Charlotte’s Web

PEA and BACON SOUP

I have to say that, on the lengthy list of the most challenged and banned books, I’m surprised Charlotte’s Web doesn’t show up more often. The book certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed by teachers and parents looking to protect the innocent—it’s been banned in Kansas for including talking animals, which some educators deemed “unnatural,” and avoided by others who think the themes of death and sacrifice are too heavy for its young audience. It has also been challenged in England by teachers worried that the discussion of eating pork would be offensive to Muslims. My teachers, however, never gave a second thought to the repercussions of assigning this book to a butcher’s granddaughter.

The popularity of Charlotte’s Web in third grade certainly didn’t do me any favors socially, and it was single-handedly responsible for turning half of my class, as well as my sisters and my cousin Caroline, into vegetarians for a short period of time. I ended up eating the bacon for all of the girls in my family that year, terrified that my grandfather would notice the strips untouched on the side of their lumberjack breakfast plates at Bickford’s and start asking questions.

That year my older sister got into the torturous habit of whispering “Wilbur” into my ear whenever she saw me eating pork, a practice that never failed to bring me to the brink of tears. I loved animals desperately and dearly as a child—I still do—and this book made me feel incredibly guilty. I was nervous that my classmates would find out that my grandfather butchered pigs, or that my friends who knew would tell everyone. I was in a constant state of self-conscious paranoia.

The wave of vegetarianism that Charlotte’s Web inspired wasn’t isolated to my family members and childhood friends. I have at least one adult friend who never ate pork again after reading the book as a child. While the book didn’t turn me away from meat, reading it was an enormous turning point in my understanding of the food I ate and where it came from. I knew a good deal, certainly more than most of my classmates, about what the meat I ate looked like before it was run through a grinder and neatly shrink-wrapped for the supermarket case, and I knew, logically, of course, that what I saw on the cutting room tables at my grandfather’s shop had only recently been a live animal, but that was where my thought process stopped. It’s hard to wrap your mind around the enormity of death when you’re a child—harder, in some ways, if you happen to stare it casually in the face every day after school.

E. B. White is unapologetic about the baldness with which he talks about death in Charlotte’s Web. From the startlingly stark first line of the book, “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” White forces his young readers to confront an uncomfortable reality, one that he himself struggled with—that animals die for our consumption. As a child, after having read Charlotte’s Web, I assumed that E. B. White must himself be a vegetarian. I was shocked when I started reading his essays in high school and college and learned that not only was he a meat eater, but he also raised his own pigs for slaughter.

There are two distinct voices in the book, that of Mr. Arable, who views his animals from the practical standpoint of a farmer—as property and a means of survival—and that of Fern, who views Wilbur’s death from an emotional standpoint, as a terrible injustice. White himself seems to fall somewhere between these two. He connects deeply with animals, humanizing them and using them to communicate about loss and friendship and death in both his children’s books and personal essays. He is also, however, a man who writes in “Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street” about his trip to the Fryeburg Fair, where he attends “the calf scramble, the pig scramble, and the baby-beef auction” and “enjoy[s] the wild look in the whites of a cow’s eyes.”

The secret guilt that I felt as a child after reading Charlotte’s Web was still present when I reached adulthood, and I wrestled daily with questions of the ethics of my job as a butcher. Many of my vegetarian friends would ask me how I could love animals and do what I did for a living, and as often as I spouted answers back at them I still wondered, privately, if it actually was possible. Then I read White’s essay “Death of a Pig,” which perfectly demonstrates that eating and loving animals are not mutually exclusive, or at the very least that it’s okay to be unsure about the answers to these enormous questions and that I wasn’t alone in asking. In the essay, White, who had been happily raising pigs for years, finds himself “shaken to the core” over the illness and sudden death of one of his animals—a pig who had “evidently become precious” to him, and who in the end he mourned “not as the loss of a ham, but the loss of a pig,” as a creature who “had suffered in a suffering world.”

When White published Charlotte’s Web in 1952, factory-farming practices were on the rise, and while there were animal protection laws in place in Europe, not many people in the United States were talking about the ethical treatment of animals, especially in connection with farming. With the Great Depression still fairly fresh in their minds, Americans were more concerned about having enough food than they were about where that food came from. White took great pride in the fact that his pigpens were comfortable and his pigs well fed and happy. He was, in many ways, far ahead of his time in his farming practices and his thoughts on sustainable, traceable food.

In “A Report in January,” White talks about the new factory farm process of cleaning eggs, a process so harsh it leaves their shells looking like “a cheap plastic toy,” and adds, “If that’s an egg, I’m a rabbit.” In “Coon Tree” he worries about the future of vegetable farming, citing a speaker he heard at the American Society of Industrial Designers who said that “we would push a button and peas would appear on a paper plate,” to which he responds, “I’m not much of an eater, but I get a certain nourishment out of a seed catalogue on a winter’s evening, and I like to help stretch the hen wire along the rows of young peas on a fine morning in June, and I feel better if I set around and help with the shelling of peas in July. This is part of the pageantry of peas, if you happen to like peas.”

Ethical farming practices and food traceability are on everyone’s minds these days—certainly I think about, talk about, read about, and hear about these issues on a daily basis. Today I work in a butcher shop that sources beautiful pastured pigs from two local farmers that we visit often. The first time I went on a farm trip it was late October and freezing rain was coming down in thick, stinging droplets. For weeks leading up to the trip I had been anxious about how I would feel seeing the animals that I knew would eventually end up on our cutting tables. When we got to the farm I stood staring at the pigs for a long while, their strong speckled backs and their busy snouts, and I was struck by the fact that I didn’t feel sad. I had pictured myself, upon seeing the field of pigs, filled with the sudden, melodramatic urge to run at them with my arms flung wide, screaming apologies, snot and tears flying, but instead I just stayed quiet while the pigs snorted and squealed and croaked.

When I returned to the farmhouse, there were steaming mugs of coffee on the table, topped off with milk from the dairy cow, Lucy, that was so grassy and sweet that I didn’t even need to add sugar. There were heaps of eggs, their shells blue and brown and white and their yolks nearly orange, and there was a pile of fragrant bacon made from pigs from that very farm, pigs that we had butchered and cured and smoked ourselves in the weeks before. From where I sat at the table I could see the chickens in their small red henhouse, snuggled close on their bleachers. Lucy’s jaw was working over some hay in the field below us, and the pigs were rooting and rolling around just beyond us, and everything felt circular and happy and warm, and I think I forgave myself a little.

CHARLOTTE’S WEB

Pea and Bacon Soup

My first instinct was to give you a recipe for bacon, but somehow that didn’t seem quite right. So I’ve decided to focus on E. B. White’s love of peas for this recipe and provide a recipe for pea soup with an optional bacon garnish. This soup can be made completely vegetarian by substituting vegetable stock for the chicken stock and using croutons instead of bacon for crunch. If you decide to go that route, use an extra tablespoon of butter in place of the bacon grease.

Serves 4 to 6

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

½ cup diced cooked bacon, for garnish, 1 tablespoon bacon grease reserved

1 cup chopped yellow onion

1 leek, roughly chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste

4 cups chicken stock

5 cups fresh or frozen peas

½ cup sour cream or crème fraîche

Freshly ground black pepper

Heat the butter and bacon grease in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat until the butter is melted. Add the onion and leek and cook until translucent, about 7 minutes. Add the garlic and salt and cook until the garlic is lightly browned, about 3 more minutes. Add the chicken stock and bring the mixture to a boil. Add the peas and cook until tender, about 5 minutes (frozen peas will take less time).

Remove the soup from the heat and transfer about one-third of it to a blender. (Note: Hot soup creates steam, and this steam has nowhere to go in a blender, which can lead to scary explosions if you don’t follow this tip: On the lid of your blender there should be a hole that is covered by either a cap or a wand. Remove the cap or the wand and cover the hole with a clean kitchen towel. This gives the steam room to escape, which means the hot soup won’t explode all over you.)

Blend the soup in batches until it is very smooth. You can also use an immersion blender for this step if you have one, and simply blend the soup in the stockpot. For extra-smooth soup, pass it through a fine-mesh sieve after blending.

Transfer the soup to a large bowl, whisk in the sour cream, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Portion the soup out into bowls and sprinkle the crispy bacon on top.