Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan Page B

tasting of industrial and pastured hog barbecue that John
T. Edge helped arranged for him to cook at an event in Oxford. Ed realized that if he
could promote these pigs at his restaurant and then get other barbecue restaurants to
join him, he could do something for the state’s small farmers, who were struggling
to stay above water after the fall of tobacco.
    “Peter set me on this path,” Ed
said. Here again was the foodways feedback loop at work, in which a Jewish writer from
Brooklyn ends up helping to restore the authenticity of Southern barbecue. By now, Ed
had taken ownership of the project and was eloquent on the subject: “You see, this
cooking is really all about interdependence and community, and that extends to the
farmers who grow the food and the little slaughterhouses they depend on. That sense of
interdependence is what we’ve lost.”
    We were talking about slaughterhouses
because we had pulled off the highway in Sims to pick up our hogs at a small custom meat
plant, George Flowers Slaughterhouse. As we drove up, Mr. Flowers himself was sitting
beneath a tree out front, having a smoke. He was a wiry old white guy with the most
unusual facial hair I had ever laid eyes on. If in fact it
was
facial hair,
because it wasn’t quite that simple. Mr. Flowers’s prodigious muttonchops,
once white but now stainedyellow by tobacco smoke, had somehow managed
to merge with the equally prodigious yellowish-white hair sprouting from his chest. I
didn’t want to stare, but they appeared to form a single integrated unit, and if
so represented a bold advance in human adornment.
    Mr. Flowers greeted Ed warmly, ribbing him
about a recent TV appearance, in which Mitchell had roundly defeated Bobby Flay in a
“throwdown” on the Food Network. (I was surprised how deep into the sticks
of eastern North Carolina news of this epic confrontation had penetrated.) After a
while, Flowers showed us into the plant, which wasn’t a whole lot bigger than an
old-time gas station with a garage. A sign posted on the loading dock spelled out the
services and prices: $100 to cut up a deer; $150 to break down a cow, and $18 to dress a
hog for a barbecue. Inside, Flowers’s sons were cleaning up. The killing was done
for the day, and they were pushing blood into drains in the floor with brooms. The
severed heads of several different species—pig, sheep, cow—were piled high in a barrel
by the door. The Flowers boys threw our split pigs over their shoulders, carried them
outside, and flipped them into the back of the van.
    When exactly does the cooking process begin?
is a question I sometimes wonder about. Does it start when you take your ingredients out
of the fridge and begin chopping? Or does it begin before that, when you go shopping for
those ingredients? Or is it earlier still, when the meat for your meal is being raised
and taken to the slaughterhouse and killed? In ancient Greece the name for the man who
did the cooking, the butchery, and the slaughter was the same—the
mageiros—
since all were steps in a single ritual process. Ed Mitchell had
evidently decided his own cooking would now start all the way back on the farm. For
barbecue to be truly authentic, he was saying, it should pay at least as much attention
to the pigs as it did to the seasoning or the sauce.

V.
Wilson, North Carolina
    When we pulled up at the back door of the
restaurant formerly known as Mitchell’s Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue, * at
the corner of Singletary and 301 Highway South, in the black part of Wilson, Ed’s
younger brother Aubrey was standing there waiting for us, impatiently. “Aubrey is
always getting places very early,” Ed explained, “but to him, see, early
is
on time.” (I would discover as much the next morning, when Aubrey
was scheduled to pick me up in front of my Holiday Inn at six; I found him fidgeting in
the lobby at five.) Aubrey was an intense man, a decade or so Ed’s junior, and
built on a stouter frame, which made the shiny