Cherry Butchering and My Frosted Side

I wrote this three years ago during my last few months living in Vegas, and I never really shared it with anyone. I'm always reminded of it when I'm eating cherries, which is an event that happened this morning. I've mostly lost touch with that fully-immersed feeling I describe in the story. Re-reading this makes me miss that state of mind. I also haven't had a green smoothie in a year or two, and I miss those now too.

 

Cherry Butchering and My Frosted Side

I have recently got into the habit of drinking green smoothies, which are these wonderful concoctions made by haphazardly throwing random leafy greens into a blender, and then adding enough other fruits and vegetables to mask the fact that you’re about to consume more leafy greens than you normally would in the course of a week. Then you add some water and blend it until the motor burns out, and you get a frothy, creamy, green beverage that tastes better than you could imagine a green, creamy, frothy beverage could taste (honestly, it tastes...okay, but that's still pretty good, right?)

Aside from doing a better job of masking the taste of the vile weeds than salad dressing could ever do, blending has the added benefit of pre-chewing your food for you. See, Jane Goodall learned from her chimps that primates in the wild chew their food more so than humans are even capable of doing (due to weak jawbone structure). Furthermore, most present-day Americans take less than 1/4 of the chews they are capable of with each bite. The tragic part of all this, from a scientific standpoint, is we don’t break down our food enough to gain all the nutrients from the food we consume. Those crafty monkeys have been showing us how do it for so long, but we just arrogantly watched them fling dung at each other and decided they have nothing of value to teach us. Especially in the case of leafy greens, deposits of nutrients are stored within the cell structure, which must be ruptured to access the nutrients. Our stomach acids can break down those cell structures to an extent, but not even Popeye can produce enough stomach acid to unleash the awesome power of spinach if its consumed in dime-sized chunks. So blending your greens offers that straight-from-mama-bird goodness that you just can’t give to yourself.

I find a great deal of joy in preparing my smoothies every morning. There’s something about performing a series of simple tasks in the morning that resonates within me (maybe it’s that farmer blood again). I’ve gone so far as to typically eschew the prepared fruits, choosing to behead my own strawberries and peel and pit my own mangoes. The more complicated the fruit, the better. Apples, oranges, peaches… they are all too simple to turn from raw to blender-ready. Bring me your watermelons, your honeydews, your pineapples. These are fruits I get to know very well before I put them into my person.

 

My favorite of all fruits for my morning tasks are cherries. Maybe that’s because it seems like half my childhood summers were spent pitting those delectable fruits originating from Door County (that’s the thumb of Wisconsin, for the unenlightened amongst you). I bought a cherry pitter, which looks and operates like a big hole punch, to help me with the task. I have to admit, my frosted side found great joy in making my cherries look like I just blasted them with a miniature hollow point, spraying its little pit brain and a splatter of cherry juice all over the paper towel, leaving a very satisfying-looking hole at the bottom the fruit. But my whole-wheat side wasn’t happy. So I put away my cherry gun and went back to my weapon of choice from my childhood, the bobby pin.

You see, the bobby pin allows me to really get to know my cherry, to feel it and understand it before I remove its reproductive organ and consume its remains. When I’m really immersed in my task, I can feel exactly where the pit is inside the cherry by feeling for the different densities within the cherry. My bobby pin probes the surface of the cherry, feeling for the proper entry point and angle to make my move. When it is time, the bobby pin breaks the skin and the dismembering is swift, efficient, painless. The pit is removed with only the slightest amount of juice and meat lost. And my whole-wheat side hums with satisfaction.

When painted in the right light, the whole process reminds me of Cook Ting, the royal butcher for Lord Yen-hui around the same time Confucius was doing his thing. Lord Yen-hui happened to be watching Cook Ting one day as he was slaughtering an ox. The slaughter was such a beautiful, skillful, efficient affair it compelled Lord Yen-hui to ask “Cook Ting, how the fuck did you get so good at chopping up an ox?”

Cook Ting say –

“What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.



“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room, more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.”

I’m clearly no Cook Ting, but I think it’s a noble vision to aspire toward.