Eating Gretl
Children opening their lunchboxes in schoolyards, smiling construction workers in yellow safety hats sitting on stacks of iron rods on a warm, sunny morning, all delighting on the same thing: Knoppers, the chocolate-nutty in-between snack in blue and white plastic packaging. “Morgens, halb zehn in Deutschland”[1], the logline for the 90’s commercial sounded through the TV in regular +/- 30-minute intervals, insisting that this was the daily norm across school grounds in Germany. This is not how I remember it, though. While most of us were lucky enough to have at least one (grand)parent who snuck a Milchschnitte or a Knoppers into our schoolbag every now and then, the majority of our first break experiences, rarely involved branded in-between snacks, lets alone fruit or a granola bar. No. We all lined up at the kiosk for a butter brezn[2] or a leberkaas semmel[3]. Standard Bavarian frühstück’s kost[4].
There were many things I looked forward to upon my return to the heimat[5], almost with a sense of desperation. The mountain range that opened up to us like a postcard when we drove over the Irschenberg; the blumenwiesen[6] full of daisies; the fresh mountain air; and the cows. The “real”, Milka-type cows, not the monochrome ones you see around here. I actually cried when we passed the first meadow with cows grazing on them. When we arrived at the organic farm we were staying at, I found my aunt getting acquainted with all the cows in the stables right under our apartment. Two calves lived in two small wooden “boxes” (this is literally how they were referred to by the farmer), on the opposite side of the path, next to a shed full of agricultural machinery. They were only about six weeks old and close enough to smell but too far to see their mothers, whose udders were swollen with milk. The smaller one was terrified and cowered in a corner as soon as anyone got close. The other one was curious and cheeky. She stuck her head out over the fence ready to explore our salty skin with her grainy tongue. They were both beautiful and sweet and about to die.
*
The animals on this farm lived a good life. Every morning, we woke to the sound of the cows being herded up the mountain to graze all day. Before dark, they’d all come back home to clean stables and generous piles of hay waiting for them. The brooding Mama Duck was treated with utmost respect, while the anxious Papa Duck was left to waddle through the garden nervously, like a looney-toon smoking a cigar on the maternity ward. A live and let live philosophy. There was a strict no-kill policy for every living being here – from the fish in their perfectly kept pond, to the bees in their hives. Every living being except for the calves.
Knowing this to be an irreversible fact kept my mind occupied and I wanted to know how the young farmer – who hadn’t even hit thirty – felt about it. Whether it was really just a job to him and left him completely cold, or whether it kept him up at night. I broached the subject and he wasn’t indifferent to it. It affected him, for sure, but he also saw it, matter-of-factly, as an inescapable part of (farm) life. C’est la vie. So is des. They simply did not have the space or the resources to keep them. Nothing to change about it. During this conversation, I asked him whether the calves had names. The youngest was called “Koibl”; the other, the one we had all been befriending, hadn’t been named yet. Her name was to start with the letter “G”, as part of her heritage. I suggested Gretl, and the farmer agreed. And now I was going to have to adopt her.
*
I can’t remember the last time I ate a leberkaas semmel but I’m not gonna lie: I am practically incapable of passing up on a quality butter brezn – you know, one that’s more butter than actual brezn. Fresh from the bakery, crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, topped with plenty of coarse salt. During our stay, it became as routine as the husband’s morning coffee. And after years of minimal meat consumption, somehow a serving of geschnetzeltes[7] found its way onto my plate and into my belly too. Even though I knew I was going to have to go back to our holiday rental, and look Gretl in the eye. The guilty conscience I had over eating it gave me an urgent case of the shitters and I took it as a sign, understood the burning message. Or at least that’s what I told myself. Because the next day, I got myself another butter brezn without giving it a second’s thought. Without considering the repercussions Gretl’s extended family suffered for my dairy intake. It was only once the butter had sufficiently greased my intestines and I fell into a sad after-dinner dip later that evening that I realized a part of me was still holding on to the naïve romanticism of my early, suburban childhood. When my grandma and I would cross the road to the local famer’s cow stable with a milk can in hand and watch him squeeze our morning’s cereal dressing into it straight from the cow’s teat. It was always quiet and kind of cozy in the stables, dimly lit during the winter months and warm with cow-dung induced heat. There was nothing industrial about it. In the mornings, we would see the same cows in the fields bordering our garden, living what I would assume even they would refer to as “the life” – because they didn’t know any different. And they didn’t know any different because we never allowed them to know any different.
*
Even though our diet at home is 98% vegetarian, the daughter has always been given free choice as to whether or not she wants to eat meat. Whenever the husband is overcome with jamon serrano or roast chicken cravings, we offer it to her. Or she’ll ask for whatever is sparking her curiosity on her dad’s plate. For the most part, however, she has already established that she doesn’t like meat. She likes a bit of jamon when it’s there, but she’s never specifically asked for it, the way she does for other things – like olives and green beans (not my doing). She’ll have a few bites of chicken, but she hates burger meat, chorizo and whatever those nasty chunks of meat are that come in a traditional cocido (“blergh, blergh!”). Again, I try not to have an influence on her when it comes to this; she knows Mama doesn’t eat meat, but I don’t make a thing of it. So, I do believe that, whatever her stance towards a carnivoran diet is entirely hers – and that’s without truly understanding the pig on her plate and the Piglet in her Winnie the Pooh books are the same.
I’ve often asked myself: if meat simply were a non-thing in most households, would anyone really miss it? In my good friend Claus Mikosch’s documentary, Ahimsa – Embracing Peace, Ben, a cook who dedicates his time to permaculture, summed up the question around meat nicely. “There is a discrepancy between our genetic makeup – we are meant to be omnivores, but then there is also our knowledge and our ethics – you don't want to kill animals, you don't want to do harm. It’s difficult to let go of meat because for tens of thousands of years we haven't had any choice.” Ben and his partner in life and work, Anne Marie, used to live in Tarifa where they were surrounded by herds of beautiful retinto cows. “They had wonderful lives, they just munched grass and herbs and flowers every single day,” Anne Marie recalls. “But I've also seen scenes where a truck would come and the calves would be led onto the truck and the cow mamas would be mooing for weeks. Not hours, weeks! Screaming, literally just, you know...mooing because their little baby was gone. And that's the harsh reality of it. You know, these animals, they wanna live. They wanna be mothers, they wanna be babies, and they just wanna live a normal life, like anybody else.”
“We live in a rural area where we see even peaceful ways of acquiring meat and it's very distressing. It’s a harsh reality and when you can hear it and see it with your own eyes – it’s shocking and you think twice about it. It's hard to justify that piece of meat when you see it like that. All of our ancestors were hunter gatherers, or living day to day and they didn't have the luxury to choose. […] My father couldn't refuse a piece of meat on his table on moral grounds. He came from a poor family, the son of a preacher, he was grateful for anything he got. And my grandfather and his grandfather before that – these people couldn't choose. Now, in the 21st century, we have the luxury to choose and it is a responsibility. We can afford to say no to meat and choose something that is of a higher conscience, something that's gonna be better for us and the planet, but it's hard. We're fighting tens of thousands of years of conditioning, essentially, that we have to somehow, in one generation catch up to.”
*
A few days before we packed up the car again to head further south towards Italy, a new calf was born. We missed the birth by some ten minutes, and when we came into the stables the farmer was busy cleaning the calf’s umbilical area with the farm’s own schnapps – and he was glowing. Yes, I know, it seems like a strange choice of words but he really was. 50% of it may have been the sheer adrenaline of assisting what is an intense and miraculous event, but seeing him handle the animal and picking up on the wording he chose to answer the questions of the neighbour children who had come to greet the new offspring, I am certain that, the rest of it was emotion – brought on by the connection he had now formed with mother and calf. I noted a sadness in his eyes, the contradiction of his role in these animal’s lives: helping them come into this world and then handing them off to be killed.
As idyllic as the lives of the cows on this farm and the general mountain region seemed, it was far from it. Witnessing the behind-the-scenes procedures and gaining a better understanding of the prevailing attitudes surrounding them was devastating. Seeing the mother separated from her baby just ten minutes after giving birth, only for the calf to be fed from a teat bucket from there on out; knowing that they would be dead just six weeks later without having ever felt their mother’s warmth and love, and the grass beneath their hooves – how can it not be? And more importantly, how are we capable of, and so willing to ignore these truths? It is exactly as Ben said: years of conditioning are hard to break. We were taught to accept these practices as a normality and, above all, a necessity. Cruelty is not a necessity. Empathy is. Kindness is – including for ourselves, as we transition toward making better choices.
[1] “Mornings, 10AM in Germany”
[2] Pretzel with butter
[3] Meatloaf sandwich
[4] Breakfast food
[5] Homeland
[6] Flower fields
[7] Traditional Swiss dish: sliced meat strips served with egg noodles