Lord of the Flies: Predation versus Artful Harvest - Ep 126

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-01

[00:00:08]Greetings and welcome to a Meat Smith Harvest podcast.

[00:00:14]This is Brandon Sheer.

[00:00:16]It is Sunday in May the 28th. That's what it is. And it is warm and wet outside here in the northeast of Oklahoma.

[00:00:29]very wet and consequently everything is growing stupendously fast. The life is just redundant and un unmanageable um on a small farm at this time of year except uh by the the artful exertion of husbandry and that is that is the joyous duty that we have here on a homestead. It is to to tame this reckless life by which we are surrounded into something that can nourish us and that is what constitutes the culinary arts.

[00:01:15]Before I get into um abstractions though, I wanted to mention something very concrete and that is the meatmith harvest classes. I posted them. They're up now for the fall of this year 2026.

[00:01:34]If you have not taken a meatmith class yet, do consider signing up for a class this fall. I have one in or two in October and one in December.

[00:01:45]And between the three classes that are on the calendar, we will be harvesting pigs, sheeps, and bovines, the noble and sustaining cow.

[00:02:00]Do come to these classes. It's it's always uh a joy to me to discover the harvest for the first time with every class. And that is that's that's an experience you only really get to repeat as a teacher. And so self selfishly I have I have made myself the teacher of these classes and I can watch people go through it for the first time and overcome the knowledge gaps and the sort of tacit reticence that we have as modern people. Uh our our withdrawal our sort of It's it's a it's a unexamined repugnance.

[00:02:54]Um, and we all have it to varying degrees just by virtue of where we do come from and some of us have gotten over it. But this repugnance to taking a life for food and I would argue that this natural well maybe it's not natural but common repugnance is actually rooted in something good. It is a good and that is something we might talk about today in this here podcast.

[00:03:28]It is actually praiseworthy.

[00:03:31]It should be overcome but it it comes from a good place.

[00:03:38]And that's one of the delights I get as a teacher in the Meatsmith classes is I can I can sort of be right next to the students, right next to you as you as you go through that repugnance also for good reason.

[00:03:55]Uh for a more defined concrete reason, namely the feast, the the task of blood.

[00:04:05]Um, it is a joy to see in these classes the move from mere ill-defined predation in our attitude towards meat to artful harvesting. There is a immense chasm, probably an in almost an infinite one. It's not quite infinite because they're both natural. I would say between being a mere predator and a slaughterman, a harvester, between a task or a duty and merely predatorial drive.

[00:04:47]There's there's a huge chasm between those.

[00:04:52]And it's in the context of a meatmith class where I can I can sort of attend people as they as they span that huge distance uh relatively effortlessly by the way.

[00:05:05]Um and largely because we have that thing embedded in the class in the procession of the class that really distinguishes the predator from the artful harvester.

[00:05:20]And that is the final cause, the right end, a feast, a feast that is delicious and nourishing, not merely an extraction of necessary proteins.

[00:05:34]Um, however you can get it. And when you have the end clearly in view, the means make a lot more sense and they attain a a a rationality. I would say a poetry that is proper to human dignity. It's proper to when a rational animal gets its food.

[00:06:01]Uh whereas that which would be proper more to an irrational animal, a material animal like a big cat, uh it it doesn't fit it doesn't fit with us. And so we feel a particular thing when we when we act like a big cat or when we act like a predator. And I think that that describes where we get some of our reticence with handling livestock especially for slaughter in the first place. But that's not what I'm talking about right now. Right now I'm talking about the classes. You should indeed come if you can make it. Come to a meetsmith class. They are undiluted hands-on experiences. Uh they're not demos. I don't sit there and flip a knife around and merely show you how to do it. You do it and you walk through the process yourself. And you know what I would say? Uh once is enough to gain the the virtue of killing well of killing nicely as William Kobet would put it or as another account would have it um killing pigs in the most gentlemanly way possible. Excuse me.

[00:07:14]That's what we like to do in these classes. And uh what you do it once and then you get it because you're doing it with your hands. You're learning by doing.

[00:07:24]And when you do that, you break through the barrier of mystery of uh well, no, mystery is a positive thing. You know, you break through the barrier of ignorance and you realize, oh, that that obscurity that that made this process seem so complex is now gone. It's actually it's extremely simple. The thing that people learn in a meatmith class is just how simple it is. And if there's anything that's difficult to grasp, it's not the complexity of the steps, but it is to truly believe your own experience when it turns out to be much more simple than you thought. And not simple um because we don't do, you know, a very good job or we're not even not because it's uh it lacks adornment or beauty or proportion.

[00:08:22]It is in fact even ornate but it is still simple and it's it's simple because it is pure and it there's something very basic about it and you can do it and you can do it indefinitely after you do it just once in a meetsmith class you get it you apprehend it. So uh I would recommend and encourage you to come to a meatmith class this fall.

[00:08:54]Do sign up. That is how we here at Farmstead meets and by we I do mean me and my wife and my children.

[00:09:05]uh and uh the heroic um community manager whom we harvest who who we who we hire to help us with the back end of the website. Victoria, it's a small team and the way that we we keep this business going and the family going is really through these classes. they are our primary source uh and many often our only source of income. So I do encourage you to sign up for those. And then also if you haven't yet, this is something I keep forgetting to mention. We have an online membership. And you know I I started this membership like eight years ago.

[00:09:49]Uh, and I it would be interesting to see if it was not one of the first homesteading memberships uh online uh before they all proliferated around uh 2019 I would say 2020 and became more common. But we have been running this membership. I have been running this membership uh for uh for a while now and it's we have accumulated quite an archive a museum as it were of traditional harvest methods all filmed.

[00:10:26]So I make instructional films and I have done for several years and I've got over 70 now exclusive to members. It's they're posted on the exclusive membership portion of farmsteadmeatsmith.com.

[00:10:42]In addition to that, all those films which detail the raising, killing, cutting, curing, and cooking of just about all livestock. Yeah, all of them.

[00:10:52]Uh we do monthly live chats in the meets of membership. We get together once a month with all the members. We happy few and we we detail our harvesting because there is a substantial posity of knowledge and traditions out there for us to inherit.

[00:11:11]And so we're filling up the evacuity that we lack. We're we're filling it up again by recording together what happens when you undertake to harvest to raise, harvest, kill, and you know, cook and cure animals in your backyard, which is their original habitat. That is their their proper environment really. Uh because all of our information now about how to kill and cut creatures for food comes from a different context, one that is revolutionary and new and alien to the human experience throughout the centuries. And that alien context is the industrial scale. And you will get all manner of draconian um and fearbased uh information officious fear-based information uh on how to harvest especially on how to cure things. uh if you just do an a search on the internets and generally it's all coming from the industrial scale where things are volatile and stupendously dangerous and not easy to control and it's not because carrying bacon itself in its essence is a complicated thing. It's super not. We talked about that last two times ago, two podcasts ago. I think it amounts to putting salt on a thing and then taking salt off of it and then hanging it. That's about it. But if you if you are lost in the labyrinth of online curing guides, you will find all kinds of um fear-mongering, not based on knowledge, uh but based on really all of the huge disasters that have happened when we try to cure bacon by the, you know, uh uh by the uh train car load when we try to do things in massive centralized scales.

[00:13:26]That is what makes it dangerous and complicated and that's what makes everything before it even gets into your kitchen. all of the meat, all of the raw material uh toxic and volatile and not stable before it even gets to you, before you can even really begin your preservation and curing. And in that context, yeah, there's not a lot of forgiveness.

[00:13:50]Whereas if you just simply shorten the supply chain to about uh a few paces out your back door of your house, you experience a simplification such that it's it's not even recognizable as analogous to the industrial product. It's a it's a totally different thing. It is incalculable, incalculably superior and more delicious and thankfully so much more simple. It is the prowess of the domestic cook of the home cook, not as I like to say the chefs in lab coats in clinical test kitchens with um pH meters and um you know scales that can weigh infiniteesimally small quantities. It's it's not that. It's so much more simple.

[00:14:51]And I the the beautiful thing about it is that there's a simplicity of home production of meat both from the the raising all the way to the curing and the cooking.

[00:15:04]This simplicity is inextricably wed to the extravagance. It's what produces the best flavor. It's not like by undergoing excessive uh complicated controls, temperature gauges, timings, measurements, and uh synthetic chemical ingredients.

[00:15:23]You don't create a better product with those things. It is quite the opposite.

[00:15:26]You create a relatively bland product stripped of its most of its nutritional value, speaking of bacon or ham, whatever it may be. But when you just do it in your backyard, it it tastes in amazing. It is the most thrifty thing you can do because it stretches the harvest of your backyard pig or lamb or whatever it may be exponentially.

[00:15:53]But it also happens to be the most delicious because because the natural order in its beautiful benign simplicity is benevolent. And it is that such that the the bacon and the ham that you cure yourself will be so much more delicious than anything it is possible to purchase and it's not even debatable. It's really fun. And so we're sort of like orphans in our era, in our day and age, where we have not inherited, at least the vast majority of us, the means of of making these things, of making things like head cheese, even compost uh for your garden or um h curing animal flesh for preservation and not merely flavoring. We haven't received the knowledge on how to do this. our our grandparents, at least for me, not even my grandparents did it. You know, you have to go back a couple generations. And somewhere in that generational line, it was there was a failure to transmit. We weren't given the knowledge on simply how to survive from the backyard, from the well-off frugality of the domestic scale. And so in the meetsmith membership, we are recompiling these things and we have extensive forums where people are doing this and we have um recipes and methods laid out in PDF format that I've written and then over 70 films detailing how to do this all specifically prim uh yeah specifically on the home scale the domestic scale the human scale which is the tasty one of all the scales out there. It's the tastiest and that's what the Meatsmith membership is. And it can be that uh because largely of the members that have contributed to it. And it's really very simple. Uh these old methods, these traditions of preserving meat and cooking well using the entire carcass, using the whole yield of your beloved backyard pig.

[00:18:12]These are not difficult things to learn at all. They're very simple.

[00:18:18]And so all you have to do is undertake some of these things on a small scale and you've automatically won 80% of the battle. Like you're done. You did it.

[00:18:29]Excellent. No matter what you do from that point on because it's a a small scale endeavor will be orders of magnitude better than anything you can purchase. So that just the scale alone is a huge advantage.

[00:18:45]And then if you undertake furthermore to not be wasteful, uh to be artful, use sharp knives and limit yourself to relatively simple technology.

[00:19:00]Now, now you're at 100%. Now, now you're fully capable of doing it all. And this only takes a few months, you know, of harvesting and you get it. Not even. You don't have to put in that many reps of killing your backyard pig or your lamb or your cow or chicken or duck or goose, all of which we cover, or rabbits in the membership.

[00:19:22]Um, and that's because the things that that get in the way and make it needlessly complex and I and even dangerous, they're just not there anymore. And those those things specifically take the form of you know the industrial scale, massive scale, huge volume, but also excessive tech, the use of excessive technology in the form of synthetic, complicated and very dangerous ingredients like sodium nitrite, which we'll probably talk about at some point.

[00:19:55]Should have the nitrite podcast when it comes to curing.

[00:20:00]and just using simple equipment. You don't need a band saw. You don't need chambered vacuum sealers. There might be a place for these things. But if you want to guarantee that you can achieve the best results with the fewest and simplest steps, you don't need any of these things. And then the traditional knowledge will precipitate to the surface. it will float to the top uh through your acts of homescale harvesting and husbandry and you you you gain competency pretty darn quickly and then you can't go back because you're going to make bacon that is going to blow your mind. It'll knock off your socks and you're never going to want to go back. Uh even after, you know, maybe it's just your second or third try, maybe your first try of making bacon.

[00:20:53]And so that's why we have such a great archive of information on the meets with membership because that's what all the members have been doing and they record it and we document it in the forums. We document it in the uh closed Facebook group which is only for Meatsmith members.

[00:21:16]And we're building up this traditional store, the store of traditional knowledge, this larder of uh preserved knowledge as it were and it's really delightful. I I am always I learn things on it all the time. uh not least of all because our members come from all over the country and in some parts other parts of the world and so there is every reason to believe that someone is curing and producing things with minimal tech as an aid in a climate and a region and a teroir that is exactly like yours.

[00:22:00]And so you will find information traditions that are pertinent to your particular climate and your region on the Meetsmith membership. So if you wanted to do that, I would recommend heartily in fact that you go to farmstead meetsmith.com and become a Meetsmith member. It's a lot of fun. We get together for live chats once a month and we we document our seasonal harvesting and husbandry and we help each other out in in the domestic art of thriving and eating as well as possible because really that's that is the simple end of it. Um it is to eat well which is not a base uh or unimportant end. Right? You we got to provide a sufficiency of bodily goods to have the the proper matter upon which to develop virtue and we got to have all the virtues and that's so that's that's the meets with membership. Check it out.

[00:23:10]do sign up farmsteadmeth.com and then I would also uh mention on our website at farmsteadmeth.com I did put a donate button at the top of the homepage. It's a PayPal donate button and this was honestly uh it was born of you know some necessity. We're as a family in a transitional period right now where we're trying to sell this home which is a wonderful place. We are very grateful for it, but it's a little too much for us and I am looking to, as you know, sell it to uh rid ourselves of the monthly burden of the mortgage, which is actually not that high. We actually have a really good mortgage, but it's just it's too much um given the unreliability of operating a small business with its its booms and busts and its its ups and downs. as any of you who run a small business know very well. And it only gets a little uh it only gets more complicated uh with the more mouths there are to feed. And I have 10. And it's uh because the the thing that those mouths also need uh in addition to stupendously delicious food that is in equal measure delicious and nutritious or we're not going to compromise either one of those.

[00:24:35]uh they need uh education, they need formation and they can get some of that on the farm for sure. Uh but they they also need to learn the truth and learn philosophy.

[00:24:54]They need to learn the discipline of mind, the virtue of studiosity that comes with learning algebra and geometry, uklidian geometry, uh and the clear rational precision which is an expression of the proportionality and the beauty of the creator uh of all of those things. And so they and of the natural order. And so it has it has just become more and more apparent to us that there are not enough hours in the day to feed and educate all of these children uh and and uh in a and work enough to pay a mortgage.

[00:25:40]Basically, I think if I had to distill it, that's kind of how it all breaks down.

[00:25:46]uh we simply ran out of hours in the day. There literally aren't enough. You know, you just keep getting up earlier and earlier and going to bed later and later. And that's not sustainable because the body does need sleep and it needs to be restored. So, we're going to eliminate one of those unbearable things because the others are not only bearable but necessary and uh truly delightful.

[00:26:15]But one of them is not and that is the mortgage. Not delightful and not um necessary when it can be got out from under. And so that is that's the goal.

[00:26:27]And so in this period of transition, it's tricky. it's tricky to pay the bills and to keep uh the classes going and the membership and so if you feel so inclined uh you could donate. Oh, and that's what I was going to say on our website farmsteadith.com just to help us because it was really at uh the suggestion of Meatmith members and many others uh that I added the donate button in the first place. I never would have thought of it but through lovely we get letters from uh people who are praying for us. It's really so deeply encouraging.

[00:27:08]Um and we get very helpful wisdom and advice and uh people advise me you need to put a donate button on there. Um and so I did and uh so it was really at the uh at the advice of you all. So thank you for that. Uh cuz that that kind of thing doesn't pop into my brain. Uh not because I am in any way humble or anything but uh I am just absent-minded and I don't think about these things.

[00:27:44]But that has been uh a very great grace and the beauty of of community no matter how remote you know uh that we get from from the people that pray for us and support us. So thank you for that. That's at farmstead meetings.com at the top of the page. And uh if you feel inclined to tithe in that way at all uh it would benefit us immensely even in in small small amounts.

[00:28:16]Um and you know part of the plan here for the Meetsmith household is to downsize.

[00:28:23]So this is this is my goal. I have currently, well, the bank has and I um I flatter them with monthly payments to permit us to live here. But this uh beautiful property, it's 10 acres just outside of Tulsa, very close to Tulsa on a highway that goes directly into the city without any traffic ever. And it's a beautiful horse property. That's really what this is. It was built for horses. So, there's a gorgeous horse barn, super stout fencing that is the best fencing I've ever had in any farming situation and uh a lovely house and a shop and it's it's set up, it's a really nice place. And I think that uh hopefully because our our mortgage is not huge. It's not immense, we can pull equity out of this place and downsize because I have realized uh that, you know, we have 10 acres here, but I probably use almost exactly, actually, now I think about it, it's precisely five of it. I use five for the growing of food and the pasturage of livestock, the raising of pigs, and the frolicking of children. Five is is pretty great.

[00:29:40]And uh so that's kind of what we're looking for is to downsize. I know and I'm utterly confident that with the what is it? It's just the serendipity that attends the domestic scale, the small scale. Just like we're saying about the membership, just shrinking the scale a little bit to the domestic scale to that irreducible unit that is the family, not the individual or the the nation, but just the family. There is just a redundancy of abundance there just for the scale itself. And I am utterly confident that uh and indeed have proven several times that we can raise more food both uh vegetable and flesh than we can possibly consume on 5 acres even a family of our size which is nons small.

[00:30:34]Um 5 acres would be great. So that's kind of what we're looking for to downsize a little bit. And uh we will be building a a another Meatsmith shop where we can host classes.

[00:30:47]Um and I was I was I have another announcement and that is uh I guess I didn't expect to go there but what the heck. Um I am starting I am teaching at a classical school and I am teaching literature and uh the academic calendar is perfect because it will I'll be fully and in indeed better able to operate Farmstead meetsmith than I am now. Uh, and I really look forward to it and it will actually it's actually going to enhance what we can do with Farmstead Meatmith because it will untether Farmstead Meatmith from the domestic bills as much as it is currently tethered to that. Um, and allow me to put more of the revenue of Farmstead Meat back into Farm Dead Meith as it has needed for, you know, 10 years. I just haven't been able to do it. So, uh I really look forward to that and even offering more classes because there's there's so much forgiveness in the academic calendar that even with teaching I'll be able to we'll probably be able to do actually more and so I I really look forward to that. Um, so in preparation for uh beginning to teach, which is coming in August, I've already done, you know, I was full-time towards the end of this last semester. Uh, more as a a uh in a pool of substitute teachers.

[00:32:25]Uh but when we when I start up in earnest in August, I will be teaching literature which is the one thing I actually am credentialed to teach in.

[00:32:34]Actually, I don't have a teaching credential, but I do have graduate degrees therein.

[00:32:40]And so uh as far as being qualified uh by um for a particular job description, that is the one literature teacher that I actually I actually am qualified for.

[00:32:54]Uh, and it'll be a lot of fun. I'm teaching I'm going to be teaching to eth and tth graders literature and it's great literature because it's a classical school and so we can uh keep ourselves well within the western cannon and we're going to be doing Beaolf and hopefully if I can fit it in definitely Sir Gwain in the green green knight Dante and Paradise Lost and lots of Shakespeare especially especially especially if I'm in charge. We're going to be doing lots of Shakespeare. Um it'll be great. And uh one of the works that I get to teach is one that I have not read yet, but everyone else has. And this is because I was homeschooled. So from second grade on, my educational experience uh all the way up until I went to college was uh homeschooling.

[00:33:51]And you know it was I would say it was homeschooling but not in the strict sense which I find homeschooling the strict sense is actually extremely rare. Uh generally meaning all of the schooling happens at a place called the home. Uh I had you know jobs outside of the home. I worked for both my parents who were uh small business owners through over the years and uh I took lots of classes. Many of my friends, you know, went to community colleges, JC's, and got their AAS way before they were 18. Um, I didn't do that, but I did take lots of classes that were offered in our smallish, well, it wasn't that small actually, in our homeschool group in the state of California. And that would be, you know, biology classes, math classes, literature classes, writing classes, all kinds. Um in that whole uh plan of education I never actually read a lot of the works that uh are required by most schools. Chief among them would be the Lord of the Flies.

[00:35:01]So at the age the ripe old age of 42 I have for the first time read William Golding's novel his iconic novel as they call it uh from the 1950s the Lord of the Flies and it was it was a journey reading this thing.

[00:35:21]It's very short. It's a page turner.

[00:35:23]It's hard to put down. He is a very good writer and I confess that I was um going into it a little cynical. I had definitely not even implicitly explicitly judged this particular book by its cover. And I thought that what I was going to read was a primitivist fallacy.

[00:35:51]I thought that I was going to read about how boys stranded upon an island devolve, and I use that word technically, into ape-like behavior.

[00:36:04]And that is not what happens.

[00:36:09]This book is actually very good. It is very true, even though it is fiction.

[00:36:17]and he's far too subtle to simply turn the clock back on the biological evolutionary thing. And I also thought that what I might find would be a Freudian characterization of the human person that if you just remove the law of the father, the prohibition of patriarchy, then the um Oh, I can't even speak Freudian anymore. I used to be really good at it. That not it's not latent.

[00:36:48]The uh what's the word I'm looking for?

[00:36:50]You know, the id the sublimated desires.

[00:36:53]Is that it? I can't even remember. Who cares? Uh that are roing beneath the surface of every human being, including the edible complex, which is garbage.

[00:37:06]Uh they're just going to burst forth in reckless abandon. All you have to do is remove the prohibition of the father and then you get um this reckless and uncontrolled perversion. And of course the Freudian construct, the evolutionary construct, they are um compelling. I would say actually they are compelling as a story to explain the human person in human psychology because they use literature especially Freud. I mean it's the edible complex, right? That's why he endures because he builds his silliness uh psychoanalysis off of classical literature and psychoanalyzes Edipus and Hamlet and Gertrude and all of that stuff but also because they uh they skirt close to the truth. They get close to it, right? Uh but yet they are so far. And William Golding, he threads that needle. It's great. I would say he's not even embedded in the Freudian or Darwinian worldview.

[00:38:14]And so he says something far truer. It's really good. It's really good. It actually reminds me one modern story that reflects uh the story of the Lord of the Flies would be the village which is a film made by might Shyamalan.

[00:38:33]Um, a very pretty film, but also similar message and very um, also true. Also very true, I would say, with some exceptions. But Lord of the Flies, at the very least when I first read it, uh, which was like literally 3 days ago, uh, I realized that there is a there is a central figure that I through neglect.

[00:39:02]Um, it is very silly that I have not been aware of it. And it is the pig, the noble swine plays a huge role in this novel, if you remember. And so much of its conflict about these abandoned boys uh who crash in an airline on an island, a remote island that is uninhabited somewhere except by pigs and figs, fruits. Um they have to it is the story of their survival.

[00:39:37]Um not necessarily their thrival. they're thriving and their attempts to create order.

[00:39:48]And one of the great conflicts in it, I think, is um the conflict that is represented by the pig, which of course, spoiler alert, this is a spoiler for no one because everyone has read this book.

[00:40:01]is the the titular spoiler what the title refers to you know be elabub is a name for Satan which means lord of the flies if I am not mistaken and in the novel this is sort of this title is given to the head of a pig on a steak and it's really interesting Because what you see play out in this particular novel is the tension and this is such a meatsmith interpretation of this novel. So I apologize in advance you guys. This is ridiculous but also unavoidable. I couldn't avoid it. The tension between the man as predator or as abattoire or as artful harvester.

[00:40:56]This is one of the main conflicts, right?

[00:40:59]The conflict between uh it ultimately ends up being between right reason and merely satisfying the appetite.

[00:41:10]That is the essential conflict of it.

[00:41:13]And uh there is this great passage uh towards the beginning where this struggle is exemplified and this is in relation to the killing of a pig for food. something I happen to know a little bit about and uh this expresses in very good writing exactly a situation that I see a lot in firsttime harvesters when uh when people are learning myself included how to kill an animal for the first time um there is in that moment when you come down to it there is like I was saying at the beginning there's a reticence bordering on repugnance and it's a continuum in all of us. I think that we advance different degrees of this.

[00:42:07]Um, and I would say that the ability to push through that, that reluctance to handle and take the life of an animal, the repugnance or reticence of it, the ability to push through it is not necessarily a consequence of having the right skills, the right means, knowing exactly how to do it step by step though that is important. The ability to push through that reticence is having the right ends, the right final cause. Then then you can go through with it. This is why I like the slaughterman's creed which you've heard me repeat too many times. They used to be emlazed on the walls of abattoars or slaughter houses in Britain. So it's in English. So, we can hear the uh sort of, you know, it's almost like a uh Anglo-Saxon meter to it. Um, it's moreiterative, even though there's not technical alliteration. Nonetheless, the uh the rhythm of the poem is in the beginning lines. It's in the the transition from I ams to troic poetic feet, which we're not talking about, but it does have poetry. And the line that I think about that really differentiates the predator from the abattoire is thine is a task of blood.

[00:43:44]And then a couple lines later it says um let thy victim feel no pain. So the whole poem as you know I'm sure is thine is a task of blood. dis discharge thy task with mercy. Let thy victim feel no pain. May sudden blow bring death, such death as thou thyself would ask. And in this little poem uh this creed, there is completely absent the Darwinian or the Freudian substrate of human life. Right? Completely absent.

[00:44:24]Thine is a task of blood.

[00:44:28]Discharge thy task. Right? This is not a predatory drive. The slaughterhouse where animals are being killed for human consumption. This is not a predatorial drive like that which motivates a cheetah on the Serengeti to chase down an analopee. Nope. This is a task that is discharged.

[00:44:56]That means it's a duty. This is a totally different thing than a drive. A duty versus a drive. We're talking about uh different orders of being here. Thine is a task of blood. A task is a duty. It is an obligation that must be discharged for a greater good. And that's where the next line comes in.

[00:45:19]Let thy victim feel no pain. Oh, it's music. It's so simple. Let thy victim feel no pain.

[00:45:29]If you wanted to keep it amic, it would just be let victim feel no pain, but that doesn't quite work. Um, victim, victim, not prey.

[00:45:40]Your backyard pig, your yearling lamb, your steer, it's not a prey animal. It's not the quarry of your hunt. No, it is the victim of a sacrifice. Victim.

[00:45:56]Victims die. And they don't just die.

[00:45:59]They don't just expire.

[00:46:01]Victims are sacrificed. That's what they are. That's what they be. That's their ontology.

[00:46:10]And they are sacrificed. What what is a sacrifice? But that which is given up, offered for a greater good.

[00:46:20]So this is the influence of reason upon human subsistence.

[00:46:29]Totally different thing than felid subsistence or you know canine subsistence or lupine. I don't know what the wolf adjective is. Um but you know what I mean. This is not just predatory.

[00:46:47]This is not just predator and prey.

[00:46:49]This is sacrifice. This is offering.

[00:46:53]This is for the greater good.

[00:46:58]You know, a a lion has no scruples about um a greater good at all, nor about the victim feeling no pain.

[00:47:10]Indeed, animals will begin eating before they even execute their their prey animal.

[00:47:19]this for a human therefore who exists on a higher level and not just because he's more advanced uh because he's on a different continuum. He's on a different train track. The human he or she uh we have reason. We're of a different order of nature.

[00:47:40]Uh any qualities that we share with the animal kingdom are analogous and not by descent. as we've already mentioned. And so it would be disordered and unnatural for us to be predatory.

[00:47:58]And therefore, whenever we do, whenever we experience something of that, whenever we suspect that we might be acting predatorally or acting in a way that makes an animal feel like prey, we feel a thing called repugnance. And I think more specifically, we feel a thing called shame. And shame is the fear of appearing lowly or base.

[00:48:26]And that is exactly what happens when we act like predators. We are demoting ourselves to a lower degree of being that is not proper to us. It is lowly and not in the admirable humble way. No, it's base and the degraded way. So, and then now put that back in the context of Lord of the Flies. Oh my goodness. think of where this baseness leads.

[00:48:59]Just read read the book.

[00:49:02]Anyway, this repugnance is something that I had when I first I remember when I first slaughtered one of the first animals um that I was obligated to harvest. So I remember it was a lamb and I was working on a farm and I was able to do it well with a minimum of repugnance I would say and no felt shame not because I knew what to do cuz I sure didn't uh I was guided through it sort of and I had seen it done sort of okay a couple times uh but that was it.

[00:49:42]What I did have though were that were that was that thing that is the province of a rational creature, a final cause. I had a tea loss. I had an end in view.

[00:49:53]And that that was the key. That's why I could kill my first lamb pretty well without too much repugnance and no shame. It's the ends.

[00:50:07]A creature that is rational needs ends just like you know a cheetah needs really springing ligaments and a particular physiology to be able to run 62 miles an hour.

[00:50:21]No less essential to our nature is art and reason.

[00:50:27]And that means we need ends. We need final ends. We need final causes. The purpose.

[00:50:35]So, I thought that this was exemplified really well uh in this book. And the beginning of this conflict happens at the first attempt to kill a pig. The boys know we need to eat.

[00:50:51]One of them is particularly confident about his ability to to precipitate the death of a pig and to eat it. In fact, he's got the knife. He even has a trapped pig in front of him.

[00:51:04]and he even comes upon it with time with time to be able to take the life of this pig.

[00:51:13]But something happens. I'm just going to read you this short paragraph. Uh this is some really good writing.

[00:51:22]He's even filled up with confidence.

[00:51:24]Actually, I haven't started reading yet.

[00:51:25]Sorry. Uh because they just explored the island. uh they they climb to a mountaintop and they experience what the author calls a feeling of dominion.

[00:51:37]They are filled with confidence in their own solitude and that the whole island is theirs.

[00:51:43]And even in view of this, he's still unable to act well in this moment. So here we go. Quote, "They were in the beginnings of the thick forest, plonking with weary feet on a track when they heard the noises, squeaking, and the hard strike of hooves on a path. As they pushed forward, the squeaking increased till it became a frenzy. They found a piglet caught in a curtain of creepers. It's even a small pig."

[00:52:14]The piglet was throwing itself at the elastic traces in all the madness of extreme terror.

[00:52:21]Its voice was thin, needle sharp, and insistent. The three boys rushed forward, and Jack drew his knife again with a flourish.

[00:52:32]He raised his arm in the air.

[00:52:35]There came a pause, a hiatus, the pig continued to scream and the creepers to jerk, and the blade continued to flash at the end of a bony arm. The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be.

[00:52:55]Then the piglet tore loose from the creepers and scured into the undergrowth. They were left looking at each other and the place of terror.

[00:53:05]Jack's face was white under the freckles. He noticed that he still held the knife aloft and brought his arm down, replacing the blade in the sheath.

[00:53:17]Then they all three laughed ashamedly and ashamedly, and began to climb back to the track.

[00:53:26]I was choosing a place, said Jack. I was just waiting for a moment to decide where to stab him.

[00:53:34]You should have stuck a pig, said Ralph fiercely.

[00:53:38]They always talk about sticking a pig.

[00:53:42]You cut a pig's throat to let the blood out, said Jack. Otherwise, you can't eat the meat. Why didn't you? They knew very well why he didn't. Why he hadn't.

[00:53:54]Because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh.

[00:54:01]because of the unbearable blood.

[00:54:08]End of quote.

[00:54:10]And I love that he uses the word enormity. It's such a good word in kind of our common usage. It just means uh the great evil, the great evil, a great evil thing. Um, but it it it really means like uh etmologically, you know, the en that's like the out the the out prefix out of um like enough, you know.

[00:54:41]And then norm out of the norm, out of the normal way of things, it was abnormal.

[00:54:50]uh and that's kind of etmology etmologically what the enormity means and they they shamefully encountered that and that was the cause of the reticence and I don't know if you have experienced this before but I remember distinctly when I first began handling animals handling livestock like fresh out of you know suburban existence having only ever touched dogs and cats? You know, uh that there is this the same kind of reticence, the same kind of reticence to get your hands on a furry living thing and to manage it and to handle it and maybe even to kill it.

[00:55:43]And the reticence is so um it's abrupt and it surprises you.

[00:55:49]Maybe you know this I'm reaching back now for like 15 years ago whenever the first time more first time I really had to handle livestock.

[00:55:59]Um so maybe some of you can remember this first experience as well. You choose you decide intellectually to go down and and grab this animal for whatever reason.

[00:56:12]Uh but you are stopped. In fact, it foils even your determined attempts to grab. You pull your punches as it were.

[00:56:22]Your hand pulls. It veers off when you go to grab it. And then if you've been in the context of watching someone who is experienced in grabbing, controlling, and asserting dominion over these creatures, you are surprised at their efficiency. It's like, "Wow, look at how they just grabbed it.

[00:56:44]That was so quick. How did they do that?

[00:56:46]That was so efficient. Like grabbing meat birds in a mobile coupe, right? I remember observing that for the first time and then just being like, why am I why do I fumble? So I am so inept at this very simple thing. I can grab chickens. They weigh four pounds. What is the deal? And they're not even that quick.

[00:57:09]There was a reticence.

[00:57:11]There was almost an involuntary recoiling against grabbing that animal, laying hands upon it.

[00:57:21]And this is one of the first things to overcome.

[00:57:29]And I would say particularly in the Lord of the Flies, as you keep reading it, Jack, who unsuccessfully went after this first pig, he chooses not the artful harvest, the noble way to go about it. It's really interesting. He has to do something to be able to kill the next pig. He has to do something extraordinary.

[00:58:08]And it's based upon shame, the unbearable blood, right? There is a sense in which it is shameful for us to kill artlessly. And I think we feel that. We feel it.

[00:58:24]and we recoil from it.

[00:58:28]And so rather than strive to kill art fully, Jack has to retreat from art entirely.

[00:58:40]He has to retreat from the moderation of reason entirely and he goes to something else.

[00:58:49]He actually apparently devolves into acting more and more like a predator.

[00:58:58]He has to actually erase his face in order to be able to do it and put paint on. He has to paint his face. And it's only then when he can remove his identity and Golding says move about freely shamelessly behind the mask of face paint.

[00:59:22]Then he can act like a predator and then he is able to kill a pig.

[00:59:30]It's really interesting.

[00:59:34]And then the rest of the book is a conflict. It's a conflict between uh several pretty apparent symbolic references, lots of symbolism, lots of self-reference that is not very uh veiled. It's all very explicit. And it's it's wonderful. It's artful. It's great.

[00:59:55]It's great for young adults. They're going to you're not going to miss the symbolism. And one of the big ones is the two kinds of pigs because there's a character named Piggy poratively unfortunately.

[01:00:10]And then there is the pigs that they eat and the pig's head that's mounted on a spit that is eventually called the lord of the flies.

[01:00:18]And uh the tension between Piggy, the individual who is actually the voice of law and reason, and the pig that is the lord of the flies, the base.

[01:00:35]And again, it's it's not a noble descent to base appetites.

[01:00:42]It's not a return to more primitive noble primitive ancestral uh semi- primate peaceful coexistence.

[01:00:54]No, no. It is a base dissent that is shameful because it subjects the reason to the appetites and then those servants of the Lord of the Flies end up acting like animals which is not proper to them and that is why it is repugnant and distasteful and shameful.

[01:01:21]And I think that the conflict of the whole book really rests or is maybe most explicitly explicitly crystallized in uh a discussion between Simon who is a very important character as you know um and and Jack when Simon is trying to describe what is wrong they're trying to understand why there is a fear that rules the entire population of boys especially the little onins especially the little guys and they start to think that maybe there's a beast out there.

[01:01:55]There's a beast. And of course, those who are trying to keep hold on to law and order, they reject they they cannot countenance this fantasy of a beast, a nameless fear out in the woods because they have no evidence of it. And the reign of that nameless fear would just devolve everything so much quicker into chaos.

[01:02:20]And they're trying to figure out what this thing is. And Simon gets up and he says, "Maybe it's us.

[01:02:29]Maybe we are the beast."

[01:02:32]And nobody has any idea what he's saying, but Simon sort of elliptically in a veiled way as generally the prophet type figure of the group.

[01:02:42]Um he's talking about something very particular.

[01:02:46]And to try to illustrate it, to try to get the point across, he says, "Imagine the dirtiest thing in everybody else's mind, particularly Jax, who failed in the hunt.

[01:02:59]He's not on the same level as Simon.

[01:03:01]He's not thinking about the same dirtiest thing."

[01:03:08]And so Jack immediately says, I think he says the crude single syllable, right? The bad word. It means poo.

[01:03:20]That's what Jack says. And of course, being in a circle of young boys, they all lose their mind and laugh and immediately the train is lost. And he said he said a forbidden word and it was a release.

[01:03:35]But that's not the word that Simon was talking about.

[01:03:39]Simon was thinking of a different dirtiest thing. Also a monoselabic word and that was sin. Sin.

[01:03:49]And it's just so emblematic that that really expresses the conflict to one group who realized that the the the main problem in their abandonment in their being stranded on this island is not lack of shelter or food.

[01:04:06]Even in those extreme situations, that's not their main problem.

[01:04:11]That's not the most deadly thing. The deadliest thing is sin, even in that context. And Simon sees it, and the story bears it out.

[01:04:22]But of course, the dirtiest thing to those who are not ruled by reason is just going to be poo. It's just natural. It's just the the naturally dirtiest thing.

[01:04:35]whereas Simon sees what the true danger is. Anyway, all of that to say that it goes the same in uh in harvesting the best thing that you can have, your greatest asset, in homesteading, in raising and in feeding one's a self.

[01:04:59]Yeah, competency competency is important. Knowledge of the steps is important. But even more than that, it is the ends. It is the virtues.

[01:05:10]You got to have the virtues. That's what's key. And contrarywise, on the other side of things, the greatest defect, the greatest threat to your husbandry, to your domestic economy, to the raising of animals in the backyard and the artful harvesting of them is our own disorder, our own interior state.

[01:05:34]That's the biggest threat and that's one of the things you find when you undertake to grow food. And I found this um gradually setting upon my consciousness over the past decades.

[01:05:47]Growing food itself, harvesting animals in itself, it's actually not that hard. It's it's very simple. It's it's so simple it's rewarding.

[01:06:00]It's delicious.

[01:06:02]uh it carries with it its own delight which makes the doing of it more um easier. It makes it easier. I didn't mean to say more easier there.

[01:06:13]The act itself is is so doable. It's eminently doable.

[01:06:20]The the problem, the discord, the enormity is not the complexity of the act, the lack of resources even to accomplish it.

[01:06:35]It is interior disorder. It is sin.

[01:06:38]That's that's the undoing of it. And I love I I really did enjoy The Lord of the Flies because it is a narrative illustration of that that's very compelling. It's very convincing without falling into the the twin errors of Darwinian or Freudian um concepts of of order and morality which basically just dene both of those things to to not to meaninglessness because those they're materialist ideologies and the thing that undoes the entire culture on the island in the Lord of the Flies is not their extenuating physical difficulty, not their poverty, their posity of food or their inability to hunt.

[01:07:35]No, their main problem, the most immediate, the most pressing problem to their continued physical existence is sin.

[01:07:44]And that that is a very true thing. So I'm really looking forward to teaching this uh there's just to reading it again uh with eighth graders. I I see I see the wisdom in prescribing this book uh for eighth graders and um it'll be great. There's a lot more in there about the harvesting of pigs that is so interesting and it's, you know, you think of the the pig head on a spit on a steak that becomes this emblem of the Lord of the Flies and rots and fall off falls off. And it really gets the the name because right next to it are the guts of the pig that just are sitting out in the sun and just crawling with blackened by the shimmering green iridescent bodies of billions of flies and then roing with maggots.

[01:08:40]And what reason does in both of those situations if it were allowed to rule the appetites and order them rightly would be roast pig head and compost. That's how you deal with those things. That's the effect of culture, of reason on what what could very easily devolve into the dirtiest thing.

[01:09:11]That's one of the things I love about compost. But maybe we won't talk about the morality of compost right now because I've been going for an hour. Um, but compost is a beautiful thing and one of the main reasons I compost on my farm.

[01:09:28]It's not just for the fertility that it gives a soil, which it indubitably does.

[01:09:32]It's such a wonderful essential thing.

[01:09:35]It's and not just for the efficiency where you turn the dirtiest thing on a physical plane into the best thing into food on your land, into soil, into fertility.

[01:09:49]It takes care of the flies. The thing about compost, if you don't compost the guts, you live in perpetual fly kingdom. You are surrounded by flies non-stop. You are breeding them and they will start to rain over your homestead.

[01:10:11]And that is a desolation devoutly to be avoided by the art of composting.

[01:10:21]So, thank you for listening to this. It was a lot of fun to read this book and I'm going to try now for the next Meat Smith Harvest podcast to get my wife Lauren on u because it's so much more delightful uh to talk to her than to soliloquize like this even though this is enjoyable.

[01:10:45]uh but she is as you all know a wonderful conversation partner and so I'm going to try to do that for the next podcast so look for that and I think we're going to talk about education on the homestead this is a thing that we have um reached a tipping point on uh with our 8th 9th 10th child um and it's very uh it's challenging it's challenging us to live uh in an ordered as ordered a way as possible um so that we don't descend into you know a Lord of the Flies type situation which uh which tends to be uh the uh the default setting if if if virtue is neglected.

[01:11:38]Thank you again everyone. I would encourage you again to go to farmsteadmeatsmith.com.

[01:11:43]Check out the classes this fall. I've got a beef, a lamb, and a pig class up for your education in the simple and beautiful domestic art of growing, killing, cutting, and curing your own meat.

[01:12:02]And then you can also check out the Farmstead Meatmith, the Meatsmith membership. You can sign up for an annual membership to get access to over 70 instructional videos that are only on the website for members or you can sign up on a monthly basis. And then if you feel so inclined, I do relish your charity and appreciate um of course your prayers. Uh you can find a donate button on our homepage if you would like to support us.

[01:12:34]Thank you again and we will do this soon. I'm going to try to do this in a few days from now. We'll record another podcast hopefully hopefully with Lauren.

[01:12:46]So until then, happy harvesting.

[01:12:52]Sing better.