From pig to pork chop takes about six months, plus or minus. I will follow them the whole way, my mother’s “you should know where your food comes from” rattling around in my brain. They get rubbed and cured and smoked and fried and ground and, finally, often with a bit of sauce, eaten. A day after slaughter, they get loaded into a truck and driven to meat coolers in hundreds of restaurants along the I-5 corridor, from the Columbia River to Eugene. The barn is only one of many structures strung along a central concrete path that leads the pigs from farrow to finish, or from the nursery to the rusted blue Chevy that will drive them to slaughter. She doesn’t name them, but neither is she overly sentimental about their fate. The piglet she’s cuddling is only about a week old, and she pulled it from the dam herself, just like she pulled nearly all the piglets in this barn. I can see her toenail polish because she’s wearing flip-flops in the barn, which is brave and foolhardy, a bit like wearing open-toed shoes on a construction site: You never know what’s going to fall on your feet. She has dried blood on the cuticles of her left hand, and her toenail polish is chipping. She’s a pretty 54-year-old, who doesn’t mind what you call her so long as you don’t call her late to dinner. Petrene runs Sweet Briar Farms, the largest grower of natural pork in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. “Incense,” she says, ignoring the smear, sniffing along the spine. The piglet has a big, wet smear of something on its side. She smiles and coos and leans down to pick up a piglet from the farrowing pen. Petrene Moreland, my guide, seems to have a different reaction. The smell remains hours after I’ve left the farm. But inside the pig nursery, where 50 or so healthy, hot pigs chug along like diesel trucks struggling up a climb, the smell cloys and sticks in the nostrils and the throat. From a distance, the smell is sweet, not as grassy as in a cow pasture, not as tangy as near a horse barn. There is only one smell in a pig barn, and it’s not a good one. That pork chop started where all pork chops start: in the pig barn. Thirty years later, I’m still having the same old argument about a pork chop. I should wrap the gift in more than a paper bag.īut does should really apply to knowing where food comes from? My mother has mellowed over the years, but Michael Pollan and his celebrity chef posse have taken her place. I should hang up my clothes the instant I take them off. It’s the word my mother, and I assume all mothers, use to measure the real child against the child she wishes she had, and the word we use on ourselves for the same purpose. If you don’t eat it, you won’t get any dessert.” The bone is unyielding and hard under the tines of my fork-a hardness that, in an instant, conjures the image of a whole skeleton, then an animal walking, an animal eating, an animal living.Īnd that’s when my mother says it: “You should know where your food comes from, Tory. Some people order plates full of bones specifically to suck on the marrow-in America people do this, even-but I never will. There’s a black, chalky spot in the center, which-I know now but didn’t know then-is marrow. In my family, I’m known as a “picky eater.” For example, I eat only the very outside of the meat because the bone terrifies me. My mother is serving pork chops 1950s style-bone in, with a little bit of applesauce. The time I remember is when I’m about 8 years old. It happened once that I can remember specifically, but it probably happened many, many more times during the long years of my childhood, as it’s probably happening right now in kitchens around the country.
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