434 words

My intention to meet a pig, kill it and eat it was the reason I started and named this blog.

I decided to meet, kill and eat because of my own realization for how distant we all are from the food we eat. (That I could build this into a multimedia project that would earn me a degree, and hopefully a job, was certainly some of my motivation, too.)

The realization came when I had just wanted to make sausage. So I went to my local supermarket armed with little more than knowledge from the recipe I had.

At the meat counter, I asked for a five-pound hunk of pork shoulder butt, a cut from the

My intention to meet a pig, kill it and eat it was the reason I started and named this blog.

I decided to meet, kill and eat because of my own realization for how distant we all are from the food we eat. (That I could build this into a multimedia project that would earn me a degree, and hopefully a job, was certainly some of my motivation, too.)

The realization came when I had just wanted to make sausage. So I went to my local supermarket armed with little more than knowledge from the recipe I had.

At the meat counter, I asked for a five-pound hunk of pork shoulder butt, a cut from the top of a pig’s shoulder with a high fat content almost perfect for sausage. The request met a blank stare from the clerk. He wasn’t sure what I was talking about. He called his boss, who wasn’t any more helpful.

We have over 17 million pigs in Iowa and this man, who cut and sold their flesh for a living, could not answer simple questions about the pieces of Hormel hog he was offering me.

And now how can I justify writing thousands of words and cutting minutes of video and posting dozens of photographs when Verlyn Klinkenborg, on today’s New York Times op-ed page, writes so beautifully and so touchingly and so movingly in just four paragraphs?

Via Michael Ruhlman