As I bite into this savory symphony of veal, pork back-fat, rice cooked in veal stock, herbs, milk, eggs, and wine - all stuffed in a hog casing - I am once again confirmed in the knowledge that God loves man.
Not in the superficial way of a lover who lavishes gifts on the beloved - because this gift was born of struggle and suffering and memory and story.
He asked me “to dress it, and to keep it” (Gen. 2.15) - that is, this land - but of course not by necessity.
It is perhaps a crowning moment of our journey back to tradition - both in the Faith and with the land. It’s a sort of birth in the midst of sorrow, like a cheerless Christmas that yet somehow still shines the light of Joy upon the comfortless.
The pigs were born on the last day of December 2021, harvested and butchered this Fall. The calf was the first calf born on our farm (in June 2022) of our family milk-cow, Patty, whom we purchased from some very good friends of ours. It is Patty’s milk that made it into this veal boudin blanc that I have just consumed, along with our duck eggs and our fresh herbs. The dried sage was provided by our live-in intern family.
It is beautiful. It is a symphony.
The sorrow? Perhaps our hardest year on the farm due to the uncontrollable loss of upwards of 300 ducks (due to feed contamination, we suspect), which follows upon the heels of our greatest, most productive, and most profitable year (in monetary terms, anyway).
And so perhaps the sorrow is not.
Because, after all, the vision of our lives that we knew ought to be … well, it happened (is happening).
I did not often sit last year as I sit now and reflect upon God’s love and mercy (and his justice upon my pride). I reflect also upon the pricelessness of it all. There is no price for which I feel I could sell this boudin blanc, because the cost is so high it is irrelevant to anyone but me - I have born the cost intimately, and so only I can understand in any full sense the beauty and the love in its existence. I have killed for it. I have died for it. I have labored ceaselessly for it.
Is it any less than a painting or a stained glass window in significance and pathos?
I have realized on some level through all of this that our farm is idealist in everything that it does, and it does succeed in this, to a degree. However, the obstacles to our success are high. I cannot with any effort convey the importance of our work to a market that is inextricably dependent upon mass production unless I put the very splinters of the plow-handle into your hands.
Many people from across the country have reached out to me in the past months asking about the production of foie gras and for guidance, which is to say “we are not there yet”. When I look at the farms that have made a name for themselves in natural farming or “regenerative agriculture” (spare me, please), I note that the farming itself is not always central (because it is not and will never be compatible with the food industry’s methods).
We cannot yet compete.
My foie gras is not just worth twice as much as the commodity version. It is worth 4x that value at the least (if I must deal in such terms).
There are some chefs and private consumers who willingly pay 2x the price for a superior, local product, but I’ve yet to meet someone willing to pay quadruple, and yet that is the price of context, of authenticity.
That is the - no, there is no price for my veal boudin blanc, and so, in a sense, there is no price for my foie gras: when the community is lost, when the ties are lost, when the story is lost - you will not understand, and I cannot force you to understand.
I cannot fight the battle of dollars and cents when it comes to generating a “product” for sale when I’m pitched against mechanization and tech and wage-workers and massive economies of scale.
But I can fight the long battle of tradition: of educating those who consent to be educated and those who consent to the suffering incurred by the splinters of the plow in order to learn again what the beauty of that participation in “the ongoing act of Divine Creation” really is.
If we are what we eat, after all, then we must learn how to stop consuming commodities so as to cease being commodities to be bought and sold.
So much to announce that BFG will be formulating a structured course to be offered on selected dates throughout the foie gras season. We hope you can join us in the battle to regain the lost traditions of our fathers that made sovereign households … and that made us human.
Pour Dieu et Le Roi,
Ross