When we lost the contents of two large chest freezers last week, beyond a few muttered obscenities, we didn’t wring our hands and moan … much. It was “just” stuff, albeit food stuff, after all. And in the daily reckonings of what people lose in disasters across the globe and closer to home, the freezer contents — thanks to our first-world resources and our farm capabilities — can and will be replenished.
Last Sunday evening a powerful electrical storm passed over the farm. I was sitting on the front porch watching the show when a lightning and simultaneous boom of thunder hit, so close to the porch that their power and proximity caused me to wrench my neck. The converted three-bay garage between our house and the woods where the pigs reside took a direct lightning strike. The building contains a one-room apartment, the woodworking workshop, books, miscellaneous household goods, and our two freezers.
Monday morning I completed my rounds by feeding the pigs, and I walked around the building to make sure there’d been no damage done. No noticeable burn marks, the lights worked inside. I concluded the lightning must have struck a nearby tree.
It was not until Thursday afternoon when I ventured out to the freezer for a leg of lamb that the damage was revealed. The lightning had tripped the breakers in the building’s circuit box, leaving the contents of both freezers to thaw and then stew over the next four days. The loss: one whole hog, three lambs, 30-plus chickens, and some wild game, along with numerous frozen dishes of the sort that languish in all freezers. The contents of the two freezers were for home use, so everything we subsequently tossed was intended for us to eat.
We live on a farm, and much of what we do revolves around raising out livestock for consumption. So, as they say, we can “make” more. But each of the animals in that freezer was one we raised from birth or a very young age to death. And in the case of the chickens, we also dispatched and butchered. For that reason the loss was more personal. We were more invested. There is a pride in providing for oneself and for the table of friends, and those empty freezers left us feeling somewhat diminished and vulnerable.
But the farm is nothing if not a work in progress. We already had a side of pork earmarked for fall butchering out of the hogs currently being raised. Of our 30 or so sheep, any number of them could be slaughtered for our use. And it is the work of only 8-9 weeks to grow a new batch of meat birds. The dozen roosters, alas, take much longer to reach full maturity and flavor, which means good gumbo is at least a year in our future.
So what really have we lost? Besides the meat, and the money and effort that went into raising the livestock, we lost time. And what have we gained? We gained a peek behind the curtain of what food uncertainty could look like. What a hunger gap for our ancestors (perhaps for our descendants) could mean, while they waited for new crops or livestock to mature. What a natural or human-made catastrophe could cost for those unable to quickly run to the store for ingredients.
We are fortunate.
