An animal is born, lives its days and is slaughtered, completely for our nourishment.
This is a sea change from picking up that flat Styrofoam tray in the supermarket: the small piece of meat lying on the foam pad, covered with plastic food film, a sticker affixed. That meat has no context. There is no animal there, no life. That small sticker may have a cartoonish reference to a farm that exists in our collective consciousness, but it doesn't refer to an animal itself of to the farm where that animal was raised.
My greatest education over the past two decades is just that: meat comes from animals; not from the abstraction of animals, but rather from actual animals. I do not mean to imply that having a hamburger off the grill in the heat of a summer day should be morose, tearful or sentimental. Rather that it should be enjoyed, savored and respected.
Kurt Timmermeister - Growing a Farmer, 2011
