Raúl & the Little Peach
There is one peach left in the fridge. It’s nearing the end of summer and I’m not sure if the co-op bag will bring anymore. I never really liked the peaches I found in Buenos Aires. I think they are pulled from the branch too early: dull like rubber, their sweetness barely a whisper, there wasn’t enough time for the sugar to spread and linger.
These peaches are different. They are small and asymmetrical with streaks of bright orange and pink that orbit around the skin. If I leave them out on the counter the summer heat makes their aroma float around the house and for a moment I worry they’ve grown soft spots, their juices spilling over the countertop, dripping onto the floor. I got in the habit of guarding them in the fridge–not because they’d over-ripen too fast but because otherwise, Raúl would get to them before I did.
I started eating these peaches around the time that Raúl arrived. A slice for me, a slice for him. Someone had found him curled up in a ball on a busy avenue. They carried him home because he couldn’t walk on his own anymore. His frame was small and the bones along his spine pointed upward, pronounced by the lack of hair that had been thinned by fleas, his belly black and leathery. Yet he still was a happy puppy. His wide eyes were filled with relief.
We fattened him up with dog food and quickly learned that nothing could satiate his hunger. The first week, he found a block of soap in the gutter. I tried my best to wrestle it from his mouth but as quickly as I gave up he swallowed it whole, it slid like a block down his neck as if he were a character in an old cartoon. I rushed him to the vet and we gave him a shot to make him vomit the potentially toxic cleaner and to the veterinarian’s surprise Raúl just sat there, tongue out and tail wagging, asking for more. “If that doesn’t make him throw up, the soap isn’t going to do anything,” and he sent us on our way. I laughed all day imagining him farting bubbles.
He eventually stopped drooling over the dead pigeons and rotting vegetables on the sidewalk. He learned to sniff out the good stuff. At home, there was papaya, cheese and stray popcorn that flew out of the pot directly into his mouth. On the days that I cooked carnitas for my taco pop-up, he slept at the kitchen door until flesh separated from bone. The sight of a shank bone made his whole body wag, he let out uncontrollable low howls. He ate the shank bone like it was a peach, gone in a few bites. To stop his skin allergies, I cooked him ground beef and rice with vegetables (seasonal! agroecological!). I had to be ever more vigilant on our walks. He’d push his body close to the ground and claw towards passerby with grocery bags. “He isn’t going to bite you but he might take a chunk out of the bag,” I’d warn. I’d apologized before after he wrestled bread from a neighbor and snapped at the doorman carrying meat from the butcher.
Our bond was formed at that kitchen door. I enjoyed the audience. I needed it. At the beginning of the pandemic when it felt like my world was crumbling around me, I craved the validation. Despite economic difficulties, despite problems in my relationship, despite an unforeseeable future, I could make Raúl happy with a piece of food. So one day when his body suddenly rejected my food, expelled it from his body until he stopped eating all together, I knew something was wrong, probably unrepairable. Three days later he died from kidney failure.
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A week later I traveled to the north of the country for a story about quebracho wood and the deforestation of the Gran Chaco. I didn’t really want to go. I felt too overcome with grief. Grief for Raúl and other pieces of me I have lost recently that I am not quite ready to write about. Here I wrote that I would look at that trip through the lens of domination, the human need to dominate people and place, but I couldn’t help but see everything through the lens of loss.
I met with numerous families who are living through the effects of drastic climate change. Over the last two centuries, the forest has shrunk from more than 120 million hectares to just 33. Across the Gran Chaco, summers are brutally hot, rains are unpredictable, the soil is desertifying and, in some areas, a record drought has made it impossible to grow the subsistence gardens people depend on for fresh produce. Quebracho was originally cut down for tannin to cure leather hides–it still is–but rather than replanting, cattle farms and soy fields were raised in their place. Lumber companies continue to encroach on indigenous lands, others sell their trees because they don’t have the means not to. We wear their loss on our backs, carry it around in satchels, eat it for dinner sometimes cooked with coals from the tree that should still be standing.
What am I willing to lose? What am I willing for others to lose on my behalf? The two questions are intertwined. I’ve written extensively about how seeing the injustices of my consumption up close has been my motor for personal change. Yet last week with all this fresh in my mind, I ate a beef milanesa. My grief has taken hold of my stomach. I haven’t desired food in weeks and most meals make me feel uncomfortable. I eat and the body rejects — my stomach bloats, my throat burns, my skin itches. I don’t recognize this version of me. That milanesa made me feel like me, even if just for a moment. I have been opting for more vegan and vegetarian meals lately but I wrestle with the loss of nostalgia, of social connection, of losing a piece of me which is completely connected to food. The latest IPCC report confirms the challenges of overcoming our social connections to food. I ofter wonder if I can’t bear to give foods up that I know negatively impact people and the environment, how will the rest of the world?
That sense of loss is slowly shifting in me. It’s transforming into a loss of naivete, of ignorance. That loss will look different for everyone. The families I met with in that particular place of the Gran Chaco will never be able to give up meat, nor should they–goats, chickens and cows are amongst the foods what take best to that land. On a micro-family scale the impact is incomparable to the farmed cattle most widely available here in Buenos Aires. I can consume differently, and thus, I should. Shouldn’t I? Maybe that loss will not be forever mourned, as I fear it will. Maybe eventually I will be able to celebrate the lesson learned and the good that is gained.
The IPCC report suggests adopting a ‘flexitarian diet’ as a global average would have a 66% chance of limiting climate change under two degrees, alongside changes in land use and food waste. A flexitarian can mitigate their impact on climate by consuming:
75% of meat and dairy replaced by cereals and pulses; at least 500 g per day fruits and vegetables; at least 100 g per day of plant-based protein sources; modest amounts of animal-based proteins and limited amounts of red meat (one portion per week), refined sugar (less than 5% of total energy), vegetable oils high in saturated fat, and starchy foods with relatively high glycaemic index.
Maybe a portion of meat every once in a while will begin to feel less like a loss and more like a celebration, a conscious choice rather than an inconsequential treat, a moment for me to really savor that beef milanesa.
In Spanish, there is no verb for mourn. Rather estoy de duelo, estoy (i am) de (of) duelo (mourning); greiving as possesion, something that becomes us. Raúl’s ashes are sitting in a box in the back of a closet I never open. Soon I will mix his ashes with compost and plant a tree, maybe a peach tree. I’ll let his loss feed me, nourish my present.