We’ve been sort of feinting in the direction of composting for over a year now. I built a handy dandy compost bin that’s basically four square frames with wire siding. The bin breaks down into two pieces, each composed of two of the frames hinged together. To set it up, you make a cube of the two pieces and attach them via eye-and-hook hardware. It’s sufficiently sturdy to hold a fair amount of compost, but it breaks down easily and is pretty easy to move around.

So we’ve been throwing vegetable matter into the composter for over a year now. This year, we accidentally grew a bunch of tiny pumpkins from last year’s jack-o-lantern guts. The seeds had settled into the ground before we moved the composter a few feet away to turn it, and the soil I guess was pretty fertile. We haven’t given our compost much real thought, though. We haven’t tried to make any really useful garden material from its contents. It’s been more a waste vanisher than a composter.

As my interest in the quality and origin of the food I’m feeding my family grows, naturally my interest in growing some of my own grows, and so this week, I began to pay a little better attention to the composter. I moved the bin this weekend for the first time since the move that resulted in our pumpkins. When I removed the frame, here’s what I saw:

I have a similar picture from last year (half of the composter is visible in this one, in case my description above falls short), though the leaves aren’t piled nearly as high. To give the stuff a really good solid turn, I set the bin up just to the left of the pile (its original spot and where the pumpkins had grown) and started inverting the pile back into the bin. To my surprise, when I got to the bottom of the pile, I found this:

That’s rich, bug-filled dirt-like compost! There were I’d say 4-to-6 inches of the stuff. It looked a lot like dirt, but clumpier, and if you examined some of the clumps, you could tell they were really compressed rotted leaves. I enriched part of one of our beds with this and planted some garlic in it. The rest I spread in another bed that I’m thinking I might plant some herbs in (our sprawling rosemary plants are lonely).

With this minor, accidental success, I’m now more interested in composting for real. The plan for the moment is to water and turn the stuff twice a week. I don’t know that I need to do the full move and turn each time. I think that if I just give a good solid stir and then add some water to keep it moist, the stuff will take care of itself. Guess we’ll see.

It’s interesting to be a meat-eater when your children begin to have questions about meat. Especially when in general you’re a pacifist type who tries to gently persuade flies to exit the door you’re holding open (all but wearing a jaunty bellhop cap) rather than swatting them, who will chase a spider or silverfish down with an index card to scoop up and gingerly deposit on a nice comfy looking blade of grass rather than getting a big fluffy ball of toilet paper to sort of anonymously swoop in with and squish with a little quiet gross crunch and then drop into the toilet.

So but then as you begin to think a little more about what you’re eating and to consider the animals themselves, not only for their own sakes but for the sake of your family’s very own health, and you look at pictures of cows being slaughtered with their baleful eyes cast skyward and bled and hung and butchered and cooked and yet you persist in eating meat, well, it makes for something of a conundrum.

One of the funniest hypocrisies I’ve seen parents commit is to spank or swat their children for hitting another person.

To be such a kind of wuss about hurting creatures who don’t have baleful eyes makes it seem all the more hypocritical to not only kill but to tear with your teeth and consume the very flesh of creatures who do have baleful eyes. It occurs to me that this is sort of like the conservative interpretation of the liberal worldview wherein (the interpretation seems to figure) you think it’s ok to murder innocent babies with rusty coat hangers but not ok to tenderly and with great concern for their comfort put hardened criminals to death. And when you look at either case in monochrome, I suppose the respective cases can be made. There’s nuance in both cases, of course.

The modern food industry makes it easy to distance yourself from the murder of meat because what we eat doesn’t in any way resemble the creatures it comes from. (Conservative right-to-life groups do the reverse by showcasing the gruesome physical realities of abortion in brochures, on posters, and I think even on vehicles.)

We have long shielded Lennie from unpleasant or over-complicated things, but I’ve recently tried to shelter her a little less, lest she grow up to be a complete Pollyanna. So I’m more open these days about the fact that the chicken substance we’re eating is an actual chicken that at some point said bock bock and scratched around in the dirt and maybe had what turned out not to be a legitimate concern about the sky falling. And she’s skeptical, saying things, even as I show her the naked pimply little broiler chicken I have seasoned and am about to put into a hot oven, like “we don’t eat a chicken, we eat chicken,” as if removal of so small a thing as the indefinite article somehow separates the food substance from the animal. If you let it remain an abstraction, maybe it’s not real!

Trying to figure out how to talk to your kids about what you’re eating really makes you think about what you’re eating. Trying to resolve the ethical conflict of not liking to kill things and yet being happy enough to kill not only sentient but in some cases beautiful, in some ways thoughtful, personality-endowed creatures, well, let’s just say it’s kind of an uncomfortable place to find yourself in. Trying to resolve this in an internally consistent way for yourself is hard enough, but trying to boil it down to the level of a 4-year-old is an even harder thing, and something I’ll have to continue to work at, both for Lennie’s sake and my own.

I had a dentist appointment yesterday with a cleaning and some fillings on the docket and a lunch break scheduled between the two procedures. While I considered trying to find some place nearby that had a really leafy, stinky salad to treat my dentist to the remnants of during my fillings, I could find no such place. There was a KFC around the corner, though, and I had recently had a hankering for that anyway.

What a huge disappointment it turned out to be. The biscuit tasted like buttery sweaty socks (I have tasted sweaty ones but not buttery ones, so I’m sort of projecting), the mac and cheese smelled vaguely vomity, and even the mashed potatoes and gravy failed to live up to my memory of them. But worst of all was the chicken. Oh, the breading was tasty enough, but if you got a bite of chicken without any breading, it was dry and basically tasteless.

For reading material, I had brought The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I had just begun the section on fast food. It’s possible that reading some of that prior to lunch colored my perceptions, though I think maybe not, as I’m really not all that suggestible. One thing I couldn’t help recalling was the statement by the author of my other big meat book I bought recently that when taking the life of a sentient being in order to eat it, you shouldn’t do so lightly. I can say confidently that the chicken I had for lunch yesterday was not worth taking the life of the animal I ate, pitiful though that life may have been.

This experience puts me one step closer to foregoing any meat but that which seems to have been raised well and fed properly, even if it’s more expensive. There are plenty of vegetarian options I’ll gladly eat to balance out some of the increased cost of meat.