Redneck Sustainability: Eating your Pets

Before you gag from the title of this blog, let me explain that my pets growing up included a pig, a few dozen rabbits, some ducks, a few hamsters, an occasional cat, a dog, a calf and a guinea pig. I’ll let your imagination tell you which ones I ate and witch ones I didn’t. But why should eating pets be such a bad thing?

If anything is out of whack, it’s that we’ve manipulated animal breeding, not that we eat them. What’s worse? Eating domesticated animals or breeding them to belch methane into old age and die a pointless life? There’s a chin scratcher.

Natives to North America, First Peoples if you will, knew that we should have a healthy connection with the food we eat, sometimes even asking the noble beasts permission to extinguish their souls. Now whacking a domesticated pet in the head as it stares up at you with trusting eyes might not be quite the same as hunting a noble beast, but none the less, it’s good to have an intimate connection with our food.

On that note, let’s take another lesson in sustainability from the redneck play book of life.

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Redneck Sustainability: Chow-Chow

jars of chow-chow
sweat and spicy chow-chow relish

While not exclusively a redneck food, chow-chow (the relish, not the dog), is certainly championed most by the rural folk of America, and with no uncertainty, is one of the sustainable marvels of our day. Seriously.

For you see, chow-chow is indeed the kitchen sink of canning. For my rural-impaired readers I will need to pause here for some clarification. Let’s start with canning.

Canning, for you urban folk, refers to the practice of preserving freshly grown fruits and vegetables in glass jars for use throughout the year. It is in and of itself a very sustainable practice due to its reliance on local produce rather than off-season stuff shipped from Timbuktu via carbon-emitting yack. And don’t think for a second that the “vine-ripened” tomatoes you find in January are anything of the sort, unless you live in California or think ripe means something like “edible enough to withstand commercial harvesting, processing, shipping and retail sale over the next week).

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Revived/Revised Definition of Redneck

Farmer reading "The Progressive Farmer"
Farmer and redneck reading "The Progressive Farmer"

Now that I have been writing about redneck sustainability for over a year, I figured it was about time to tackle a new universal definition of said redneck. So from here on out you can link this post to an wiki you may construct in dealing with this popular cultural topic.

According to wikipedia “a citation from 1893 provides a definition [for the American redneck] as ‘poorer inhabitants of the rural districts…men who work in the field, as a matter of course, generally have their skin burned red by the sun, and especially is this true of the back of their necks.'” A more concise way of saying this could simply be, “uncomplicated rural Americans.” And this indeed is the best shortened definition I can come up with. But there is no doubt something lost in the shortening.

Even a simple glance at the etymology of the word should suggest a need to refresh our understanding and use of it in modern society. It is no longer sufficient for Americans to lump the term ‘redneck’ into the same honey bucket as ‘white trash.’ Poor rural society is much too nuanced for such a disrespectful approach, and it is time that we stand up to proclaim this fact.

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