The Blood Is The Life.

[thorfinn]

the_christian asked for stories about blood. This is a story about the presence and absence of it. This is a true story. Probably not a good idea to read if you're even slightly squeamish about meat.

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The first thing you notice when you attend first year anatomy classes is the lack of blood. Chunks of carefully dissected human flesh lie on the table, looking strangely similar in texture (almost woodlike in grain, yet still soft and squishy) and in colour (a greying brown) to the roast beef slices you can get at the sandwich shop across the road. No blood oozes out, only a clear fluid. The second thing you notice is the smell of that clear fluid. Formaldehyde. Nothing quite smells like it. Don't lean over the table, they say. Don't breathe deeply. Good idea, your nose tells you. That stuff'll knock you out if you breathe too much of it. The third thing you notice is the cold. It's cold in those rooms, cold so the formaldehyde doesn't evaporate.

And so, you get on with today's class, on blood vessels. Poking and prodding at pieces of preserved meat. You almost forget that these pieces of flesh used to belong to someone alive. Someone whose blood used to pump through the cold white veins and arteries that you are peering at, trying to memorise the names of. These pieces of flesh had names, once. So and so's right hand. Such and such's upper left torso. But you don't get given those names. Instead, you get given names for the tiny things. Hepatic Portal Vein. Jugular Vein. Pulmonary Artery. Aorta, Aorta. You have these inside you, too, but you don't think about that. These squishy white tubes can't be the same as what's inside you. What's inside you is alive. Pulsing, pulsing.

You leave class three hours later. It's only when you notice that you've stopped that you realise that you've been shivering in the cold, burning energy to keep warm. Your chilled bloodstream tells your brain that you're hungry. Starving, in fact. For meat. Warm meat, cooked in its own blood. So, what to do? Go across the road, of course. Get a sandwich, of course. And have the roast beef, of course. Which probably didn't have a name, but still, it too, was once alive, filled with blood, just like you.

Yet you relish the taste, for the blood is the life.

Comments

[qamar.livejournal.com]

Great Story! I'd really like to see a human body (or clever artwork) tressed up like roast meat next to other more familiar meats. E.g. a leg of ham next to a leg of Stan.

But, if the blood is 'the life', why would you crave roast beef instead of meat that actually still had the blood in it?

I was a *rare* roast beef girl myself, does that have more blood in it? Does blood lose something when it's cooked?... and I'd certainly not squirm about eating human flesh, at least no more than non-human flesh (these days).

[thorfinn]

Heh. Rare roast beef wasn't available. I probably should twist the story in that direction, but since I said it was a true story...

And when you make it back down here, you have to visit for dinner. I will show you my Rohen and Yokochi anatomy text... There are a number of, err, cuts in there that look remarkably like stuff you'll see in cookbooks.

As for cooked blood... The proteins all glom together and break down when they're cooked. It's still blood, sort of.

[nutzboy.livejournal.com]

Certainly an interesting and palatable read!

Kinda reminds me of when I was doing textures for a zombie a while ago, using hacked up photographs of real dead people for an open wound here, decaying flesh there. Something in my head informed me that the real dead people from these images may not approve, and my taste may not have been the best.

But hey, it's not like their close family is gonna look at them and go "OMG, THAT'S DADS ARMY WOUND".

[drreagan.livejournal.com]

Excellent story. And it brings back so many fun memories of first year medicine. The thing that used to get to me in anatomy was the texture of the subcutaneous fat. Depending on the age and condition of the person, it'd look like either vanilla custard or porridge.

[anthologie.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

Reasons I stopped eating meat.

[kitling.livejournal.com]

i tell people I call myself vegetarian because i'm a very fussy eater. While its true that i have some ethical objections and don't like the taste of meat it was something else that first put me off eating it.

It's worth noting that as kids we were very very poor, so meat would often be just sausages, chops or rissoles (not good cuts of meat), often there wouldn't be enough to go around so dad would get the chops and us kids would get an egg. (meat & 3 veg diet)

As we slowly got more money, mum's shopping habits changed.
She would purchase half a cow at a time, it would arrive from the butchers all cut up in bags and go in the freezer. (buying in bulk cheaper) As the cook it would be my job to decide what was on the menu and remove the appropriate bag from the freezer to defrost. Being half a cow, while there was plenty of sausages and mince, there are also a few 'good' cuts of meat, steak etc. I would remove the defrosted bag from the fridge and the pile of blood in the bottom of the bag grossed me out. This repulsed feeling grew strong and stronge r until I decided I would refuse to eat anything that left blood in the bag. This is why to this day i'll still occasionally eat a burnt sausage. But I can't even watch someone eat a steak thats not competely well done without wanting to vomit.

Strange that i actually have a bit of a blood fetish, piercing, needles, cutting etc. But the sight of blood and meat together completely repulses me.

[the-christian.livejournal.com]

Been meaning to thank you for this, Thorfinn. Cheers. An interesting look into how distance changes everything.

[thorfinn]

*nodnod* I side with the ethical point that if you can't stare an animal in the eye and kill it yourself, you shouldn't eat it. 'tis one of the reasons I like Vlado's cow mural... It's nice to see a big field full of cows watching you eat cow meat. None of this sanitised "it came off the supermarket shelf" thing.

[thorfinn]

Mm, yeah. Subcutaneous fat has got to be one of the ickier substances out there, especially on the specimens that have been formaldehyde pickled for ages. There were a couple of bottles in the anatomy museum where the fat had started to leach out into the formaldehyde in little bubbles... They were really icky.

[paula-angela.livejournal.com]

Beautiful.
I really felt like I was there, with you.

I also share your smugness at being a "conscious carnivore."


:)