Little Lambs Eat Ivy

A little warning: this entry might be a bit much for animal lovers...

Last Friday, Mihaela, Hana, Auntie, little Luca and I drove to a nearby village to pick up the most important part of our Easter feast. By the time we arrived, the lamb had already been killed and hung eerily from a rafter in the barn. It hung upside down with a red streak across its woolly neck and a bucket on the floor underneath, catching all the drippings. The lower half of the legs had been removed.

As I squinted from a safe distance, I caught sight of three little lamb bodies already skinned and cleaned hanging in the back. Our small friend had a ways to go before it was ready to be packaged up in the trunk of Mihaela's Dacia. I watched as a lone lamb emerged from a separate barn, took in the four bundles - one fluffy and creme colored and much too similar to itself, the others smooth and sinewy white and somewhat sinister - and, with two sad bleats, retreated back inside the barn.

Before my stomach could turn too much, we were ushered into a small kitchen and served coffee and fried patties of some sort by Mihaela's aunt, who took great strides in ensuring that I and the rest of the guests had plenty to eat and drink. Small talk and banter ensued and my mind quickly stopped following the conversation and wandered out to the barn and its four little tenants. I followed Luca's initiative and darted outside at the first opportunity. He, being almost two years old, was more curious about the outdoors world than the indoors one.

We wandered over to our prized lamb, who was now being attended to by an overall-ed man with a sharp knife and a surprisingly kind smile. The progress that had occurred in the past 10 minutes was significant. It now looked as though the lamb was wearing a wool skirt that, flipped upside down as it was, dangled at its chest. The white stockinged legs and lower body lay exposed. The man obviously knew what he was doing. With gentle punches and flicks of the knife between the skin and the muscle, he separated the two and progressed in quick circles, around and around the lamb's body, until the skirt became a cape that hung from the lamb's shoulders and nearly touched the floor.

Luca was just as transfixed by this process as me. We stood there, side by side, watching a dead animal lose its fur and become meat. Right before our eyes. I wondered how I would be different if I had witnessed such a thing for the first time when I was two instead of twenty nine, and continued witnessing such things throughout my life. Would I still feel a weakness towards every baby animal on the planet? Would I still shudder every time I saw a badly limping stray dog wander into the street? Would I still feel a distinct difference between the lamb meat on my plate and the lamb bleating in the barn? As the man prepared to remove the skin from the lamb's face, I turned to leave, knowing my limit for the day had been reached. Luca, however, did not follow me.

The next day, I helped Mihaela prepare some traditional lamb recipes. Luckily, the lamb had been chopped up into manageable pieces by the time I arrived and I spent the day dicing the lamb's heart, liver, kidneys and lungs, all while its tongue poked out at me from a bowl on the other side of the table. We also prepped some of the meat to go into a ciorba (traditional soup) and to be roasted with potatoes. The following day, Easter Sunday, my friend and I arrived and we all sat down to a table of lamb dishes and ate to our heart's content. This proved to be the closest I have come to seeing a meal through from start to end.

Last Easter, the piatza sold lambs by the half. I had always assumed that I would pass out at the sight of the innards of any once living being, but as I strolled through the market that day, perusing the aisles of half-bodied lambs, I found myself more fascinated than grossed out, like I was revisiting the interesting and unseen side of Biology 101. The piatza buzzed with shoppers probing and prodding different parts of the lambs' entrails, discussing signs of health and quality.

Where in the US could you go to buy a lamb by the half or see one being skinned and prepped for cooking? Not that it's something I want to witness regularly, but it's a part of the food process that seems to be locked away and inaccessible where I grew up, which leads to a person believing they will pass out at the sight of animal intestines. Or leads to a person not understanding the connection between the piece of meat on their fork and the lamb frolicking in the field.

I'm sure there is a sizable population in America of people who witness these things daily, on farms, in butcheries, etc., but I have the feeling the average American is much like myself and has a huge gap of vast nothingness between the image of an animal and the image of its meat, where here, people start understanding the process when they're two and probably have a more accurate idea of what it means to be a carnivore.

Since being here, I've become vegetarian when I cook at home, but almost never refuse meat when it's offered to me at someone's home, especially around the holidays. I feel better about eating that meat, knowing that it most likely came from a nearby village and was carefully tended to by a person with a kind smile and a few healthy and happy (for the time being) animals in the barn out back.