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Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene

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Jo-Anne McArthur

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“The sheer mystery and majesty of heritage wisdom, contained in each cell, each mitochondria, instills in the farmer who respects and honors the pigness of the pig a daily emotional high. The satisfaction of being nature's nurturer always trumps the short-lived adrenaline high of being nature's conqueror. Such an attitude offers spiritual ascendance over physical domination, which never really happens anyway. And that's why the industrial farmer, for all the smoke and noise and horsepower, never feels in control, but always dreads being drowned by the nature he thinks he's controlling.”

Organic FarmingIndustrial Farming
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“I challenge you to go to any industrial farm. You'll see anti-microbial shoe dips, shower in shower out, plastic suits. Whenever we get scientists visiting our farm, they invariably remark about how seemingly nonchalant we are about bio-security. The industry is paranoid about bio-security because their animals and plants are fragile. If our farm plants and animals had as dysfunctional an immune system as that found in industrial facilities, I'd be paranoid, too.”

Organic FarmingIndustrial Farming
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“An ecological farmer once told me that he quit industrial farming when he realized that his first waking thought every morning was: 'I wonder what's dead up there in the hog house today?' He couldn't hear the birds chirping. He couldn't enjoy the sunrise, or the rainbow after a thunderstorm. And his kids wanted nothing to do with the farm. But after this epiphany, he closed down the pig concentration camp and devoted himself to pasture-based farming. Suddenly his children wanted to be involved. His thoughts turned lofty. He developed a can-do spirit. And his emotional zest returned.”

Organic FarmingIndustrial Farming
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“Sirine puts a forkful of sweet potatoes into her mouth. The potatoes are soft as velvet, the gravy satiny. It is as if she can taste the life inside all those ingredients: the stem that the cranberries grew on, the earth inside the bread, even the warm blood inside the turkey. It comes back to her, the small secret that was always hers, for years, the only truth she seemed to possess- that food was better than love: surer, truer, more satisfying and enriching. As long as she could lose herself in the rhythms of peeling an onion, she was complete and whole. And as long as she could cook, she would be loved.”

BelovedTastesFood Sensor
Book:Crescent
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“Does it work with sandwiches? he asked. I didn't move. He handed it over. George was watching with a kind of neutral curiosity, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, so I just unwrapped it and took a bite. It was a homemade ham-and-cheese-and-mustard sandwich, on white bread, with a thin piece of lettuce in the middle. Not bad, in the food part. Good ham, flat mustard from a functional factory. Ordinary bread. Tired lettuce-pickers. But in the sandwich as a whole, I tasted a kind of yelling, almost. Like the sandwich itself was yelling at me, yelling love me, love me, really loud.”

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Book:The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
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