Gristle You know those tenacious bits embedded in the muscle of meat, random clumps of fatty tissue that even your fangs can’t tear through, your saliva doesn’t have a chance of breaking down. Passed on from the cows’ ancestors, these fragments persist, a reminder the beasts have not entirely succumbed to slaughter. Jawed out, your own taut muscles stop their ruminating, your tongue and lips roll it around, evading its edges, like a splinter in your mouth, expel it into a napkin with a gob of inert spit. Who wants a reminder of that indivisible past? Of the tentacled mass, lodged in your chest in response to some unspeakable loss. Later you marvel when your gut-churning stops, and revere a grazing Holstein for its resilience.