My family and I reside on a non-working farm, although we have a couple of horses and the usual stuff like pigs, cows, and chickens. We really don't have an honest-to-goodness farm, more of a hobby farm.
I adore pigs, and I love eating them and cooking them, and I love using the whole animal.
All chefs have pictures of food in their phones, stuffed pig's ears and pigs' heads and the like.
The greatest job I ever had was working on my family farm. Each morning my father would come into my bedroom around 4:30 am and command me to get up and work the fields. I would spend the next two hours before school slopping pigs and cropping tobacco.
I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.
When I started researching the eco effects of eating meat, I'd assumed, for no good reason, that environmental irresponsibility would correspond to both animal size and deliciousness: Eating cows would be worst, eating pigs would be a bit less bad, and eating chickens would be basically harmless.
Thanks to capitalism, the importance placed on beauty has never been so manipulated. We are the guinea pigs force-fed ads that tell us how pathetic we are: that we will never be loved, happy or valuable unless we have the body, the face, the hair, even the personality that will apparently be ours, if only we buy their products.
Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct.
Our family always rescued animals from local shelters or from the street or from someone who didn't want their animal. We always had a dog in our house. We usually had two cats. We had guinea pigs and little chicks and chickens.
There are a lot of women who live with pot-bellied pigs.
