“Bacon, Sausage & Scrapple Making Day” is one of the more eye-opening of the public programs hosted by Howell Farm. When I’ve blogged about the process in past years, including posting photos, these are some of the comments I’ve gotten back from the public:
“Nice, although I don’t know if I always want to know exactly how my food is made.”
“That first pic of a side of hog is surprisingly non-disgusting. It looks like plastic!”
For many people, there seems to be a limit of how much they want to know about where the meat-portion of their diet comes from. It’s easier to eat something if you don’t think about it recently having been a living animal. It's better if it looks like plastic instead of flesh.
I imagine this queasiness is a very modern problem. For most of human existence, killing, butchering and cooking animals was a crucial part of the work required to survive and prosper. It would be interesting to know if early humans ever gave killing and butchering an animal a second thought.
I myself had never killed an animal until about two years ago, when I worked a few days helping butcher chickens. I had mixed feelings about doing the work. I didn’t mind butchering a few chickens at a time, especially when one of those chickens was going home with me into my own soup pot. But killing 50 chickens in a row felt a little different— more like it was just a job that needed to be done. I was relieved when it was over.
Like most things, I found that doing difficult work at the scale required for an individual or family group felt more satisfying and humanizing than doing the same work at the scale required for production and commerce. For better or worse, modern society has replaced the need for one person to do many different small jobs with the need for one person to do one job, over and over again, as efficiently as possible.
“Nice, although I don’t know if I always want to know exactly how my food is made.”
“That first pic of a side of hog is surprisingly non-disgusting. It looks like plastic!”
For many people, there seems to be a limit of how much they want to know about where the meat-portion of their diet comes from. It’s easier to eat something if you don’t think about it recently having been a living animal. It's better if it looks like plastic instead of flesh.
I imagine this queasiness is a very modern problem. For most of human existence, killing, butchering and cooking animals was a crucial part of the work required to survive and prosper. It would be interesting to know if early humans ever gave killing and butchering an animal a second thought.
I myself had never killed an animal until about two years ago, when I worked a few days helping butcher chickens. I had mixed feelings about doing the work. I didn’t mind butchering a few chickens at a time, especially when one of those chickens was going home with me into my own soup pot. But killing 50 chickens in a row felt a little different— more like it was just a job that needed to be done. I was relieved when it was over.
Like most things, I found that doing difficult work at the scale required for an individual or family group felt more satisfying and humanizing than doing the same work at the scale required for production and commerce. For better or worse, modern society has replaced the need for one person to do many different small jobs with the need for one person to do one job, over and over again, as efficiently as possible.
RSS Feed
