The New Yorker: Fact

"I deposited my pig on the breakfast table. I emptied out the refrigerator and washed down the counters. I sharpened a knife and reflected on the difficulty of a pig at home. I hadn’t wanted to upset my neighbor. I didn’t know him well but gathered (from the doorman) that he, too, was a meat-eater. My pig was a more elementary form of things he’d been eating for years. The realization confirmed something I’d always suspected: people don’t want to know what meat is. They don’t think of meat as an animal; they think of it as an element in a meal. (“What I want tonight is a cheeseburger!”)

For me, meat wasn’t a cause. I just believe people should know what they’re eating. At the Greenmarket, you overheard discussions about fertilizers and soils and how much freedom a chicken needs before its eggs are free-range. Wouldn’t it follow that you’d want to know your meat? I had brought home a freshly killed animal—better raised than anything I’d find at a store—and, in preparing it, I was hoping to rediscover old-fashioned ways of making food. This, I felt, could only be positive. But I was sure getting a lot of shit for it."

This pig, we knew precisely, had been slaughtered for our table, and we ended up feeling an affection for it that surprised us.