Pigging Out

So, I have pigs...

A week and a half ago, I drove up into the eastern hills of the Green Mountains, to the little town of Chelsea, Vermont, and came back with four wee piglets, Tamworth piglets to be precise. They had just been weened, and were perhaps six or seven weeks old at the time; still small enough to comfortably fit two to the dog crate. The little buggers squealed bloody murder for the first hour of travel, but as we drove south, homeward, they quieted, and all five of us settled into the warm funky stink of barnyard animal.

The first home for the four piggies was the fenced in garden plot at the farm, a small square overgrown with the withering remnants of this past summer's growth. After a little timidity, the pigs loved it. There are two males, one castrated, and two females, including the runt, who was simply too cute for me to leave lingering alone back in Vermont. After five days or so, the garden began to seem a tad small and well rooted-up, and so we fenced in a segment of pasture out behind the barn with wire and electric tape. Few things in this world are as sadistically comical as seeing a pig hit the electric fence...

But they learned. Now a week later, they've made the new paddock their own. The pile of horse manure we fenced them in with has been torn up, turned over, and lounged in thoroughly (happy as a pig in shit has taken on an all-new veracity). The little porkers, who are growing with nearly alarming speed, love to root up the grass, digging with their spade-like snouts for who-knows-what in the rich brown earth. They scratch themselves upon a log we provided, bury themselves in the hay of their shelter, and they come running when I ring their dinner bell. All in all, they seem like happy little piggies.

Which is the point of this whole enterprise. Anyone can go to the supermarket and buy a nice pork roast for a fraction of the cost and effort that I'm devoting to my pigs. But that's bad meat. Not bad for you, per se (though salmonella is rife in factory farmed meat), but bad in a way that I almost want to call spiritually. Pigs are smart animals, emotionally complete and social, and though the manner of industrial pig farming is a topic for another day this week, just know now that it's shameful and heartrending. There is nothing joyful about a Stop 'n Shop pork-chop.

But pork is delicious, and I honestly believe that eating meat can be reconcilabe with a firm set of ethics. I want my pigs to have a happy life. They are bound one day for the butcher's block, but in a manner of speaking so aren't we all; every beast's time comes due at some point, you and me included. But how much joy can be wrung from what life there is?

Watching my four new pigs gorge on pumpkin, nap in the warmth of the manure pile, and run around their grassy pen, I'd like to think quite a bit.

A Tale of Two Corns

Today, I saw something that made my blood run a little cold: coming down Rt 6 from Watertown towards Bethlehem, passing a farm I pass almost every day, I noticed a field of corn bordered by a row of white and red signs. I recognized the signs from a distance, and my jaw clenched a bit. I'd seen plenty of the signs, or those like them, before, during the brief time I lived in Iowa. Out there, in the green desert, many fields sprout such warning signs, as unsettling as those demarcating a land-mine zone. As I drove closer, the signs revealed themselves, plastic placards on stakes, red and white, simple. Each one bore the name ConAgra. Hybrid, GMO, copyrighted corn had come to my little corner of Connecticut.

ConAgra, like its bigger brother Monsanto, is one of the chief faces of evil in the realm of industrial agriculture. As well as dabbling in confinement livestock factory farming, ConAgra makes its name building frankenfoods. Now, for what it's worth, I'm not as opposed to genetically modified crops as you might think (I'll devote time soon as to just why), and unsettling as the whole idea may be, what truly upsets me is the industry's tendency to treat their corn as intellectual property.

Farmers planting ConAgra hybrids must register with the corporation, risking legal action if they should try to plant a second year's crop with their own seed corn instead of re-upping from the parent company itself. Worse, should TM corn be found growing in a neighboring farmer's field, even if it hybridizes accidentally or is spread by mistake, that farmer can be sued for illegally possessing the equivalent of stolen corn. In return for high yields and straight rows, farmers forsake their freedom, and the industry reaps the profits.

I always considered Iowa a lost cause; the farmers there seemed just too far indebted to the system, and too weak-willed, to ever get out from under the corporate thumb. But to see the mark of ConAgra greed and a grower's ignorance so close to home was unsettling. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

There was, however, a nice counterpoint to that ConAgra corn field, just a little further down the road. Another sign, though this one a little more welcoming: a giant plywood ear of corn, green and yellow, advertising native sweet corn at Logue's Farm (credit where credit's due, Logue's has the best butter and sugar corn this season, beating Towne's farm hands down). Sweet corn season is one of the most pleasant in northwest CT, late summer when the weather swelters and then cools, and the green of the landscape seems to deepen in its final moments. And the sweet corn itself embodies what's best in local, seasonal eating. As delicious as it is, it comes and goes in a matter of months; you eat all you can and then hope the taste lingers till the following year.

Within half a mile, I saw two very different ends of the agricultural spectrum. One corn crop was good for nothing but high-fructose syrup or cattle feed, an industrial engineered shackle around a farmer's leg. The other, sweet, crisp, fleeting, stood in my mind for a lot of what is right with the local food movement. I know which end of the spectrum I prefer. I drove home, with the giant wooden ear receding in my rear-view mirror. It looked good enough to eat.