I love pork. I love pigs. The pig is a smart animal, very smart in fact, and they get a bad rap because they are stinky. So stinky, that some religions see pork as a filthy meat and unfit to eat.

I am an animal lover. Johnny too. When we have to sell our lambs in the early fall, we both cry. We believe that we are probably not the best farmers in terms of raising animals for slaughter, which, killing an animal for meat is a major way you make your return on investment.

I have tried being vegan, I’ve tried being vegetarian but I think innately, I need pork in my life. That and fish. So, since I have returned to the farm, my mind has been on raising pigs. In a natural way. The way it was before the days of mass production and mass consumption. If you ever get an opportunity to taste organic pork, try it next to some conventionally raised pork. You will not believe that you are tasting the same animal species. There is a wholeness and pureness about organic pork and it is in the flavor.

I grew up with pigs. My dad had me give them shots, help sort them, transfer them from one building to the next, and help move them onto trucks headed to Hormel and the like. My parents started their farming careers by raising pigs. They were also one of the first farmers in the area to build confinement units for their pigs. They in part survived the farm crisis in the 1980’s because of their hog business, and they owe much of their farming success to pigs. Confinement buildings have a bad reputation among animal rights people, but the buildings do provide a stable, temperature controlled environment for the pigs to maximize their growth potential, and they are efficient for farmer and pig. I don’t disagree with this type of livestock farming. It has its place in our society to meet the demand of the American consumer at Wal-Mart, but it is not a style that I personally want to practice.

So, I have been researching organic livestock production and I am currently taking an organic Ag course through Iowa State University and am a mentee of the Frantzen Farm, who raise organic pigs. I feel very confident in my animal husbandry skills, it is the departure and slaughter of the pig I am concerned about.

I just read this article, reported on NPR news, about a former vegan who wanted to better connect with food. So he started to travel around seeking a better understanding of butchering animals for meat. His article contains the same feelings and issues I have about pork and pigs, and after reading the article, made me understand a little more about my innate love of pigs…and pork, and helps me with my slaughter issues.

How One Former Vegan Learned to Embrace Butchering
by Kristofor Husted
January 21, 2012.

The farm-to-table philosophy has been mostly about knowing where food was grown. For meat, that meant knowing if your chickens were caged and if your beef was grass fed.

But with the revival of the butcher shop, some young people are undertaking the largely lost art of butchering as a stronger way to connect with their food.

For 24-year-old Andrew Plotsky of Washington, D.C., that meant leaving his job as a barista in a snobby coffee shop to learn the process of raising an animal, slaughtering it and butchering it for a meal.

“I had a romantic idea of the way I thought animals should and could be processed,” he tells The Salt. He says he was attracted to the small scale tradition of a whole community having its hands involved in the raising of animals for food. “I wanted to be a part of that process,” he says. “Somehow, that manifested in pig slaughter.”

Long gone is the idea that only chefs care about the provenance of the meat they cook. Now, the notion of knowing a piece of meat’s history seems to be trickling into the mainstream. Who raised it? Who killed it? How did it die? Who butchered it? It was questions like these that led Plotsky across the country.

The former vegan went to Vashon Island., Wa. to learn the butcher trade from Brandon and Lauren Sheard. His goal was to document the process for about a week and half. He ended up staying for two years.

“I had been preparing myself intellectually for years,” he says. “The immediacy of taking life was difficult at first. It’s still something I’m figuring out how to rationalize.”

Pigs are first shot with a rifle to stun them. Then their throats are cut to let them bleed out. “The moment of silence before the shot is taken was difficult,” Plotsky says. “It came out of fear that the pig would suffer.”

By killing the animal himself, Plotsky says he strengthens his bond to that animal, as well as the food it provides, the ground it lived on, and the family and friends he shares the meal with.

Though killing the animal weighs heavy on Plotsky’s heart, carving the precise cuts from the pig weighs heavy because of its physical size. He has to wrestle the carcass and take awkward positions to make sure he gets exact cuts. “There’s a steep learning curve,” he says.

As a pork butcher, Plotsky typically uses a bone saw, a cleaver, a boning knife and another sharp knife to “break down” a pig. Each side of the pig will get cut into quarters: the shoulder, the leg, the loin and the belly. Using geographical markers, such as the sternum and vertebrae, butchers locate exactly where to slice first. For the leg quarter, it’s one vertebra up from the curve near the bottom of the spine.

Two years later, the butcher and filmmaker is still working at the farm and documenting the process with the Sheards for others to see. He says he finds the work enriching because he’s present for the whole process — something he hopes more consumers can connect with through his agrarian videos.

It seems to be working, too. “I see the ‘hipification’ of butchery in urban areas like Brooklyn and San Francisco,” he says. “It’s a good thing.”

His favorite cut of a pig? The trotter, or the foot. “If you have a trotter on a plate, you should feel blessed and not say ‘Ew,'” he says. “They’re kind of everything a chicken wing dreams of being.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Another example of a person overcoming animal slaughter issues is
Nicolette Niman, an environmental lawyer and wife of former owner of Niman Ranch, Bob Niman, who wrote a piece for the Huffington Post back in 2009. She was a vegetarian, but she believed that people will always want to eat meat. So instead of fighting a somewhat losing battle of getting the world to stop eating meat, she would help and support the producers who produce naturally raised animals. She ended up marrying a Californian farmer and rancher who has a made a successful business of raising natural, hormone-free, non-confined animals for consumption on a national scale.

As consumers, we have the opportunity to navigate through the choices our supermarkets provide for us. Having options and the freedom to choose what we eat is what makes America so great. There is a place and a style for every kind of eater. AND, there is a place and style for every kind if producer. These are yet more reasons why the U.S is such a great place to live. Freedom, the right to choose, and options, options, options!