Let’s not tip-toe around the shocking news that a goat was slaughtered in the kitchen of a Salisbury restaurant. That restaurant later had an E. coli outbreak that left one woman dead. Health officials do not know for certain that the slaughter led to the bacteria spreading throughout the kitchen, but the practice is so unsanitary they shut down the restaurant and do not know if it will ever re-open.
Here’s what we do know. The incident is a sign of a cultural clash.
The restaurant employees who slaughtered the goat were Hispanic. By definition, they are not yet assimilated into modern American civic culture in all its many forms. It is hard to define just what that American culture might be, it is jarring to just to write the words. Yet — like pornography — you know it when you see it — or its absence.
Many years ago a lack of assimilation into American culture was obvious in some neighbors we had. They were from China and seemed pleasant, unremarkable people. Then one day they started a construction project in the tiny backyard of their townhome. Plywood went up, was painted, roofed, a door of sorts, not quite a shed.
A chicken coop.
Another neighbor — or perhaps all of them — must have immediately took note as well. Within days a white Jeep Cherokee from the county/town rolled up. A brief education in local law ensued. Down came the chicken coop.
In Salisbury, somewhere along the line the cultural transmission belt failed to convey that in America we do not buy goats from local farmers and take them into restaurant kitchens to butcher them. This breakdown seems obvious, yet there is denial afoot. Check out Greensboro lawyer David Brown, who represents the restaurant owner:
Brown said he was told the goat wasn’t killed “for some religious or cultural reason, but simply a desire to cook the goat and eat it.”
The desire to cook and eat the goat is a cultural reason. And a very tasty one at that.
Roasted cabrito is good stuff. But it is exotic in North Carolina. I bet you could put in special order for a young, fresh goat at a specialty butcher shop, but again that is a cultural thing. If you are a working class restaurant worker in Salisbury with a hankering for some goat — and we are evidently right in the in middle of cabrito season — you have to get creative.
But not in the kitchen of the restaurant where you work. Everyone knows that. Or should.
