It is indefensibly trite to reiterate the fact that having children forces you to look at the world through a new set of eyes. The blogosphere is cluttered with the saccharine enthusiasm of parents who would have you believe that they just noticed for the first time that the sky is blue, or that milk will come out of your nose if you laugh hard enough while drinking it. Enough already. We know how precious and transparently observant your offspring are, so spare us the soliloquy. Call me a heartless cynic, but after eight years of parenting remarkably precocious and observant little boys I have come to realize that my children are in essence no more likely to inspire epiphany than anybody else's.
This being said, even I get zinged once in a while.
Yesterday my four-year-old and I were riding home in the truck after a visit to the cake decorating shop, where we had chosen tiny plastic trees and a little plastic skier and sugar granules that looked like tiny granite pebbles. We were riding and talking and listening to music as we always do (he is a sucker these days for that "Swing of your Hips" song by Matt Nathanson) when out of nowhere he asked:
"Papa, do bacon and sausage come from pigs"?
"Yes buddy, they do", I answered, in keeping with our policy of absolute honesty except when it becomes inconvenient.
"And do they have to kill the pig to get the bacon and sausage"?
"Yup. They sure do". This was verging on dangerous territory.
"Papa, how do they kill the pig"? Oh shit. This was a new one. Time to be very, very careful and not embark on a diatribe about feedlots and waste lagoons and the death of Rural America.
"Well sweetie, the pig lives a very long and happy life and eats lots of yummy food and then when it gets old they shoot it in the head with a gun and it dies right away without feeling any pain". At this point I could feel the cartilage of my nose pressing against the skin as I mentally figured how many years I have before he reads The Jungle. Long pause from the passenger seat as we rounded the corner onto our street.
"Papa, if no pigs died, would there be no bacon and sausage?"
Here we go. Break out the ToFurkey and Field Roast and cue the theme from Charlotte's Web. I could already envision our family mealtimes spiraling into an abyss of separate meals, impassioned defense of animal rights, and all the other theatricals that come packaged with an incipient preschool vegetarian. I have seen this movie played out in other households and believe me it is not pretty.
"You're right, buddy. There wouldn't be any bacon and sausage".
Another looong pause as I parked the truck, killed the engine, and unbuckled his car seat.
"Papa, I LIKE bacon and sausage"!
Halleluiah!
I am all in favor of my children knowing where their food comes from, and owing to my line of work I think that they have a better sense of it than most of their contemporaries. They have seen me come home from work in blood-spattered whites after a long day of butchering, and they have seen me carry a brace of freshly killed mallards in from the truck when my buddies are in the thick of waterfowl season. They have heard the tattoo of lobsters beating their staccato death throes against the side of a four-gallon stockpot. My older boy has caught hatchery trout on a spinning rod and watched impassively as I scaled, gutted, and grilled his prize, which he then pronounced to be "tasty". Last spring he asked me if we could go hunting when we went back to Maine that summer, and I had to explain that deer season didn't start until November.
The tricky part is deciding when to let them in on the rest of the picture.
I can remember all too well discovering at age twelve or thereabouts exactly how it was that veal remained so lusciously tender, which led to a knockdown family dinner fiasco at a fancy Italian joint in Westchester. I railed against the lot of the factory hen, wept for the piglets that were snatched from their brood-sow mother, exploded in outrage when the conditions that so readily incubated Kreutzfeld-Jacobs were exposed to the public. I also marched in protest against the abuse of animals in cosmetics testing and outright cried when I first learned about the use of chimps in medical research. And yet I never even flirted with vegetarianism. Meat, it turned out, is just too damn tasty.
Like so many of us, I am caught between the legitimate desire to eat only free-range, hormone-free meats and dairy products and the inability (or unwillingness) to pay the price. I am a hypocrite of the highest order. When spending somebody else's money buying product for a working kitchen, I will readily kick down thirty-five bucks a pound for farmstead cheese and five dollars plus for organic "heritage" chicken, but Sunday morning at the Safeway I struggle with the extra ten cents a piece for cage-free eggs. Could my wife and I give up our drive-through espresso habit and direct the savings towards feeding our children more wholesome food? Absolutely. Do we choose to? Sadly, no. Does this make us bad people?
Maybe it does. And maybe, before too long, I will have to explain to my sons why it is that we sometimes have to make difficult and contradictory decisions that pit resource allocation against moral imperative. Xbox or grass-fed beef, kids? You make the call.
All I know is that I LIKE bacon and sausage.
