Four days, six people. Mostly manual work. Preserving what can be preserved as cuts, ground beef, glass-jar-meat, tallow, jelly, and broth.
The house smells like grease while the pots are bubbling down the fat. Upstairs we are still processing fresh meat in the half outside, half inside makeshift facility. The sun is kind to us and stays mostly behind a curtain of clouds, keeping the temperature down by several degrees.
“No breaks, keep going. It’s getting too warm soon”, Sam pushes us on.
My job is simple. Cut everything that lands on my wooden board into cubes for the meat grinder. 10% fat is okay, more needs to be separated. Thick tendons need to be cut out. They have their own pile and will be cooked down to a healthy jelly.
When I was invited to help with the breakdown of a full oxen, my reply was that we couldn’t be there before late evening. I hoped I wouldn’t miss most of it. But then, after all, it’s a full oxen.
Everyone is following the specific work that needs to be done. Taking breaks in turns to provide each other with bites of food or a coffee.
In my breaks, I can’t help but think of City-Leon. Would he have thought to end up here? Would he have hoped to end up here?
When I felt lost back then in Berlin, when even a vegetarian and vegan diet didn’t answer the questions I had inside of me, following my impulse to a farm, that’s when something healed inside of me.
Holding a heart in my hands.
How did we end up here, being so separated from life and nature’s cycles? Where buying plastic packaged pre-sliced salami or vegan-salami in the supermarket is normal, but processing your own animal is weird?
Processing an oxen that has lived all his life on pasture, only 5km from here. And will now nurture two families with kids for a whole year.
I feel intensely grateful for this wonderful being, of being part of this process. Of being part of this community where one becomes many.