Holiday Food Memory--by Prof. Whitman

"Understanding Myself as a Carnivore"

Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) is a holiday I acquired by marriage. A little more than two months after the end of Ramadan, Muslims commemorate Abraham's demonstration of faith by killing an animal (usually a sheep, if they can afford one), eating some of the meat and sharing the rest, with a full third reserved for the poor.

The details of the background story are a little different in each of the Abrahamic faiths, but the gist is the same: when God commands Abraham to kill his beloved son, Abraham obeys, but at the last minute an angel substitutes a ram for the boy.

My husband and I come from different faiths, so our holiday celebrations are very uneven. Often we don't make much of the eid. In Tunisia, though, it's always a big deal, with special food traditions. The night before the holiday all you hear are anxious sheep bleating in back yards as if they knew what lay in store for them. Some families do the sacrifice on their own while others hire a freelance butcher, but many, many Tunisians chop up the carcass as a happy group project. My husband's relatives use every bit of the animal, salting the inner skin to turn the coat into a rug, stuffing the intestines for sausages, and burning the hair off the head, which is a great delicacy (especially the brain).

One year here in America we decided to mark the occasion a la Tunisienne. Instead of buying a lamb chop from the supermarket, we contacted a farmer near Charlottesville, Virginia, and arranged to buy and slaughter a lamb there. We drove out to this beautiful farm on a rolling hillside and picked from the herd a lovely black lamb. And then ...

...we killed it. I felt if I were going to eat meat, I should face what I'm doing. I held the lamb's legs as my husband took a sharp knife, said "in the name of God," and sliced across its aorta. Actually he had to saw a little. We pulled the lamb's head back away from the body so its blood spilled quickly, a dark river running over the grass and soaking into the earth. Although the lamb did not cry--and did not feel pain, I believe--its body thrashed as its blood drained.

My husband was even more shaken than I was. We butchered the lamb and ate it the next day, grilled, with friends. It was delicious. But my husband said, "I'm never going to to do that again."

Taking a life is one of the most sobering experiences on earth. And people used to do it all the time. Were they more callous than we are? Or just more honest, facing up to what they were doing?

Back to lamb chops. My husband and I still eat meat, but not a lot.