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- [00:00]
Rosetta Stone Advertiser
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- [01:08]
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- [01:54]
Dan Kennedy
Together we'll go far welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The story you're about to hear by Dan Barber was told live in New York in 2008. It was a great show. The theme of the night was stories about men and I think this one's gonna it's gonna change the way you think about a few things.
- [02:18]
Dan Barber
So a year ago I was standing on a hilltop watching a boar try and make love to a sow. His name was Boris. He lived right next to my restaurant, Blue Hill, up at Stone Barnes in Tarrytown, New York. He lived on the farm that supplies the restaurant with most of our menu. He was sweet and affable, but he was terrifyingly large. Like well over 800 pounds. And you would have looked at him and thought, dinosaur. The scene that I watched was Boris, in this testosterone fueled trot, would approach the sow and the sow would sort of freeze. He'd mount her and nothing would happen. And she'd screw, scurry away. And a couple of minutes later, same thing would happen. He'd approach her, mount her, and then sort of jiu jitsu, like moves. After a few moments, she would evade Boris. Like Craig Haney, who's the livestock manager at Stone Barns. He was standing with me. He turned to me and said, I think next week I'm going to have to shoot Boris. And my first thought was like, shoot Boris. Boris, he's been our friend, our protector, our Mickey Mouse at the Stone Barn center, our mascot. How could you possibly think of shooting him? And before I said that, luckily, I thought, I have no idea what happens to a boar when it stops performing like a boar. So instead of saying, I did some research, I actually googled when my boar stops performing. And what I learned is it's incredible. It's like, it's sort of an outdated question. Boars as they were, they're a dying breed. They've been replaced by what's called boars in a bottle. It's frozen semen from like a couple of thousand of the best boars around the country. The super boars. Frozen semen that's inseminated into sows that are in heat. You can get the semen like I did on the world wide web. Go to swinegenetics.com that's the most popular site. It's set up like match.com. it will find you the boar of your dreams. True, it'll name the boar names like Blockade and Power Boat and fix your game. And you scroll down and you find the characteristics that you're most interested in. Like, look at me, I'm shapely. I have an incredibly beautiful top. And my favorite, I'm a hugely expressive ham. This is where your pork comes from. 99.999% of your pork comes from this frozen semen for the same reason that we have mega malls and drive throughs and electric can openers. You know, we've got boars in a bottle because it's a lot easier than waiting for mother nature to take its course. But the Stone Barn center, we let Mother nature take its course. So I don't know, we're breeding the old fashioned way. And the question still remains, like, what do you do with a boar when it stopped performing like A boar. So I got it down to, like, four basic options. Option number one, shoot and bury. That's what Craig had suggested originally. You know, take Boris out back, shoot him between the eyes, and bury him. End of story. From the chef's perspective, that was like a waste of £800 of sausage meat, right? Totally untenable. But also the thought was like, who's gonna eat them anyway? But still, my chef hat was just like, this is not right. Right? That was option one. Option two, natural death. Let Boris live out its life. Let Boris live out his life. Let him die of natural causes. He's earned it. He's been a terrific mascot or whatever. The problem with that was purely economic. A guy at $150 worth of feed a month, plus the labor to move water and the opportunity cost of the land, it became ridiculously expensive to allow Boris to live. Also an untenable option? Pretty much. Third option, slaughter. Boris take them to slaughterhouse and slaughter them. The problem with the slaughter was something called boar taint.
- [07:13]
Squarespace Advertiser
Bore.
- [07:13]
Dan Barber
Taint is the result of too much testosterone coursing through the veins of a boar like Boris. It makes the meat acrid and, like, totally unpalatable. I spoke to a famous pork breeder, and I asked him, you know, what would Boris taste like? And he said, imagine licking a urinal at. At the Port Authority bus terminal. He then said, now you know why pepperoni was invented. Apparently, you had enough wine, enough seasoning, and any meat becomes palatable. I wasn't really that interested in 800 pounds of pepperoni. Option four, though, was castrate and then slaughter. By castrating, you remove the testosterone, you cleanse the meat after six months or so they say, and you get delicious meat. The problem with that, of course, was, like, where were you going to find a vet 30 miles from Midtown Manhattan that was going to A, perform a castration, and B, perform a castration that was so dangerous and so complicated. Boris testicles were. Were the size of small basketballs, to put it in perspective. Not a small procedure. So we all. We just. The Stone Barnes community, sort of tossed around these options. And I became, unfortunately, the vector for other people's emotional investment in what to do with Boris. I heard from Craig Haney. Craig, the livestock manager, he actually raised Boris. He first got Boris with his wife Amy, and when he and Amy went through a kind of bitter divorce, she got the farm, but he got Boris. And he brought Boris to the Stone Barns. And there were days I would go out and he would be massaging Boris and wistfully Saying what a friend he's been and what they've been through together. And then I swear to God, you know, like four hours later, if I had had a kitchen knife in my hand, he would have grabbed it, stabbed Boris between the eyes, and ripped his heart out. For me, it was the greatest case of transference I'd ever seen. It was his wife, who he still loves and maybe thought they'd get back together, and also who he absolutely despised and wanted to kill for ruining their life together. Julie, the assistant livestock manager, had no ambivalence whatsoever. She actually. She hated me long before Boris situation ever came to the forefront. One day she screeched up in front of me in the pickup truck, and she came out and she put her fingers, two fingers in my face, and she said, stop making this farm into a circus. Boris needs to die. And my opinion of Boris dying is probably colored by the fact that I don't like Boris. He rapes the ladies, or he tries to, and he pushes himself on the young girls as well. And when she said that, you know, kind of cough off guard, I just, like, I sort of snickered. I don't know, it's like pushes himself. And a small lady's like, why? I just sort of smiled. She got right up in my face. Two fingers again. Said when Humpert. Humpert was raping Lolita, she didn't seem to care. Does that fucking make it right? A couple days later, Irene Hamburger, who has worked with me for 12 years, I know her almost better than anyone. She came barreling into my office. She goes, remember, remember Sophie the sofa? Sophie the sofa. Yeah, the sow who couldn't get pregnant. Yeah, the sow couldn't get pregnant. Right. Ah. When they discovered that, they killed her within a week. Good old Boris hasn't gotten a fucking erection in six months. And for that we have some big philosophical debate. Is there something about this you find, I don't know, sexist? I was down at the Greenhouse not long afterwards with Jack Algier. Jack Algier is the vegetable farmer. Completely out of the fray, as he calls it, of the animal kingdom. And, you know, I figure I'm close to Jack. I figured I'd just raise. I said, you know, what do you think of this whole Boris? And before I could say the ISS of Boris, he turned around and he said, a numero uno, textbook l stupido decision was to name your freakin boar. All sorts of attachment issues. You should have named him. P22 when something in my field isn't productive. I rip it out the same day. Gone, Goodbye. He sort of thumped his chest like he was the real man. What was my opinion of this whole thing? Well, I worry that it's colored by this disclosure, which is I had cancer 15 years ago. I had testicular cancer and I had a testicle removed. And I worried that my push in Boris decision was colored by my own experience. So I called my rabbi. Like any good Jewish Upper east sider, I reference him on Rosh Hashanah for a particular reason. He took my call, I told him the story. I told him the story about me, and I told him the story about Boris. From A to Z, start to finish. A Boris not producing. He said, all the thing, the complex of the whole thing. I stopped. Long pause. And he said, tough one. There is nothing in the Talmud that references this, at least directly. Here's my opinion. Castration is the option that's most appropriate as long as you donate 20% of Boris meat to charity. In so doing, you will make Boris pain and suffering worthwhile. So, option number castration, slaughter, 20% donation. As luck would have it, I got a phone call a couple weeks later. Dr. Steve Stanford. Hello, this is Dr. Steve Stanford from the Northern Kingdom of Vermont. I hear you have a situation. I hear you are in need of a castration. Now, there's, I don't know, 2,000 questions. I could have asked them. Who are you? Have you ever performed a castration? But instead, my question to him was, how much? He said, I'd like to take my wife to dinner. My wife wants to take her cousin and her cousin wants to take her boyfriend. And I said, you want to barter? He said, that's right. I want to barter for the bulls. Five weeks later, he. He arrived at Stone Barnes in his beat up Ford pickup truck with basically Duane Reade at the back. I mean, it was a pharmaceutical cabinet. It was astounding. Dopamine, Xylophine, Special K. He said, that's right. Lucy's going to the sky, but we're taking the diamonds. We made a semicircle around Boris and Dr. Sanford went to work. And it's at that moment that I thought I was going to faint. Not the most manly response, but it's true. I thought I was going to faint and I thought I was going to faint. Not because the procedure was so barbaric, it was really barbaric. I mean, it was like downright middle ages. But I had the thought or the association immediately. Was I pushing for this option because I really wanted to save the meat and work with it in the kitchen? Or was I pushing for it because I wanted someone else to experience the pain that I went through? Six months passed, and on Valentine's Day, Boris was taken to the slaughterhouse and we made £840 of the best sausage meat I've ever had. £160 went to the Tarrytown House for the Homeless. It was the best sausage meat we've ever had for two reasons, I think. One was physiological. It was aged pig meat. We never have that. It was marbled, and it was absolutely stunningly delicious in and of itself. But what brought it over the top, I think, was this emotional reaction my diners had to knowing where their food came from, to knowing Boris, to understanding this connection that we so often don't have. We're hardwired for this stuff. We weren't hunter gatherers so long ago where we were deciding what was good and what was poisonous and what was delicious. And here we were connecting to something that we knew instead of the yuck factor. I don't want to eat Boris. I don't want to eat Mickey Mouse. In fact, it was the opposite. It was a celebration of Boris and it was a festival for several months. A few weeks ago, at the end of service, I reached into the charcuterie drawer just for a little late night snack. And in the back of the drawer was a piece of Boris. It was lardo that had been cured for several months. I sliced a piece of lardo, I stuck it on my tongue, and I remembered Boris quite fondly. This old Douglas MacArthur quote. General Douglas MacArthur. Right. He said, old soldiers don't die, they just fade away. And he did, on my tongue. And he was delicious. Thank you.
- [18:03]
Dan Kennedy
As the chef of Blue Hill restaurants, Dan Barber has received multiple James Beard Awards and been featured on Time's list of the 100 most influential people. His opinions on food and agriculture have appeared in numerous national publications and inspired his new book, the Third Field Notes on the Future of Food. Thanks, Dan Barber.
- [18:26]
Squarespace Advertiser
This podcast is brought to you by squarespace.com Squarespace gives you an all in one platform to create a professional website or online portfolio in just a few minutes. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, head to squarespace.com and use the offer code themoth. Thanks again to squarespace.com for supporting the Moth.
- [18:45]
Dan Kennedy
The Moth main stage will be at the Southampton Writers Conference at Stony Brook University. That's going to be Friday, July 18th. For more information, visit themoth.org Our podcast.
- [18:57]
Squarespace Advertiser
Host Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit. Available now.
- [19:05]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast Audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.