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96Around the turn of the last century, our place, which is nowsurrounded by woods, sat stark on a bald hilltop with narya tree in sight. Without burning through a forest’s worth offirewood each winter, as they did back then, or through asmuch in petrochemicals, or hydropower, perhaps obtainedby impinging on indigenous water rights with collateraldamage to wildlife, we never really discovered how to beatthe cold without hammering away at fossil fuels.Until we did. We decided to ditch the beautiful old-worldromance of a traditional house and build our own thoroughlymodern one. We read up on all the newest techniques forpassive and net-zero homes and researched solar panels andheat gain. It may not sound particularly transformative, butin some ways it’s been just that.I have a dear friend here who, every morning, no matterthe weather, walks out the door of her own new hand-builthouse—a jaw-dropping three-story yurt—to the water pumpto haul back buckets for her family. She looks like the roman-tic heroine of some ancient fairy tale, and seems to take to herantiquated tasks in perfect stride. When her electricity goesout, which it does every time a storm downs a tree limb ontoa power line, her family hardly notices. “The digital clock onthe stove goes out,” she says, “and we have to keep an eye onthe fridge.” The furnace that heats their house continues toburn; the water keeps flowing from the pump.Now, that’s sustainable and inspiring, but I wasn’t en-tirely willing to leave the twenty-first century behind. Bycomparison, our house is something like a spaceship, withhigh-tech triple-pane German windows and a front door thatcloses like a vault on the loftlike interior. When deciding onthe visual style of the place, however, we looked to the oldgrange halls around us for scale and aesthetic guidance, andstained the exterior wood with black pine tar to blend withthe forest beyond. And yet, when the snow swirls outsidethe giant windows and we’re so warm indoors beneath anexuberant jungle of tropical plants, it’s like living in a verysurrealist giant snow globe.I’ve always loved a sunny day, but now they couldn’tbe more welcome. Our ecological heating system, even inMaine, generates more than we use, so we can sell someback to the electric company. (Next step is to buy a Teslaand power it from the house.) An app tells us how manykWh we’ve produced using tiny tree symbols. It feels goodto flip the switch on our winters and say, “We earned, like,three trees yesterday!”Eating Meat, Mindfullyby Camas DavisLast Saturday I butchered a side of beef with friends, all ofus women. We stood around the worktable in kitchen clogsand running shoes, old T-shirts, worn jeans, faded aprons.With saws and knives and cleavers we separated brisketfrom shoulder, rib eye from T-bone. We set aside brightyellow suet for rendering, trimmed meat for grind, bones forstock. Once we were finished, each of us would take homethe equivalent of one quarter of a 335-pound side, whichhad come from an animal that had spent its life in a pasturefeasting on foxtail and fescue.``````Halfway through, my husband, Andrew, appeared withmy ten-month-old daughter, Djuna. I set my knife down,washed my hands, and nuzzled her, her new-baby smell stillstrong enough to cut through the pungent, earthy scent ofbeef fat that permeated my apron.That morning, after nursing Djuna, I’d walked out thedoor, knife bag over one shoulder, breast pump over theother, and heard Andrew say to Djuna, “It’s time for Mamato make the doughnuts.”I hadn’t wanted to leave her; I didn’t even really have timeto do this—who has time to butcher her own beef anymore?But this was how I’d chosen to feed my family: Once a year, Ibuy an animal—sometimes pig, sometimes beef, sometimeslamb—from a local farmer I trust. I butcher the animal myselfand fill our basement freezer with whatever meat I don’t turninto charcuterie. Besides, I actually do want my daughter tosee me elbow-deep in a beef carcass. I want her, eventually,to learn how to kill a chicken for coq au vin. I would like herto embrace these complexities just as I did when I droppedeverything and everyone I knew and loved, and went to Franceto learn how to turn a live animal into dinner.Here is how it went: Nearly ten years ago I left the man Ithought I would marry. Shortly after, in the Great Recession,the magazine where I’d been working relentless twelve-hourdays laid me off. I spent the weeks that followed sitting in mypajamas thinking, No more. No more editing and writing.I realized that while I’d written about food for much of mycareer, I’d never really found out where the steak I describedcame from. I did remember, as a kid, watching my dad knockthe fish we caught in the head with a little baseball bat hecalled the Fish Whacker—so they won’t suffer, he told me.But I turned vegetarian as an adolescent, and then, in mylate 20s, as I evolved into a food writer, I slipped back intoeating meat again and mostly ignored the darker side of themodern system that brought it to my table: cattle standingin their own manure. Chickens stuffed in tiny cages. I choseto ignore a lot of things, really, like how unhappy I’d been inmy job and in my relationship. What if I learned to kill myown dinner again? I thought. It would be hard to ignore that.One month later I was living in Gascony, in southwesternFrance, working alongside the Chapolard brothers, who,along with their wives, ran an artisan pork operation. I’drecently read that 99 percent of animals raised for food inthe industrial world are factory farmed. The Chapolards’pigs were part of that other 1 percent. They owned and ranevery part of the process—from growing the grain to feedtheir pigs to making sausage. And they sold every part of theanimal—save for the bones, which they burned and turnedinto compost—at four outdoor markets each week.In the abattoir, Jacques Chapolard showed me how to stuna pig via electric current, making it senseless to pain, beforekilling it. In the cutting room, Marc demonstrated how to poura bucket of pig blood into a meat grinder for blood sausage.Dominique, with thighs nearly as big as prosciutto hams, stoodover me in his white butcher coat, smiled kindly, and said, “Ifyou are going to kill an animal for food, you should be willingto eat every part,” while Bruno took a cleaver to a pig’s headand gently retrieved both sides of the brain with his fingers.“We’ll sell out of these on Wednesday at the market,” Brunotold me. What would happen if pig heads were a part of mydaily existence back home? I wondered. Would we demand