Meat On The Table – Then and Now

As a toddler growing up on a farm in Wisconsin in the 1940s, food was grown, harvested and sometimes the food was butchered. An early recollection is of the hog carcass hanging from rafters of one of the farm buildings. Not too many days later, parts of that hog were hanging in the smoke house – 4 foot by 8 foot building constructed of tin. No doubt it was ham, bacon and sausage.

As I grew older, the hog or yearling steer was taken to the nearby butcher in the village of Morrison. Once butchered, without a freezer at home, the meat was stored at a locker plant in another nearby village – Wayside or Lark. The butchering of chickens continued to be done at home. In late summer, every week or two, fifteen to twenty roosters were butchered. Chopping off the heads, removing feathers, cutting open, removing guts, chilling in cold water and eventually freezing. Soon the dinner menu would include chicken hearts and gizzards. Gizzards are chewy and have flavor.

Speaking of flavor. Those were the days when chickens had flavor – they were free range eating bugs and green plants. Not anymore. Today the chicken needs lots of spice and then deep fry just to give it flavor.

I grew up with a close relationship to the food that was eaten, the milk, the eggs, the garden produce and the apple trees. That relationship included the animals that were destined to become the meat for our meals.

Those are the memories that came back as I read Jonathon Safran Doer’s Eating Animals. The book addresses the subject of where the grocery store meats come from – the factory farms. Eating Animals details how factory farm animals are raised and how they die. It does not make for easy reading. There were times that I had to put the book aside to read something less disturbing.

The author depicts a pretty dismal picture of how factory farming treats animals – from birth to death and your table. We all make choices in our eating habits. It is Foer’s hope that when making those meat choices that the consumer knows how the meat was raised and how it was butchered. His intent and hope is for the consumer to vote with their grocery dollars.

I am mostly a vegetarian (for the past two years) with an occasional meat meal. After reading Foer's Eating Animals, I will certainly have to rethink my few meat purchases a bit more fully.

For a summary of Foer's thoughts and the core of his book, Foer has two opinion pieces at CNN -- First piece. Second piece.