Caring for Your Food
Raising Pigs for Food Requires Love
By William Craig
For the Valley News
Nurture. Cherish. Kill. Eat.
You got a problem with that?
If so, don't read Living With Pigs: Everything You Need to Know to Raise Your Own Porkers.
Or, better yet, do. Squeamish meat-eaters probably need this insightful and informative guide to making bacon even more than eat-your-own enthusiasts, who will find it indispensable.
If you eat meat, but don't like to think about where it comes from, this is a good time to open your mind. Recent bestsellers including Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, will inform you of the impact that your I-don't-wanna-know choices are having on the economy, the environment and your own precious well-being. But, while global-peril arguments are powerful persuaders, there are other ways to find out where you stand on the realities of living con carne. Take a break from the dismal, big-picture stats and have some fun reading Living With Pigs.
In delightfully clear prose, Hartford resident Chuck Wooster gives you all the facts you need to imagine yourself a back-acre pig farmer. Breeds, fencing, feed, butchering: it's all here, everything you'll want to know before you get started and once you get going. Where would you purchase piglets? How much should you pay? What kind of a pen would you build them, and how big? What do they eat, and for how many months, before the eaters become the eaten?
Yes, eaten. Although Living With Pigs is decidedly aimed at the hobby farmer, Wooster keeps the message on the mission: good food. Hobby or small-scale farming is still farming; these pigs aren't pets. They're humanely raised to be humanely slaughtered, their wholesome flesh feeding farmers, friends and the market at a price point that is both profitable and affordable.
And there's nothing grim about that. Or about any of it, really. In fact, Wooster makes clear that one of the chief reasons to consider raising pigs — as opposed to cows, chickens or trout — is that pigs are smart, social, driven by guileless gluttony — and flat-out, pratfall funny. Especially piglets. The little ones, he explains, have a habit of rocketing around in play and "suddenly freezing in place as a group, stock-still, all eyes on you ... It's like walking into a basement, flicking on the light, and finding a bunch of teenagers all staring at you, having just whipped the beer bottles behind their backs and managing to look both innocent and guilty at the same time."
As they grow, porkers project unique personalities, and Wooster advises the wise farmer to forge a strong relationship with each animal, reinforcing the idea that people bring good food and great back scratching — all of which makes it a lot easier to get a 250-pound sow to go along with your request to get back in the pen or, at the end of its days, hold still for a coup de grace.
And we're back to slaughter again. Nowhere in this practically eloquent book does Wooster write more feelingly than in his chapter on "Slaughter Day." In a passage on "Emotional Preparation," he identifies the responsibility and rewards that make raising one's own meat ethically profound. His first slaughter, he writes, yielded an unexpected emotion: pride.
"It wasn't just the pride of a job well done, though I certainly felt some of that. It was the pride of tackling a job that most people find too horrifying to even consider, let alone discuss in polite company, and discovering that it wasn't so bad after all. Discovering, in fact, that it was a job full of richness and meaning, wonder and learning."
That's right. Raising up your own food, providing a good — even a loving — life for animals you then dispatch, dismember and devour, puts you in touch with truths we have long avoided. Anyone who has ever cleaned a trout and marveled at the astonishing works therein knows that we have much to learn from the wonders of anatomy. Slaughtering pig is the same lesson writ more bold. Seeing how intricately each organ folds into the others, understanding that the absolute interconnectedness of our insides mirrors the interdependence of every system on the planet, it's easy to hope that a rediscovery of home-grown food could curb our environmental arrogance.
And if philosophy weren't sufficient reward, there's always pleasure. How good is the pork you raise yourself? Wooster writes of a dear friend, a strict vegetarian, who finally dares to try the home-raised ham everyone is raving about. "Skeptically at first, but then with gathering speed, she finished the slice and asked for a second.
"'But aren't you a vegetarian?' I inquired later.
" 'As far as I'm concerned,' she replied, 'that wasn't meat.'"
As indeed it was not, if meat is defined by industrial agribiz. But it'll be a better day when "meat" means home-grown or small-farm, and the stuff you get from fast-food windows or box store freezers has to be called something else.
— Valley News, published August 8, 2008