Old MacDonald had a...menu...

As I stood in my kitchen tonight, picking the pinbones out of my dinner, (a center-cut piece of wild salmon - B has convinced me to eat only wild salmon after a conversation he had with an impressionable client - his take was that there are horrible dietary ramifications for consuming farm-cultivated spawn), I thought about at what point do you charge your child with the association between fuzzy and cute, and delicious and seared?

I almost called CR into the kitchen to start such conversation while I freed my meal from it's natural choking hazard, but then paused.

I grew up on a recreational (read: edible) farm. My first real association between what I pet with my hand, and what I put in my mouth, sent me into eight vegetarian years.

The brief: Nancy the ewe had triplets - she came down with a nasty case of mastitis (again, read: horrible, horrible, unimaginable as a former lactating female), and as a result, we bottle-fed her lambs...

Every day "Sweet Thing," my favorite little surrogate, would run at me when I arrived home from school, often with so much excitement that she would lunge herself through the squared-off fencing that separated her from our extended side lawn. I took it as a sign of love, when in reality, it was more her excitement to become one with the ghetto bottle that my father rigged up for her - a Forty, complete with a rubber nipple that was poorly attached to the oversized beer bottle...

At any rate, I loved my "pets," I loved raising them, but that ideal shifted when one day I came home from school, and asked my father "where's Sweet Thing?" - my father, thinking he was being funny, said "Check the freezer..."....so, there you have it. I knew about the kill...I witnessed the execution of countless turkeys, etc., but never a fluffy little thing I looked at as a pet...

So, I will refrain. As much as I know I want my kids to know where their food comes from...I hope to join a co-op for natural animal and vegetable supplies to bring our intake closer to home and healthy for our family...but tonight was not the night to make the connection....let CR have a little more time to crave the meatballs on his plate, and enjoy petting a cow at a visiting farm for just enjoyment alone...