Spiritual Meat - Raising a Pig for Pork

Spiritual Meat - Raising a Pig for Pork

We have spent the week processing the meat from our first two pigs, which we raised under oak and apple trees from autumn when they were ten weeks old. It has transformed my relationship with meat and taught me so much about nature, energy, growing and food. And about spirituality.

We rose before dawn and loaded the pigs into the trailer that we’d cleaned carefully and filled with fresh hay. They came easily to us, used to being stroked and scratched and keen for breakfast. They settled down to eat and we drove off slowly along the winding lanes to the abattoir.

Nature had laid on a spring sunrise display, making me more keenly aware of the cycle of life and harvest, and its magnificence. A blushed-apricot sunrise in a turquoise sky, mist in the deep Devon valleys, and rich red fields curving up hills crested with wind-sculpted trees. Then pure sunshine.

At the abattoir, a small family business on a farm, we unloaded our pigs. They were relaxed and calm, lying in the hay in the trailer, happy to be stroked, touched and then guided into a pen, curious to meet other pigs. And they looked so good.

I gave each pig a last scratch and felt a momentary pang of emotion. It really hit me that they were going to die to feed us. Yet what struck me most strongly was a sense of reverence and compassion, and thankfulness to them for giving up their lives and spirits. I can really now understand how ritual and myth and shamanism grew out of the death of an animal in order to feed humans. There’s a transference of feelings to the animal and back again – how would it be for me to be in their place - that really made me honour them.

I’m not sentimental and had been proud that I had cared for them, fed and watched them with interested concern, yet had maintained what I thought was a healthy detachment. I knew they were being raised for meat. We even called them Bacon and Butty to keep us focussed on their fate. Yet at the moment when we left them I felt grateful to them.

I was so proud of our pigs, of their health and size, of their ease around people, of their lack of distress. We had made sure they used to being touched and scratched so that they wouldn’t be distressed by it at the end of their lives. I felt that we had respected the animals’ welfare in life and in death.

A few days later when we collected the meat, which we’d had cut and packaged, it came out on a large trolley, stacked high. One pig produced 74 kilos of meat, the other 76 kilos. We had asked for the heads, trotters and offal too and on top of the pile of packaged meat were two heads in plastic. We had some minutes, whilst our bill was settled, to come to terms with our meat. With the end result.

At home, we marvelled at the pure white fat on the meat and its texture. The butcher had said that they were fine pigs, well-conditioned and not too fat, like many animals he saw. We had smiled and thought of them running round the orchard, chasing the hens and playing ball with the dog. Rolling in the mud around the spring. Yes, very well-conditioned.

That night we had some couch-surfers staying and we’d been discussing sustainability and meat production. One had questioned our motives in raising our own pork and had been convinced about our desire to eat responsibly and be more connected to the food we eat. I was protective of the meat, concerned that it should feed people who appreciated the lives of the pigs and who understood our choice and effort, and were not just talking theory.

And so we shared our meat and food.

Before eating, my friend and I paused for a long time to acknowledge what we were about to receive, and spontaneously spoke our thanks for the pigs’ lives, for the apples, rain and sun, acorns and hazelnuts, grass and pumpkins that had made it the meat it was. It felt very spiritual and moving, and we hugged each other before we turned to eat, which we did slowly and with gratitude and reverence.

I can see why food and eating are at the heart of so many religions and rituals – it really does go back to older, even tribal, times when food was hunted or farmed to feed the family, and the animal became part of the family and their life cycle.

There is a sense of sacrifice, of one animal giving its life so that we may live, which invokes reverence. It connects us to our roots in nature, to the energy of life and land, to the circle of life and death, growing and harvest. To our choices about how we live our lives and what responsibility we take for life around us. To our family, friends and community. And to the animal itself.

And it links me to my grandmother and great-grandmother who raised a pig every year in the sty at the bottom of the garden of their terraced house in Scunthorpe. As I have raised my own pig, I understand more of their lives and why killing the pig to feed family and friends was such a celebration when food, and meat in particular, was not so easy to come by.

Raising and killing a pig brings me to a new and different relationship with the food I eat and choose. It is now hard to think about buying fast-farmed, industrialised meat produced from animals that have been brutalised by intensive farming. Animals that have never experienced sunshine, run on grass under trees, rolled in mud and played. It goes against nature to deprive them of what makes them thrive.

So I shall certainly raise a pig for meat again. I am accountable for my meat in a way that I hadn’t anticipated when I started. I know where, how and why my meat grew, on what land and with what care. I have seen the joy of happy pigs with a curly tails running in the sunshine on the grass. And, through its life and death, it has taught me so much more about nature, energy, growing food, and spirituality.