's about to happen when you do consume it. And if you don't have that grief, maybe you don't respect it. And if you don't have that grief, maybe you don't respect it. And if you don't respect it, it never metamorphosizes, like it never actually continues its life's purpose. I don't know. That just continues on what you said. It doesn't negate it in any way. It's just like you have the left and then the right and it seems like they're both very complementary. It's like the grief of love and the grief and the respect. Or maybe it's we we respect because we also love.
Anna Borgman:So like now, it's just one, two, three. Right, it might not be the love that you think of, as you know, your husband or wife, or your child, or your dog or you know whatever, but I don't know. I'm not a very religious, I'm not a religious person at all, but I think if there is anything that I think of as of God, it is just the idea of love like a universal sort of thing. And whether that's, like you know you're saying, the nematode that eats the fungi, that's the plant, that to me, is a form of love, not in a way that I think I can understand it as a human or that I have tried hard enough to understand it, but it it appears to me that way, just when I think of it. You know, and, yeah, and I think the respect thing and the, the mindfulness of, you know, that first meal after slaughter, I think about the first deer that I killed when I started hunting, the first deer that I killed when I started hunting, the immediate feeling of like protection that I felt around this thing. It was like, okay, I did this thing, now it's my responsibility to see it through and to do right by this animal that there's, there's a thought that that we should be, I mean, like during slaughter or whatever it is saying thank you to the animal right and being grateful, and I see where that is coming from. But I also feel like it's kind of putting words in the animal's mouth, if you want to say it that way, like they didn't. They didn't choose this, they didn't in in the way that we're doing it in a field, harvest or a slaughter situation. They're not choosing to be there. They would choose to not be there given the chance. So sometimes I feel strange. I guess it's the type of gratefulness that I'm trying to feel, where it's sort of a universal gratefulness rather than specifically to the animal, because I, where it's sort of a universal gratefulness rather than specifically to the animal because I, I don't feel like it was something they wanted to do, it was something I chose to do and and so the gratefulness is sort of like I'm grateful that this is here for me and now I have to do right by this creature that I killed to keep me alive, right, and so I like and that was kind of what I was saying earlier about leaving leaving the slaughter floor. It was.
Anna Borgman:There was a lot of grief there because I felt so protective of those animals that came in there because I, it's like and I got to see them all the way through, from when they came off the truck and stood in the corrals to going out the door in packages, right Back, sealed, labeled packages, and after doing that, even for years, it's still jarring to me sometimes to be labeling, you know, beef tenderloin and all that and being like I was petting this cow on the face three weeks ago, right Like, and now I'm just putting it out the door as a beef tenderloin, that no one knows who this cow was, no one knows what she was doing in her last moments before she was killed and no one knows what it felt like, what her hide felt like, except for the person who raised her. But they aren't necessarily the person that's going to eat her. This thing is going to the grocery store or it's going to the restaurant, and when I started on the kill floor, I was also working at a restaurant in town and we served a lot of the food that we processed, a lot of the meat that we processed at the butcher shop and it was so fascinating to watch stuff come in the door and be like, oh yeah, we killed these pigs, you know, three weeks ago. Now we have pork chops that we're serving as a, you know, a special or it's new on the menu or whatever, and and being really proud of that, but also feeling a really big disconnect there, knowing that the people eating it are just going to eat it and have a good meal. But I, I just it's frustrating to be like you don't, you didn't know that pig, like I knew that pig and my friend that raised it knew that pig and I wish that you knew, I wish that you, I wish that everyone could see at least one slaughter to then maybe carry them out the rest of their lives, or at least you know years, a few years down the road that they have, if it's even for a split second, that feeling of like, oh, this was an animal that someone cared about, that someone had to kill and maybe it was hard for them that day, and then someone the labor of cutting it up and I don't know it's and I don't know it's beautiful and it's also frustrating, and this is kind of going off on a tangent, but we have chickens now and we are now selling eggs to the restaurant where I used to work and it's really fulfilling.
Anna Borgman:I love cooking.
Anna Borgman:I love cooking in restaurants, I love being in restaurants, I love being in restaurants, but it's like, okay, the thing that is most fulfilling to me is producing the food or the people eating it.
Anna Borgman:What really was happening there, you know, like the labor and the love that went into it and and and the protection I felt over it, like you're saying the not want to, not wanting to waste it, so people, you know, taking really mindful portions of of the food that they killed.
Anna Borgman:You know, the day before or two days before, and and even like at this restaurant, I made salads for a really long time and a lot of the ingredients were from local farms and they were gorgeous, and I would see stuff come back and whether it's just a one piece of lettuce on the plate or a strawberry or a tomato, and it was like it's like what do you mean? You're gonna throw that away. You know it's just, and I like I I feel the same way I do about the animals as I do about all the food that is so laborious to produce and that's so I don't know there's so much love put into it and then to see something go in the trash or, you know, maybe in the compost, but it's just like consume it, metamorphize that it is not to be wasted. Right, like, put that in your body, metamorphosis, metamorphosize that, that love and that energy, and like don't, don't waste it. I just can't stand the waste.
D. Firth Griffith:We, we started this conversation talking about like weather and expectations and letting go that control and such, and I wonder. I want to present you this question what do you think would happen if that same idea was translated into the food and the food system and the way we consume food, like so much of harvesting and slaughter is so unlike hunting. Like hunting is hunting, it's not called getting, but agriculture is getting, it's not called hunting, right? So, like to be very clear, what I'm saying is that agriculture, to some degree, is getting. It's knowing the 10 day weather forecast and then getting that exact thing. Hunting to me seems to be the opposite in some like pure sense, pure agriculture versus pure hunting, and there's obviously great nuance there. What do you think would happen if husbandry or agriculture became more like hunting? And there's a lot of things that would have to change. So this is really just theoretical, but I want to pose you the question anyways.
Anna Borgman:It's a question of uncertainty, right, like the uncertainty of having the thing that you're used to or that you need to survive, and I think I don't think it's totally, I don't think it's a question that's totally, I don't know, out of context or inappropriate to ask, because it's I don't know, that we're not headed that way. I think I think there, in the next few decades, there's going to be a lot of uncertainty regarding food and I, you know I might be a little more concerned about that than I should be or than a lot of people are. I don't, I don't totally know. You know everything, all the ins and outs of of all that. But just thinking about, like water shortages, you know climate change, everything that's happening, looking at there's a really fantastic book called Perilous Bounty and it's looking at agriculture in California and how perilous it is and how much we've come to rely on just a steady supply of food in our grocery stores and on our plates and and throwing things away. I mean the amount of food waste. And you know I do it too. I I get. I go into town and I get excited about what's on the shelves and I buy a bunch of produce and end up inevitably looking in the back of the fridge and be like, ah, that cucumber or whatever it is you know that I forgot about. So I'm totally guilty of it and I understand why it happens.
Anna Borgman:But I think if there was less certainty I mean, when COVID hit, you know, and there was a lot less certainty about what was going to be on the on the shelves, there was a moment of reckoning right with what was possible. And I think our attention spans are so short, it was so powerful in the moment and I think we have forgotten what that felt like, even though it was, you know, four or five years ago, and it was so intense when it happened. And I saw it in meat processing. I mean, I was on zoom calls once a week trying to figure out how to open a new slaughterhouse because there weren't enough spots, and you know there wasn't enough meat on the grocery store shelves and, oh my gosh, there's this panic. And then one day the zoom call stopped and we haven't talked about it since, you know, and it was like an emergency and I have not heard a single word about it since.
Anna Borgman:And right right yeah, it's just, our memories are so short, our attention spans are just, you know, being pulled in every direction. And I think I was. I was weirdly optimistic when all that happened and thinking maybe this will be sort of an eye-opening thing to happen and and that it might be change people's understanding of, of distribution systems in general and the production systems that we rely on. And it did, and I think there are some people who really internalized it and took it to heart and have made changes or, you know, think about it a lot more. But I think most people, once the grocery store shelves were full again, it was like, okay, back to normal. And I don't know that we shouldn't expect that sort of thing to happen again.
Anna Borgman:But I think if agriculture were less getting and more, you know, hunting, I think that that respect and I think I think that respect would be there for whatever the food is, whether it's a vegetable or a piece of meat, um, I think we would waste less. I know we would, but we wouldn't have a choice, right. I mean, I think about, like the I have a few chest freezers full of kind of the ends and bits of meat that we got at the shop and stuff that, um, we've hunted and I mean I pick up, I love picking up roadkill, I love it, and people think it's insane and it's like what do you mean? There's free meat on the side of the road. This animal died. I mean I can you know? I picked up one couple it was probably three weeks ago a little buck that got hit and I just wanted to see if it was good and it was, it was fantastic. And so we had it butchered and in the freezer in about two hours and and it's like it feels like such a bounty, such a it's like gold.
Anna Borgman:I mean my chest freezers are, in my mind, the most valuable things I have, the things that are in there, you know, other than you know my, my animals and my boyfriend, who I love, but other than it's like having this thing to feed us and my food that I have that I sometimes probably seem like a hoarder, but it's like that's just gold to me and that's what I spend my time getting and it's what I spend my money on. And I think if, if, hunting, if ag were more like hunting, and then certainty was there, I think that that feeling would probably be a little more widespread and I imagine you probably feel like that too. I mean, when you seek out certain types of food and you find it and you know the work that went into it, you do value it infinitely more than you could something that came in a bag on the you know from the grocery store shelf.
D. Firth Griffith:I think so. I think so. I think that's true, universally true, but also universally unknown by many, and I don't know how you would ever, obviously, transition without great pain. But it's still interesting, I think, for us to consider and dialogue about Because we can continue to create all these interesting systems. Like I agree with you at the at the COVID meltdown of, you know, local USDA and custom exempt slaughterers. Like I agree with you, I was on two or three Zoom calls a week.
D. Firth Griffith:It felt like of like this grant, you know, trying to get money to build a slaughterhouse here and these people trying to build a collaborative to go get the climbers market commodities money to bring in some process. Like infrastructure, like everybody, and now nobody cares. And now, and on top of nobody caring, um, like usda slaughterhouses that were booked out two, three years here in appalachia, which is a whole other kind of like how do you even book out an animal that hasn't been born yet? You just think it's a little ridiculous. They are now calling local farmers being like, hey, we have openings this week if you need any. Like the whole system is just like this is back to normal, there's, there's no problem anymore and obviously there's nuance where the big processors shut down because of covid, and like the big processors came into the little processors, or you know whatever that is. Like the big producers fell into little little processors, or you know whatever that is. Like the big producers fell into little processors.
D. Firth Griffith:Like there's tons of very complex nuance, painful nuance, but I do wonder, you know, because you see these people, these students, these humans. They come through these harvest courses and they just write these reviews when they leave and you can see it on their face. You don't need their words, but their lives are changed and then, like you're saying, you go to a restaurant and you just see people shoving food in their mouth, and not all, not always and obviously not everyone, but it's just like man. There's something we're truly missing here, in this very modern regenerative rhetoric where soil health matters, but just keep shoving food in your face. Soil health matters, but just keep shoving food in your face. Like we're clearly missing something, an irreconcilable division in what is versus what should be that I think blood and fire does a fine job at remediating.
Anna Borgman:So I don't know how you get there Exactly. Yeah, just in thinking about people eating at restaurants and maybe you know, in their daily lives talking about the importance of regenerative agriculture and the importance of all these things, but not necessarily. I mean, it's hard. It's hard to eat a certain way and to be mindful of every bite that you take. There's so much else going on to pull your attention and to spend money on, and whatever it is, and I am so not dogmatic in the way I talk about diet or the way I think anyone should eat. It's the last thing I have any interest in talking about or telling anyone to do.
Anna Borgman:But every Monday I go to my friend's farm and we do chicken slaughter and we do about 400 chickens and then we kill them and gut them and then later in the week we'll either piece those same ones out or pull other ones from the freezer. And I have 50 chickens here and I love my chickens and I know all of them by name and they all have very distinct personalities and so doing chicken slaughter is. I'm very mindful of that. Even though it's 400 chickens that look exactly the same. It's like I know that if I spent time with these chickens I would know them, you know their personalities and I recognize individuals, but I think chickens are a really good example of sort of the I don't know where.
Anna Borgman:It's easy to not be mindful when eating something like chicken, because we've kind of decided that they're just not the same as you, the, the bigger ruminants, and so there's like this hierarchy of what counts as deserving our respect, or being mindful of, or or eating less of, or whatever it is, and chickens they've just it's just been on my mind a lot recently because we kill so many of them and and I mean I see the work that goes into raising these chickens. It's unbelievable, you know. And and then I mean they sell for a decent price, which they should, but people even balk at the, at the price of these chickens and it's like they're pastured their whole lives, they are slaughtered in a, you know, humane, certified humane slaughtering facility. This is something that is not cheap to do, but somehow buying expensive chicken is just shocking to people and it's like well, but you were talking about regenerative ag and how important it is, and these people that are raising these chickens are doing the thing that you think is important.
Anna Borgman:That are raising these chickens are doing the thing that you think is important, but I don't know it's, it's really it's. It's just it's really easy to talk about something and hard to practice it, and I think we're just not used to, and people aren't quite ready for, what it's going to take to actually embody what it means to fully support. If regenerative is what you want to support, or whatever you want to call it, it's going to, it might end up being more more like hunting, less like agriculture. Right, because it's you can't produce it the same way.
D. Firth Griffith:I don't know yeah, yeah, that feels very true how we get there. I don't know. Maybe our great great grandchildren will have the answers. I hope so. I hope someone does. I don't know.
Anna Borgman:Maybe our great great grandchildren will have the answers. I hope so. I hope someone does.
D. Firth Griffith:Anna, I so appreciate you. I appreciate your time and thoughts and wisdom. I don't want to assume that you want to be found, but if people were to find you in a way that gave you life, where might that be? Where do you want to be found?
Anna Borgman:It's probably easiest to find me on Instagram, and I'm just at Anna Borgman. I have a lot of fun with Instagram. I like sharing what we're doing out here. I love teaching, and so when I can't teach in person, it's fun to sort of just put little snippets out there of the stuff that I find is interesting, and it's all over the board. It's not necessarily just meat or slaughter specific, but, yeah, instagram, yeah, that's about it. Right now. We just started Chaos Farms, which around here, we like to pronounce it like it's spelled, so we often call it chow's farms, but it's a chaos farms mt and that's our instagram there, and we're doing eggs, um, and then if people are in montana and they need mobile slaughter or they want to do slaughter classes, or if you're a hunter and you're doing uh, you aren't processing your own animal, we do wild game processing and we're starting that right now. Basically, I think archery started a couple of weeks ago. So, yeah, we got our hands full, but it's good.
D. Firth Griffith:Absolutely Well, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. We'll put the links in the show notes, Anna. Thank you again.
Anna Borgman:Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Thank you.