Author: Nick Bergus

A 52-year-old man in bright-yellow hip waders hunched over a pig, on its back and lifeless, carefully removing its skin. Clotted blood dissolved and spread like watercolors around the drain. The faint odor of barnyard hung in the air.

I stood in the corner of the cement-floored room, asking questions.

“Do you remember the first pig you ever slaughtered?”

The butcher stopped and cocked his head. “What?”

“Do you remember the first pig you ever slaughtered?”

“Nope,” he said, returning to his attention to maneuvering his knife through the subcutaneous fat covering the pig’s chest.

We’d been at this for half an hour. I asked each question twice and he gave the shortest answer possible. His longest response came when he spelled his four-letter last name.

“Do you like your job?”

He stopped again. “What?”

“Do you like your job?”

“Used to,” he said, again returning to his work. This time he shook his head slightly, a movement that told me exactly what he thought of me.

He gave me points for not vomiting when he eviscerated the pig or dug around in the 50-gallon bucket of waste to find the eyeballs he was supposed to save for dissection by future biologists. But he didn’t trust me; he wasn’t going to tell me any more than necessary.

During what could only be called a one-sided interview, the butcher’s boss interrupted us.

“You want a brat?” he asked me. Well, those were the actual words he used. But his offer of ground pork stuffed into a sheep intestine was really his way of asking a different question.

“Are you a pussy?”

It is one thing to watch someone slaughter hogs. It is something else to hear the sploosh of blood gushing out of a pig’s jugular and sloshing into a bucket of entrails while noshing on the victim’s brother. This offer was a call out.

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t really hungry, either, there was one obviously right answer.

Both of these had grown up around animal slaughter. They felt no more emotion when killing a pig or lamb as I do squashing a mosquito; it’s just the way it is.

The boss brought me just a brat — no bun, no ketchup, no mustard — and held it out to me. The translucent casing sheathed the warm, gray meat of the just-steamed sausage.

I don’t remember if I hesitated when before I took the sausage or when I went to eat it. All I remember is the snap as I bit through the natural casing.

It would have tasted better grilled.

There are a lot of things I’m not supposed to do as a parent. Letting my two-year-old daughter see photographs of slaughtered animals is pretty high on that list.

When I do, it’s not because I’m trying to turn her into a vegetarian. It’s because I want her to understand that the meat she eats doesn’t grow in a hermetically sealed Styrofoam tray. It was once flesh.

My hope is that she’ll learn to respect the meat she eats, to recognize that some animal has made the ultimate sacrifice for a meal that we’ll consume and then likely forget, to be concerned with how her food was treated when it was alive.

Getting kids to make that connection is hard. The traditional foods of childhood — hot dogs, bologna and hamburgers — bear little resemblance to the flesh from which they’re born. A hot dog looks the same whether it’s made of cow, pig, chicken, turkey or soybeans; they’re just different shades of brown.

I didn’t start by showing her the picture of the pig lying on the floor of a slaughterhouse. That came later. Nor did I force it — Look at the blood! Look at it! — on my daughter.

I began trying to get her, when she was just a year old, to make the connection by subverting the cartoony pictures of farm animals in the books that line her shelf. I would point to an animal on the page and, as another parent might try to coax out its sound or the color of its fur, ask if it was something we might eat.

Do we eat pigs? Chickens? Horses? (Well, some people do, sweetie.)

But even for an adult, it’s hard to connect a cartoon cow to the pieces of beef rib eye that lie on the dinner plate between the mashed potatoes and green beans. I wanted the connection in her mind to be concrete.

So we began walking along the 20 feet of supermarket meat counter, starting with the lobster tank and salmon fillets and ending with the pork sausage and bacon-wrapped fillet mignons. As we went I would tell her about each cut in as much detail as I could.

“The pork chops,” I would say, running my fingers along her spine, “come from a pig’s loin, right here on its back.”

I got used to receiving odd looks from people standing on both sides of the counter.

“She doesn’t need to hear that,” said one 50-year-old meat cutter, trying to veil his disgust with a jovial smile.

It’s odd that parents discuss with their kids what’s left over after digestion easily, and that conversations between parents can degenerate into discussions about poop and pee suddenly, but talking to my daughter about what she’s eating made me an instant member of a lunatic fringe.

Was I being creepy? I suppose so, but I couldn’t think of a better way to get her to understand that animal flesh was really no different from her own.

But bacon doesn’t look like a pig, New York strip doesn’t look like a cow and a whole chicken hardly looks like a chicken. Even in our rural state, my daughter hadn’t interacted with any livestock before it became her lunch.

So when I met Lois selling pork and lamb at the Saturday morning farmers’ market, I asked if I could bring my daughter up to her farm. Over several visits, she laughed at the bleating lambs and was fixated by the pigs romping in the open fields and chasing each other through the lots.

We would take home Lois’s meat and, when my daughter watched me cook it for dinner, I would explain that this might be the very same pig she had had so delighted her the week prior.

And when she glimpsed the photograph of the slaughtered pig, its throat cut, its pooled blood, its death throes causing its legs and body to blur, she didn’t seemed bothered. But it seemed to click in her young mind.

Not taking her eyes off of the photo, she asked in most serious tone a two-year-old can muster: “Is that Lois’ pig, Daddy?”

I was back at the farm today for the first time in a few weeks and spent time watching the pigs. They are warily curious, especially in contrast to the sheep pasturing next to them. Sheep seem stupid and scared of everything, always making sure of the space between themselves and visitors. The pigs follow visitors around their pen, sticking their snouts through the fence, shoving their way closer, climbing on each other for a better view.

The longer I’m away from the farm, the easier I think it will be to slaughter my pig when her time comes. And every time I go back to the farm and watch the pigs running and snorting and sniffing, I’m snapped back to the reality of how emotionally hard it will be.

On the left is the 36-pound tom turkey carcass. On the right, for scale, is my 33-and-a-half-pound 2-year-old. Her arms are in her armpits because she is doing a turkey impression.

We’re just outside Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the week, staying in a house that has been in a state renovation for a year or so (and will be for another five). The walls are naked (and not in the no-art-hanging way), the floors plywood and walking around without shoes is a bad idea. The only heat comes from fireplaces.

It’s the home of my cousin Josh (he of the Maryland crabs), the retired cook and Culinary Institute of America alum. And while living in a constantly morphing space has it’s drawbacks, it is fantastic for cooking.

Right now, Josh is installing a new counter next to the sink over the used Sub-Zero wine storer, adding a second oven just for the 36-pound turkey (more later), and hooking up a second refrigerator for all the bits and pieces.

Josh and Michelle are raising their own chickens for both meat and eggs. (They originally got the birds to save money, but quickly realized that it was costing them more to raise their own. They don’t get government subsidizes.) The meat birds are still too small to slaughter, but the eggs’ yolks are a vibrant orange instead of the pale yellow of regular supermarket eggs (including the cage-free, organic and free-range ones).

The coolest feature of the kitchen, such as it is, is the built-in wood-fired oven. Our first night we had pizza in it and last night’s roasted chicken and the skin came out a beautiful brown. I’m now planning — with or without anyone’s consent — to tear apart our 1950s ranch to enlarge our kitchen.

I’ve become facinated by Wooly Pigs. The blog by Washington pig farmer Heath Putnam about his herd of Berkshires and rare Mangalitsa hogs. His blog offers his thoughts on slaughter (he worried about what might happen to meat of the pigs he was slaughtering for the French Laundry) while his farm’s site contains more information about rare pig breeds than you could ever want.