A brave, painful journey, wrapped in paper
The Ethicurean: Chew the right thing. » Blog Archive » Happy Year of the Pig
As I prepared to cut my first bite, it occurred to me that I had never worked so hard for a piece of meat in my life. Of course the time I spent is nothing, a blink compared to the labor of those who raise these animals from birth, growing them from adorable piglet to sumo-wrestler-sized swine. Still, it pleased me immensely to know exactly where my dinner had come from — how it had lived, and how it had died. Studying the cross-section of rib bones embedded in the chop, I even had a good idea roughly where on the hog it had been cut from.
Leaving aside the fact that having to tell the butcher how you want the corpse cut up counts as "work" for this person, this pretty well sums up the real nature of this whole foodie "ethical" fad - farm (so to speak) out the messy, bloody parts of killing animals for food and rationalize the living crap out of it in a rich blend of self-serving justification, consumer environmentalist "back to the dirt" sentimentality, and yuppie squeamishness. Start with the term the farmer prefers, our old euphemistic friend "harvested" again. Why? Because the pigs aren't sent off to a cold, heartless slaughterhouse, but are instead done the generous favor of a "good" death - whatever the hell that is. Perhaps the farmer has learned the value of euphemisms as a marketing tool and has figured out that pigs happily "harvested" by the farmer makes squeamish foodies feel better than "intelligent, inquisitive"-eyed pigs which get their throats cut. Then we get this self-congratulatory, watered-down Pollan lite horsecrap:
Handling the paper-wrapped hog heads was spooky and somewhat unnerving, I confess. Someone else had dibs on them, but I was tempted to open one. After all, I had looked many of the Clark Summit pigs right in their intelligent, inquisitive eyes — perhaps even the one whose head now rested so heavily in my hands. As a society, we’ve become adept at compartmentalizing the animals we watch — Babe, Wilbur — from the reality of the meat that we eat. And so even though my conscience as a carnivore was clear, I could not bring myself to tear down that “chinese wall” by gazing at the face of the animal I had bought to consume. At least not this time.
The reality of the meat we eat is a pig's head wrapped in paper she can't bear to open. It's always the next time we're going to actually look at the slaughter and the butchering. I've read Pollan 3:16 - I don't need to actually see animals being - ewww - killed, thank you. Well, except as good, distant things like big, fat foodie-porn chops. Instead of actually confronting the issue, we get lame excuses and smug, self-congratulatory justification.
Studying the cross-section of rib bones embedded in the chop, I even had a good idea roughly where on the hog it had been cut from.
The horror! The courage! Why, it's almost as if she had killed and butchered the pig herself. Sorry, I meant "harvested." Or is it almost as though she'd seen one of those diagrams locating the cuts on a drawing of a pig?
Tell us the part about how you used to be a vegetarian again, Queenie.
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