Cometh the hour, cometh the pig

I flew back into London last night from being with Vera and Miriam. Tomorrow, my family will slaughter a pig on a day which is traditional for that sort of thing across the continent (the BBC have a nice if somewhat squeamish article on the subject on their site today, featuring an Italian family doing the same). The conditions for the pig's demise are probably in breach of some European Union regulation but I cannot help feeling that the enterprise, if bloody, is entirely laudable (unless you are a vegetarian). The pig is killed pretty swiftly and the meat divided up by various members of the family, who will engage in helping each other actively - making sausages, preparing hams for smoking, salting and preparing chops, bacon and all the other trimmings.

By contrast, I popped into a stark neon-lit supermarket this morning to grab pre-packed cuts of meat. The experience was clean but devoid of "warmth" - purposefully so I guess. However, I feel it merely creates ignorance or dis-honesty in those of us who enjoy meat. Having spent plenty of time with the family and having eaten food from the smallholding - including vegetables, fruit, nuts, I am certain that the natural method of preparation produces more wholesome, healthy and tasty meals and fosters greater respect for the natural world. The animals, pre-slaughter at least, enjoy a decent life and, when killed, are put to good use. There is nothing of "the machine" about their life, or death, and something supremely social and pure in their distribution and consumption. A family in touch with the land, aware of animal husbandry, to my eyes, is one which is likely to have well-rounded values - having created a full sense of the relationship we have with our food - cast in vivid colours, rather than wrapped in cellophane. It may sound "Walton-esque" (perhaps Miriam's arrival has turned me sentimental) but a life lived in such circumstances is one to be applauded.

Finally, off at a tangent, there was a film, released a few years ago, called the Hour of the Pig. It is set in a French villlage in the days leading up to the arrival of the Black Death. Marvellous film - if you have not seen it you would be well advised to try to track it down somewhere.