Pork and Apples

My Dad's father is from the South. Mom is from the South as well. The South has some particular traditions. One of them is cheese with apple pie. Another is growing your own food, which is actually possible there since until recently hard frosts and snow weren't common outside the actual winter months. One of the traditions, passed down from Britain, is the use of apples baked with pork or a roast pig. Pigs were slaughtered and roasted in several common celebrations, most important being that if Midwinter Feast, which happened around January 12th. The Catholics combined it with the Winter Solstice of December 22nd and shifted the days around further which is why you eat Ham on Christmas. This is one of those truths displayed in The Hogfather, btw. It's a bit of Gaelic history, and it matters to about 400 million people. Ham or pork, and apples go together well. While the Hawaiians serve pork with pineapple, which is even better but popularized to promote agriculture in Hawaii and promote Dole Inc and make them some money, proper apples, originally from Kazakhstan up against the western slope of the Himalayas, were sour, bitter, inedible messes. The thing is, rarely, they'd have a sweet one. Or a sweet branch. And grafting from those branches is how we've got orchards. These are clones.

All the bad apples, the ones that are sour and bitter, aren't completely useless if you don't eat them. Johnny Appleseed isn't a myth. He was a real person. The trouble is, the seeds he planted only sprouted up SOUR apples, the kind you can't eat, so what he did was crazy and useless. Not that a child understands this. Even the seed of a sweet apple comes up sour. Apple orchards retain ownership of their stock, value of their orchards, because the seeds only produce sour apples. You can't buy sweet apples, plant the seeds, and get a sweet apple orchard later. It has to be clones.

Back in the day, 200 years ago, the thing to do with sour apples as juice them into cider, anyway, and then allow it to ferment. Do this late in the year and allow the casks to freeze in the shade, and remove the ice, again and again, and you're left with a low quality concentration of ethanol. This is a freeze-method of distillation, ice distillation. This is how you make applejack. Its a real thing, even if its not popular anymore. It was a century of boozehounds in the Midwest that started the Temperance Society that lead to Prohibition of Alcohol, which lead to the unintended consequence of turning the Mafia into a drug organization, not just human slavery of fresh-off-the-boat immigrants and vote selling the Democratic part is famous for now. Mafia and Democrat are pretty much synonymous. The Mafia have more rules and tend to obey them more consistently. Democrats are like the Mafia without all the rules or ethics.

So those farmers with the inedible apples and the booze also raised chickens and pigs. A pig was great because all those leftovers turned into tasty lean protein, which could be fattened up into something delicious. At slaughter time, that pig would feed a family for a year, and it was often cured with salt and smoked. In Little House On The Prairie, they wrapped the hams with string and hung them from the ceiling of the cabin, cut them down as needed. It meant they'd drip onto blankets in their sleep, and there would have been flies, briefly, until the salt killed them, but this was a sustainable food supply. And pigs reproduce fast. You can sell piglets for a profit too. Some other family or bachelor farmer wants a piglet for next years meals.

The trouble with having chickens AND pigs, when you're a farmer, of course, is that the bats eating the mosquitos can give the chickens bird flu, and the chickens can give it to the pig, which can pass it on to you. Normally, the bats can't infect you. And even if they infect the chickens, it doesn't often jump to you. The pig is the middleman, so to speak. The Middle-pig? It can transform the virus to be able to get you. This is where Spanish flu came from, Kansas bats. It has been properly traced. And it killed 20 million people. Slightly more than WW1. A war that suffered many battles in Crimea. Heroic ones where most of those involved died. Charge of the Light Brigade, Rudyard Kipling, etc. The reason the USA got into WW1 so late, and would have skipped it entirely, is people were still around who remembered the Civil War and they'd just finished off the American Indians so not terribly excited about brutal slaughter, and the English prodding Australians to die in withering machinegun fire? Not interested. Thanks.

Better to stay home eating bacon, apple wood smoked bacon, sipping applejack or cider, and having some tasty fresh eggs, some whole wheat toast from grain you'd grown yourself, and pondering the lastest Auto Mobile Carriages (Cars, it was being shortened in the latest fashion. Modern times are so FAST). So many labor saving devices. And that new fangled electricity you could see in some towns. Not all, but some.

The great strength of American farmers, and farmers in general, is the ability to ignore politicians because farmers have the food, and politicians just have lots of hot air. Eventually they can be starved out. Crimea may turn into Anschluss and WW4 (WW3 ended in 1989) escalating from merely the Invasion of Kuwait for oil supply control to nuclear weapons in Iran, turning into EU vs Russia open warfare. This is terrible but not our problem. Not directly. I notice that fracking is more successful at energy recovery than bioethanol from Corn when we could buy it for pennies on the dollar from Brazil. Oh well. Stupid is, as stupid does. The USA, such as it is, will make money fracking oil and exporting it to the EU, along with grain since Russia will probably burn the wheat fields in Ukraine, something they have done before under Stalin. Its essentially a foregone conclusion. Putin wants the glories of the Soviet system back. The megadeaths. The firing squads. The secret police. The nuclear missile launch drills. The nuclear submarines off the US coast. That's what he wants. A pity. I think that Siberia will prove to be an interesting place for capitalism someday. Looks like we'll be developing other places first. Who is going to invest in Russia now? They're clearly run by an insane tyrant who tells other people what they can think. Like Jay Carney tells the US press corps. Oops!