Saturday, July 04, 2009

Children getting the work done

In the June/July 2009 edition of Mother Earth News was a photo of the process of slaughtering your own chickens, should you decide to keep some of your own in your backyard or on your farm. I was surprised by the photo, just because I so rarely see children doing such gritty work these days. Here's the photo:


It reminded me of a photo from Jamie Oliver's book of recipes associated with his travels around Italy -- "Jamie's Italy". In the excellent TV series that accompanied this theme (which was more culture than cooking), he went quite hands-on with the meat, including an occasion when he quite uncomfortably slaughtered his own sheep. But the book contains the image below, where they are draining what looks like a pig using what looks like the young Italian girls' paddling pool:

4 comments:

Ro @ Eat Live Move said...

Wow, this is disturbing...that's one reason to become vegetarian.

mattbg said...

But these are cultures with a long and successful history. More than a reason to become a vegetarian, I'd say it goes to show that those kids who say that they want to become a vegetarian because they couldn't hurt an animal have really just never been immersed in a culture that would let them try -- there ARE plenty of kids that would kill an animal in order to eat it, and not all meat-eaters are hypocritical or inconsistent.

If we didn't have abbatoirs and butchers to do this job for us, we'd either have to stop eating meat or we'd have to do it ourselves. Most cultures seem to decide to do it themselves.

Rob said...

I am with you Matt - we kill animals to eat them - meat is not a shrink wrapped object but is a real animal that had a life and was killed.

The ethical issue is surely - what kind of life? How were they killed.

Most of us don't care about either - that is the cruelty

icare said...

I am a vegetarian and advocate for animal/environmental protection. All I can say about this WTF?? What is wrong with these kids?? How shameful that kids can feel fine with killing animals. What happened to their hearts?? Where is their compassion?? I just don't get it!!