aschie30 wrote: I don't hold it against parents who want to educate their kids, but at the same time, I don't begrudge parents who think it's too graphic for their kids to witness either.

To be fair, when you start comparing viewing a pig slaughter to viewing the Holocaust, it doesn't sound the above is what you mean. Nobody at any time, including Monica Eng, suggested that this was something all parents should do with every kid.

Mhays wrote:

aschie30 wrote: I don't hold it against parents who want to educate their kids, but at the same time, I don't begrudge parents who think it's too graphic for their kids to witness either.

To be fair, when you start comparing viewing a pig slaughter to viewing the Holocaust, it doesn't sound the above is what you mean. Nobody at any time, including Monica Eng, suggested that this was something all parents should do with every kid.

Where did I compare a pig slaughter to the Holocaust? That is not at all what I said. My point, so it's clear (and others apparently got it) was that we can understand and emphasize with events -- the Holocaust is one example -- without having experienced it or witnessed it firsthand. Likewise, as MikeG and jimswside stated above, there are other ways to teach your kids about where their meat comes from without having them witness a slaughter firsthand.

It's obviously a parent's choice, and obviously should be done with trepidation. At the same time, if a parent is not so obsessed with the notion of "where does our food come from," I could see how hearing about Eng doing this sets off a lot of alarm bells. The pushback Eng is experiencing probably comes as a surprise to no one, including Eng.

In my experience watching an animal slaughtered is not nearly as disturbing as watching one die due to preventable causes. Unfortunately that's what happens on every farm.

You got livestock? You're gonna have dead stock.

aschie30 wrote:My point, so it's clear (and others apparently got it) was that we can understand and emphasize with events -- the Holocaust is one example -- without having experienced it or witnessed it firsthand. Likewise, as MikeG and jimswside stated above, there are other ways to teach your kids about where their meat comes from without having them witness a slaughter firsthand.

I do think it's worth noting that in the case of the pig slaughter, you're showing your kid what happens as a direct result of their choice to consume meat. Empathizing with the Holocaust (or any other tragic event) where your actions clearly had no effect in precipitating the tragedy, is different.

As someone who doesn't have kids, I've generally been staying on the sidelines of this one. That said, I respect Monica tremendously for showing her child the linkage between eating bacon and and an animal dying - in a way that she felt appropriate for her child.

-Dan

dansch wrote:

aschie30 wrote:My point, so it's clear (and others apparently got it) was that we can understand and emphasize with events -- the Holocaust is one example -- without having experienced it or witnessed it firsthand. Likewise, as MikeG and jimswside stated above, there are other ways to teach your kids about where their meat comes from without having them witness a slaughter firsthand.

I do think it's worth noting that in the case of the pig slaughter, you're showing your kid what happens as a direct result of their choice to consume meat.

Agreed. But that begs the question -- do you think witnessing a slaughter is necessary to consume meat?

aschie30 wrote:But that begs the question -- do you think witnessing a slaughter is necessary to consume meat?

I don't. I do think that a respectful appreciation of what is involved in putting a pork chop on the dinner plate is sorely lacking in our society.

I think that witnessing slaughter can be a part of making that connection and, in the right context, not unreasonable for a child.

I applaud parents who work with their kids to make this connection, in a way that's appropriate for their children.

-Dan

dansch wrote:I don't. I do think that a respectful appreciation of what is involved in putting a pork chop on the dinner plate is sorely lacking in our society.

+1, very well put as always dan.

dansch wrote:

aschie30 wrote:But that begs the question -- do you think witnessing a slaughter is necessary to consume meat?

I don't. I do think that a respectful appreciation of what is involved in putting a pork chop on the dinner plate is sorely lacking in our society.

I think that witnessing slaughter can be a part of making that connection and, in the right context, not unreasonable for a child.

I do think witnessing a slaughter - animal, fowl or fish (probably the easiest to start) - is necessary at some point. I do think this would elevate the level of respect we have for our food (and where it comes from) and would seriously reduce waste and increase the taste quotient of what we are willing to put in our mouth.
There is I think a general disconnect between eating (meat/fish) and the recognition that (and respect for) a life sacrificed for that.
Fish, for example is not some fillet on ice; if people realized that I think they would demand better quality. I grew up buying mostly live fish and when the opportunity presented itself, I had no problem showing my two year old (at the time) how fish ended up on the table.

[no slaughter shown]


Kudos to Ms. Eng!

Good point - truth be told, you don't need to go downstate - any Chinatown and most Argyle markets offer this opportunity (not just fish, either - there are frogs, crabs, etc.)

sazerac wrote:Fish, for example is not some fillet on ice; if people realized that I think they would demand better quality.

I recently learned about the Ice Aquarium in Kesennuma, Japan:

Crave wrote:The Kori no Suizokukan (Ice Aquarium) in Kesennuma, northeastern Japan, packs about 450 specimens of marine life frozen in large columns of ice bathed in blue light. Some 80 species, including saury, octopuses, crabs, and skipjack, are preserved in lifelike poses. They seem to be swimming in ice.

Opened in 2002 in the Uminoichi seafood market, the Ice Aquarium uses flash-freezing technology to preserve fresh fish unloaded in Kesennuma's port on the Pacific Ocean. Inside, the ambient air is a cool minus 5 degrees F (minus 20 C), and guests have to don parkas to keep warm. There's also a hunk of Antarctic ice on display.

I don't know if there are any live fish in the marketplace proper. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of fish in ice (displayed as if they were swimming) and presumably fish on ice is curious.

pairs4life wrote:

boudreaulicious wrote:I also have a HUGE problem with "we should do" shouted from the rooftops as it were. Sorry but I just don't see how anyone becomes vested with the authority to tell someone they don't know (or even someone they do know unless asked for their opinion)what to do unless they're able to pass it as a law.

But laws are hard to pass.

Only good ones. Bad ones, unfortunately, seem to slide through with ease.

I wasn't criticizing Monica for taking her kids to see slaughter and not being in 4-H or some equivalent. But it was interesting to me that in the recent 4-H contretemps at Wagner Farm, the animal rights people all said "But you won't take your kids to see slaughter, A-HA!" For them the whole business has only two aspects: the animal's life (a happy, but largely featureless, thing to them) and the animal's cruel death which exposes the sham of it all. And if you don't make that the central part of the whole business, you're a fraud.

I find that tremendously reductive, not to mention, revealing of how shallow and unidimensional their understanding of it all is. My kids have had experience, not of an animal's death, but of farming, which is a complex thing with many aspects to it. They have had experience of a wide range of things-- birth, feeding, care, training, exhibition, many smaller things. They understand where the animals go, but I am not convinced that the basic physical mechanics of death would give meaning to something that is otherwise meaningless or even deceptive. I believe it has had plenty of meanings along the way, which are not in any way mendacious...

pairs4life wrote:This reminds me of the offense my animal-eating friends took to my posting this picture of my husband with his birds after a hunt on Facebook a couple of years ago.

Well yeah, where in that picture are the bird dogs who pointed his birds and brought them back to him after he shot the birds? Hmmm?

Mike G wrote:My kids...have had experience of a wide range of things-- birth, feeding, care, training, exhibition, many smaller things. They understand where the animals go, but I am not convinced that the basic physical mechanics of death would give meaning to something that is otherwise meaningless or even deceptive.

This makes even more sense to me when I think of a human analogy. For a child to understand the concept of grandpa dying, and to have a reverence for grandpa's life, we don't usually think that it is necessary for the child to watch grandpa die.

By the same token, a child's being with grandpa when he dies can be a beautiful choice, depending on the situation.

That would be a better analogy if the child were about to eat grandpa and grandpa could live if the child chose to eat something else

Kennyz wrote:That would be a better analogy if the child were about to eat grandpa and grandpa could live if the child chose to eat something else

True.

Thanks everyone for the most reasonable and intelligent discussion (not that I'm surprised) of my piece on taking my daughter to the farm.

Just a clarification, Sebastian meant, "we cant eat meat unless someone kills the meat."
His dad chef Bernie Laskowski, (as you can probably tell from his quote) was in no way pressuring his kids to watch the slaughter. They all gravitated to the scene voluntarily.

Miranda also did once she saw all the other kids going. She did take it the hardest but all the kids were super supportive. One quote that didnt get in there was little Abigail who sat beside us and said during the skinning, "it's ok miranda, you can look. now its all just yummy meat."

The Laskowski kids had never seen a slaughter but they had seen whole carcasses in their dad's kitchen and were pretty sophisticated about the matter.

Many critics have predicted that Miranda would be suffering nightmares, anorexia and need years of therapy because of this but I am happy to report she is almost unchanged except in her heightened appreciation for meat and animals.

My mom still cant believe this is such a big deal since she saw slaughters at the Union Stockyards as a school girl along with hundreds of thousands of other brownies, girl scouts, boy scouts and Chicago Public School kids of that era.

I certainly don't recommend this for all kids. My 11 year old son would not have been a great candidate for this trip. But I think it was the right decision to bring her and then give her the option to watch it.

Thanks for a thoughtful discussion as usual.

I was between 6 and 7, it was '79-'80 with my dad visiting my grandparents at their second home/farm in Palestine, TX. I don't recall the context, but I do remember it was a cloudy, grey day, clammy, rain-slick, muddy roads. My dad, Pepa, and I rode over to the slaughterhouse; a series of low-slung, corrugated metal buildings set far off on a field of speargrass and chiggers. They left me in the truck for a bit while they went inside conducting some sort of business. Not long after, my dad appeared beckoned me over to a wire-meshed window set high in a sturdy door. He lifted me up to peer into a bare room, concrete floor with a drain set into the center. The carcass of a cow hung suspended over the drain, a worker cut it open and the viscera spilled onto the floor. I specifically remember a massive, silverish purple length of intestine bulging forth.

Though I grew up in Houston, my family'd long been entrenched in Texas ranching and rural properties. My dad's side were avid hunters, my Pepa gave me a small rack of antlers with a hank of hair and part of the skull still attached when I was 5; I thought it was the coolest thing ever, used to strum long drones out of my guitar with it in college.

Suffice it to say, that the disembowelment of the cow certainly was gruesome and remains with me as an iconic image of my childhood...but, it didn't keep me from my carnivorous ways.

---

ca. 1985, my then step-brother and I were traipsing around the Piney Woods, we were on a weekend vacation with my dad and his new wife up at Max Apple's cabin near Big Sandy.
I remember the red dust of the backroads, how quiet it was, a slight fear of getting lost as we hiked circles within circles.

We came around near the mouth of a road passing a garbage dump hidden just back aways. The air was pink, that's what sticks with me most...and it spoke in flies. The air was pink and buzzing.
Someone had taken a deer and left behind a pile of thick, waxy, hairy rotting skin(like it had melted), an entire head half-cracked open, gray congealing brains, intestines slung across one dumpster, unidentifiable green matter slickening another, and blood everywhere...

you see, that was messed up

it wasn't like someone hit a deer and lugged it's body back here

more like some sick fuck had fun with a deer, got bored

---

between the two: the slaughterhouse, the trash dump, the one that affected me most was the latter, it speaks to me more of man's capacities than does the aforementioned which is basically just someone's job...a job and a service to the community

not all children can handle viewing the dispatching of an animal bound for the table, as we remove ourselves further and further from the practicalities of the food chain we exacerbate an already toxic frission; for some reason I'm reminded of Eloi and Molochs, but that's probably a bad analogy

I wish I could remember the name, but back in film school we watched a Chinese film the first few minutes of which consists of a hunt on the Mongolian steppes. I remember classmates leaving the room. They couldn't take the filmic depiction of arrows in throats, broken legs. I remember thinking, "Really?" "This is a classic of 3rd Gen Chinese cinema and you're pussying out because of some footage of a hunt?"

meng wrote:My mom still cant believe this is such a big deal since she saw slaughters at the Union Stockyards as a school girl along with hundreds of thousands of other brownies, girl scouts, boy scouts and Chicago Public School kids of that era.

My dad grew up just south of the stockyards in the late 20s/early30s. He told me they had a visitors center and a viewing area where you could see the cattle being killed with a sledgehammer blow to the head.

teatpuller wrote:
My dad grew up just south of the stockyards in the late 20s/early30s. He told me they had a visitors center and a viewing area where you could see the cattle being killed with a sledgehammer blow to the head.

mercy.... I cant imagine the outcry from PITA, and others if this viewing option was available nowdays

I loved this article.

I am a vegetarian= my choice.
my husband is an omnivore= his choice.

Our daughter is an omnivore, and will remain one by default unless she chooses otherwise, at an age when she can make such a choice. (in spite of her most heartfelt desire to be a crackers, blueberries, and string cheese-avore. I thwart her every desire, I do.) At twenty months, she's still far too young for me to know if this will ever be an appropriate way for her to spend an afternoon- I just don't know how sensitive she's going to be. However, we WILL teach her, in small (but progressively larger) ways, that she's able to handle, where her food comes from. The hand-wringing around this article is unsurprising to me, as we are all (collectively, not all of us here) so profoundly disconnected from our food.

Hi- Personally I think that the seven year old daughter was too young to view the slaughter, but like Mike said, all the protesters at Wagner Farm, wanted the 4-H kids to watch their animals being slaughtered, so they could see how cruel it was. Hope this helps, Nancy

Mhays wrote:

aschie30 wrote:I mean, we can emphathize with and understand the atrocity and violence in the Holocaust without having witnessed it, right? (Almost a Hitler reference for you.)

Have you been to any of the museum exhibits covering the Holocaust in the area? They are pretty significantly graphic, and children are expected not only to go to them, but to react appropriately to what they see.

When I was 8 years old, at summer camp, we were shown graphic Holocaust documentaries (like this one). The intent was to drive home the lesson of "Never again!" and believe me, it made an impact.

I have to say that it horrifies me somewhat to see anyone equate, however tenuously, that monstrously sick genocide with age-old, humane practices of slaughtering food animals.

While I believe that Americans in general are far too squeamish about food and overly disconnected from the sources of their foods, I'm not a parent and can't really say what's an appropriate age for getting a graphic lesson in understanding just where your food comes from. But perhaps it ought to be linked with another natural life lesson -- understanding where babies come from. Should children be explicitly exposed to the end of the life cycle before they're given similar lessons in its beginnings?

On the farm, kids see both as a matter of course. City kids may need more preparation. But maybe not. I saw my dog have puppies when I was 5 or 6 -- I didn't see the part that came before that, but the concept of "heat" had been explained to me in simple terms (mainly having to do with why sometimes our poodle had to wear little pants in the house and should not be let out into the yard unsupervised). And although I was much older before I actually witnessed an animal being killed, I did accompany my grandmother to the live-poultry store, watch her choice of chicken being taken to the back, feel the still-warm package that was brought out afterward, and then see her dismember the corpse, with -- to bring things back to life's beginnings again -- the immature eggs inside.

LAZ wrote: Should children be explicitly exposed to the end of the life cycle before they're given similar lessons in its beginnings?

On the farm, kids see both as a matter of course. City kids may need more preparation. But maybe not. I saw my dog have puppies when I was 5 or 6 -- I didn't see the part that came before that, but the concept of "heat" had been explained to me in simple terms (mainly having to do with why sometimes our poodle had to wear little pants in the house and should not be let out into the yard unsupervised). And although I was much older before I actually witnessed an animal being killed, I did accompany my grandmother to the live-poultry store, watch her choice of chicken being taken to the back, feel the still-warm package that was brought out afterward, and then see her dismember the corpse, with -- to bring things back to life's beginnings again -- the immature eggs inside.

This we've done - Fair Oaks Farms offers the opportunity to watch a cow give birth, as it's happening pretty much around the clock there - although we got there minutes after the actual birth, Sparky witnessed the afterbirth and the cow cleaning up her slimy calf and has never really forgiven me . I would guess that a humane butchering is probably less graphic and more tidy.

I find the farm kid vs. city kid discusison really interesting. I wonder how many farm kids these days raise food animals and then are involved in the actual slaughter part. 4-H kids I know that raise food creatures (not rabbits or show roosters) auction off their their pigs and cows. Then the animals are sent to a slaughter house for butchering; they're not killed on the farm.

I was raised in the city but we spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house downstate. My dad and grandfather would go pheasant hunting every fall and they'd bring the birds home where I'd watch them get cleaned and plucked in the driveway. Sometimes they'd bring home a rabbit. I hated watching them clean the rabbit but not because I felt sorry for the furry thing. Rabbits stink when you gut them but birds don't. We kids knew the pheasants and rabbits were going to be dinner and we picked up on our parent's excitement about these "special" foods. They looked on pheasant as a rare treat so we did, too.

My grandfather had a huge vegetable garden, too. I am not aware that my grandmother purchased fresh vegetables ever. I know we ate garden produce fresh all summer and either (home) frozen or (home) canned vegetables the rest of the year. I don't even remember commercial canned vegetables but I suspect she used them.

I guess this rambling is just my 2c about when to expose kids to the how and why of our foods. I wonder if waiting too long is not more traumatic than just making it a fact of life from babyhood. By the time I was 7, I anthropomorphized fuzzy bunnies and other creatures. I wanted to hug them and pet them and had I not been exposed to them as food, I think I might have been quite upset about killing them. I think that as a young child I was more able to emotionally separate food creatures from pet creatures since that's how I'd always thought of them.

I do know that my grandparents on both sides would have not understood this discussion at all. The notion that kids don't know where food comes from would have completely mytified them. My mother's mother died in 1964. For most of her life, her store bought chickens came with feathers that required plucking.

Diannie wrote:I wonder if waiting too long is not more traumatic than just making it a fact of life from babyhood. By the time I was 7, I anthropomorphized fuzzy bunnies and other creatures. I wanted to hug them and pet them and had I not been exposed to them as food, I think I might have been quite upset about killing them. I think that as a young child I was more able to emotionally separate food creatures from pet creatures since that's how I'd always thought of them.

Certainly kids who've been exposed to Bambi and Thumper before venison and rabbit balk at those foods. I know full-grown people who won't touch those meats because of "Bambi." Disney has a lot to answer for.

LAZ wrote:Disney has a lot to answer for.

Indeed: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/ ... -vt/27139/