Author: Nick Bergus

Today I woke up at 5:35 a.m. to kill a pig.

My night’s sleep had been short and I still felt exhausted when I awoke, but that was due to the normal goings on of my life; the pig didn’t stir me from my sleep. How the pig slept, outside the abattoir, delivered for its fate a day and a half before, I don’t know. Frightened? Cold? Lonely?

I called Doug, the butcher, to confirm that we were still on for the slaughter. Yes, he said somewhat to my dismay and somewhat to my relief. Could you be here by 7:30?

The gray light of the rising sun through the clouds seemed appropriately ominous. So did the derailed freight train engine near the interchange onto the highway that would take me to the slaughterhouse.

My muscles tightened and my heart rate rose when I turned off the highway and saw Doug’s white brick building. The drive was shorter than I remembered.

Inside it was a swirl of activity as the butcher’s ten employees broke down an entire side of beef; slashing, slicing, sawing. None acknowledged me as I stood by the cases of meat in the front, waiting while another hog was finished in the slaughter room.

Then it was my turn. I was waved back. Then Doug, in his olive-green boots and faded-purple apron sauntered in. He handed me the .22-caliber rifle.

“Safety’s on.”

The bullet had to pierce the pig’s thick skull to stun it. The shot’s angle and position are everything. If you drew an X from each ear to the opposite eye, I was aiming for the small depression that lay in the middle.

Even at point-blank, getting in position to shoot a pig is a dance with an unwilling partner. I had the added trouble of working up the nerve to pull the trigger. You have to shoot the pig with it looking you in the eye.

Each time the pig looked at me, every time I had a shot, I was slow to act and the pig would move away.

“I know, I know,” I said, answering the pig’s imagined protests. “This is going to be hard on both of us.”

Admittedly, it would be harder on him.

I clicked my tongue to entice the pig to turn his gaze toward me. He obliged. I aimed. Deep breath. Safety off. I pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

Doug took the gun and ejected the misfired round and handed rifle back.

“Safety’s on.”

Again the dance. The pig turned around in his pen. I clicked my tongue. Doug reached in to push the pig back around to face me. He squealed in protest. Doug sprayed water on the ground and the pig turned, put his head down and drank. Aim, Safety off, trigger.

Nothing.

Doug took the gun. I laughed. Doug cleared the misfire then opened the backdoor, aimed toward an open snow-covered farm field and fired. He closed the door and handed the gun back.

“Safety’s on.”

The pig didn’t seem distressed by any of this. He just stood there. He looked at me. Aim, safety off, trigger.

Pop.

The pig’s face went brain-dead blank and he fell to the ground. Doug reached in and cut its throat. The pig thrashed, kicking the wall and gushing crimson. Its movements eventually slowed and its life was over.

Knowing that I would, well, butcher the butchering, I had Doug skin, eviscerate and split the pig.

I was disappointed that I didn’t feel a profound sadness or emptiness. But that disappointment was overwhelmed by a feeling of pride and accomplishment. The killing was an act necessary for the eating of meat but a part that I usually give little thought to while I am eating.

Maybe I’m a heartless asshole for not feeling sadness. But this pig was destined to die so someone could eat him from the day he was born. By participating in his death and dismemberment, I rather think I’m just not in denial.

At least that’s what Heath Putnam says on his blog. And he has a point: their is no direct correlation between quality and size or proximity. But to listen to the food writers, it’s nearly quantifiable.

There are many reasons to seek out local products: support the local economy, perhaps environmentally better, for example. But to just say local or small is automatically better is wrong.

And the bias denies us of great food. I love Michael Ruhlman’s contention (I believe it was in The Reach of a Chef) that FedEx has done more than any single company to change the way we eat; an Iowan can have fresh black truffles shipped overnight.

Finding a local specialty is always a special treat, no matter where it is. But there is no way that I’ll say, for example, Maytag makes the best blue just because it’s produced ninety minutes away.

Herrick Kimball will gladly show you how in just ten steps. The formatting is a odd because he uses a blog to do it, but the information looks good. And you can do it with your kids for a fun family day!

Seriously, who wouldn’t trust the inventor of the “world-famous Whizbang Chicken Plucker?”

A surprising number of people do Google searches for “i love dead pigs.”

Not surprisingly, they end up here.

I wrote about the necessity of slow cookers in every Midwesterner’s kitchen. NPR’s Web site has an ode to the device (text only, no audio).

There’s something incredibly satisfying about coming home hungry on a snowy winter’s day and breathing in the savory scent of pork braised in wine — especially when it’s ready to eat when you walk in the door.That’s the beauty of the slow cooker.

Recipes, too.

Today’s post isn’t news; it’s exactly 60 years old this month. But because of the blog’s name, it gets a lot of hits from people looking for E.B. White’s essay “Death of a Pig,” the forerunner of his children’s book Charlotte’s Web. It is rightfully held up as a example of how a writer doesn’t have to use flowery language to convey personality.

The opening paragraph:

I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had sat up with a pig.

Anyway, I recently dug up a link to the full text for a class and offer it up — and implore you to read it. 60 years old and it’s still beautiful prose.

Two guys who left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina made life there unbearable, Scott Attias and Ben Halperin, have opened a restaurant called Augusta (after the street it’s on) in Oxford, Iowa. I have heard good things in the week and a half since it opened.

My friend Emily Grosvenor wrote a nice story about the latest piece — well, the only piece — of the Oxford dining scene. My impression is that it’s going for the same type of business and atmosphere as Mount Vernon’s Lincoln Café (locally focused food in a restaurant that they hope becomes “ a destination — but also be a place locals can come to for good food,” as Scott, a former co-worker of mine, told Emily) .

Good luck to them.

The sentiments expressed in today’s letters responding to last week’s piece on the importance some chefs place on animal slaughter aren’t surprising. (I had a similar discussion with a reader in the comments section.) The meat-eating debate often seems to be the gastronomic equivalent of the abortion debate: both sides so entrenched — and not even arguing over the same basic points — that there is no way to reach a middle ground.

Anti-meat-eating letter writer Kathryn Dalenberg is right: “Killing innocent life is killing is killing is killing.”

But so is pro-meat-eating Mary Hammett: “If you can not look a Mediterranean daurade in the eye, you have no right to eat it!”

The problem is that often we have a hard time understanding how someone can both respect an animal and kill (and eat) it. Doug Havel has been butchering for over two decades, beginning on disassembly line and now in his own small abattoir (and I’m glad that Heritage Food USA partner Sarah Obraitis points out that small slaughterers are the vital connection between family farms and consumers). The first pig he ever slaughtered his dad’s pet Fred: “Then he was Dead Fred.”

It is possible to respect animals and still kill and eat them. But yes, it is still killing. And killing is killing is killing, no matter how humanely or carefully or respectfully it is done.