Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Blood Moon

September moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The Moon is new! We are entering the moon cycle known as the Blood Moon in 16th Century England. Before I get into the gory details, I want to let those of you in the Bay Area know I will be teaching a cooking class at the Crissy Field Center in San Francisco on Sunday October 5 from 10am to 2pm. The class will introduce students to ways to supplement local, organically grown ingredients from the farmers market with aromatic spices and other 'exotic' ingredients to make easy and delicious dishes that celebrate the flavors of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The cost is $40 and you can register by calling (415) 561-7752. The title of the class is "Fresh Feasts in the Age of High-Flying Foods."

And now to the Blood Moon... This time was the blood moon in 16th Century England because it was the time of year to hunt and put up meat for the long winter ahead, when plant foods were scarce.

Many of us have an aversion to blood. It's not really something we want to talk about, think about, or look at. Just the mention of the word may make us a little faint. While it is crucial to life, we would prefer that it remain in places where we can't see it. We abhor bloodshed, and equate it with violence, death, and pain.

Would this have been any different in 16th Century England, when the time of hunting, slaughter, and butchering meant survival -- a full larder that would feed the family through the winter? Would blood have evoked the same feeling among the Masai, cattle herders in Africa who pierced the skin of their cows with sharp tubes and drank their blood as a critical part of their nutrition? Blood is part of the omnivorous diet, and sometimes is its own specialty, such as blood pudding and blood sausages. For those of us who enjoy a rare steak, the blood is part of the point.

I've been thinking about blood lately since I just finished reading a new book called Sex, Time, and Power. It was written by Leonard Shlain, the same author who wrote a popular book a few years ago called The Goddess Verses the Alphabet, which I never read. He is a medical doctor who is fascinated by evolutionary explanations for the way things are, especially relations between the sexes, and has the boldness to publish his theories -- even when they seem far-fetched. He begins this book with an effort to explain why, in terms of human evolution, women menstruate.

Menstruation is another part of the 'blood' story that we don't like to talk about. It is almost taboo for women to mention it in front of men, and when women mention it to each other it is in low voices with a glance over the shoulder. So it is disconcerting at first to read page after page of a man giving the topic earnest and forthright consideration.

Furthermore, when people do talk about menses, it is never really in the context of the question "why?" But Shlain points out that there is really no good biological reason that human women should bleed so much each month. Some other primates have a very subtle menstrual cycle, but it is so scant that it is almost negligible. Almost every single animal besides humans has a pronounced and obvious period of ovulation, or estrus, when mating occurs. We speak of an animal being 'in heat', which means in estrus. The human ovulation period is so hidden that most women don't even know they are ovulating. It is when we are emphatically not ovulating that something dramatic happens to us. Why would that be?

Especially when, as Shlain points out, our menstrual cycles put us in a state of being constantly on the verge of iron-deficiency and anemia.

If you can, take a moment and ponder why women would have evolved to bleed every month, and see if you can come up with one good reason.

If you can't, you're not alone. Evidently, this was a question Shlain pondered for many moons and many suns. The theory he puts forth in his book is that we evolved to menstruate in order to give us a sense of time. He argues that our understanding of past, present, and future is a unique human consciousness that was sparked by women's menses, and by the fact that our menstrual cycles mirror the phases of the moon. We are, evidently, the only primate that has a menstrual cycle that averages 29.5 days in length -- the same length as the moon cycle.

It is a big jump, but he makes an interesting argument. I, for one, am fascinated by time. I strive to be aware of the turning of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the sun's rise and descent each day. Shlain points out that when women are asked to draw a representation of time, they most often draw a circle. Men, when asked the same question, usually draw an arrow. He argues that women's menses and their connection to the moon make them more accepting of death, and more attuned to the cycles of life.

Shlain doesn't stop there. He believes that humans evolved from herbivorous primates into omnivorous hunters in order to satisfy women's need for a reliable and easily assimilable form of iron in the diet -- an evolutionary adaptation that allowed us to survive the ice age. His theory that men hunted to satisfy women's need for meat leads to a whole bevy of other theories. He has an evolutionary explanation for left-handedness, homosexuality, color-blindness, baldness, language, marriage, misogyny, patriarchy, art, religion, and even love! So you really have to take the whole thing with a grain of salt, but it's interesting food for thought.

And what he has to say does fit in with some of my own experiences and musings on things. I was a vegetarian for my first ten years of womanhood, and this ended up being a big mistake. By the end of that period, I was weak, anemic, and sick. When I decided, reluctantly, to begin eating meat again, I began to regain my energy and strength. As I slowly recovered my vitality, I remember having a kind of short-hand understanding for the reason that meat-eating was making me well again: "Blood out; blood in." I began to observe that while some men and post-menopausal women could remain healthy on a vegetarian diet, many young women could not. Interesting that Shlain should propose that we became hunters in the first place because women needed meat to survive.

I have spent many years in careful consideration of the ethics of meat-eating: of what the presence of blood in the diet means, especially on a spiritual level. I have heard, and thought about, each of the arguments made against it. While there is so much more that could be said about this complex topic, I will sum up my conclusions very briefly. I feel that on a nutritional level, humans have evolved into omnivores. In general, our bodies need animal protein in order to maintain vigorous health. That protein can come from non-lethal means, such as eggs and milk -- and maybe the Masai's blood-from-the-living-cow would qualify as well. But I also believe that on a spiritual and personal level, no matter how hard we may strive to rid our diet of the products and by-products of death, we can never do so. Even vegans who may avoid the rennet in cheese may remain blind to the songbirds that die because of coffee production, or the countless billions of beings from insects to gophers to coyotes that die in the production of vegetables, grains, and beans. This pest-and-predator death is a part of every agricultural system -- from the conventional to the organic to the biodynamic. In organic farming of fruits and vegetables, synthetic fertilizers are replaced with organic ones, and one of the most common organic fertilizers is blood-meal -- a by-product of slaughterhouses.

So it is my feeling that the attempt to remove oneself from this cycle of life and death is an exercise that will ultimately fail, and one that all-too-often creates a false sense of righteousness in those who try. Some might find a conscious, humble, practice of vegetarianism to be a powerful and critical spiritual exercise. But I think an important part of that practice would be the understanding that one is still ultimately part of a food web that encompasses death and violence.

Acceptance of this reality can lead us to a whole new level of relationship to our food-source. Once we understand that we have blood on our hands, and that as much as we may recite "Out, out, damn spot!", it will not go away, we can move on to what are to me crucial issues surrounding that blood and our relationship to it. We can now concern ourselves with how that animal lived and died, and how to make sure that that animal's life and death are as humane as possible. Our current system of factory farming of both animals and plants is not a system that honors or celebrates life, and death is dispensed thoughtlessly. Pesticides and herbicides not only kill bugs and weeds, they poison our waterways and the animals that live in them.

Though the death may be bloodless, the suffering and destruction are no less real than the slaughterhouse.

We are scared of blood, and so we keep it out of sight, and fool ourselves into thinking we are not responsible when it is shed. How different it would have been in a 16th Century English rural village, where the death would be witnessed and acknowledged, and everyone would get blood on their hands as the butchering, hanging, drying, brining, smoking, preserving, and freezing were meticulously carried out. Were they heartless? No. Like all beings all over the planet and throughout time, they were trying to survive.

And they knew, as we all do deep down, that death and blood and life and plants are all interconnected, are all part of a vast web that we but dimly understand. Maybe we can view not only time, but something like meat-eating, not as an arrow, but as a circle. Not a thing of dominion or control or harm, but a complex cycle in which we shed blood, and then replenish it, we nourish, and are nourished in return.

There is death, but there is rebirth and rejuvenation as well.

But who really knows about these things. We can bleed every month, we can gaze up at the moon and wonder why, but we can never really know the answer. All we can do is walk our moons and suns on earth the best way we can.

May we celebrate the mysteries of life and death on this Blood Moon. And may we practice forgiveness, and begin by forgiving ourselves.