This Little Piggy

Once Upon a Time...

My grandfather owned a farm where he raised mostly potatoes, but also pigs, cows, and occasionally chickens and lambs.

I spent many a summer afternoon running around hay bails and hearing tales of neighborhood children being crushed by potato machinery. Salt of the earth, I was, and my grandmother picked rhubarb from her vegetable plot and fed it to my small, muffin-sized self. I believe my grandfather ate mustard on his cream of wheat, or something equally outlandish and rustic. They were good, wholesome times, in that Southern Ontarian farmhouse in the god-awful middle of nowhere.

My younger aunt grew up in that house, a decade before my childhood began.

To win her affection, my grandfather (her new stepfather) gave her a piglet to keep as a pet. The piglet was the runt of the litter, a tiny waif of a pig who would otherwise perish, and my aunt took him into her loving teenage arms. She adored her pet pig, who was intelligent and clean, just as pigs are rumored to be. My grandmother trained him to use a litter box. He was the perfect house pig.

But eventually, over time, all of that love and attention began to fatten up our tiny, piggy friend. Like a good little pig, he began to grow. One fine winter day, he could no longer fit in the house. He could no longer nuzzle my aunt to sleep at night with his adoring, piggy snout, for he did not fit in the bed. The family met to discuss what to do with their beloved porcine pet.

It was agreed, unanimously - the piggy had to go to market. All that love would result in especially succulent flesh. My aunt agreed to pocket the cash from the sale, to help her with her grief.

And that, boys and girls, is the story of how the Little Piggy became the Little Pork Chop, who lived happily ever after in our bellies.

The End

Sowing the Seeds of Hypocrisy

I try, I really do, to live a Good Life.

I haven’t killed any babies or puppy dogs. I haven’t smote anyone, lately. I speak out against the various atrocities committed in the past, and I vow to do better in my own time. I try to lead an ethically sound life. But sometimes, it’s hard.

Take food, for example.

First, I lost meat, because I like happy, frolicking animals, and I like the Earth, and I don’t know if my life is worth much more than that of your average chicken. Then, I lost dairy (I still cheat if it’s delicious) - because milk doesn’t exist without veal, and scared little veal calves on atrophied legs being hauled out to auction make me cry myself to sleep. Then there was the loss of Nestle Products, which meant no Turtles, or Stoufer’s, or Haagen Daz (now doubly banned). Why did you have to kill all those African babies, Nestle? Your products were delicious. It’s all so unfair.

I eyed bananas suspiciously, waiting for them to declare themselves inedible, wanting to pretend that I didn’t already know about cash crops and gunned down plantation workers. I was losing weight, and bananas were affordable. I needed a better solution.

Thus, I began to grow a vegetable garden.

I cleared the earth myself, ripping back the grass, picking out the grubs, swearing vehemently at the dandelions and their insidious, spindly roots. I learned that vinegar will kill dandelion roots, but only if applied on a warm, dry day. I set traps for slugs, and going back to weed, found myself chanting: worms, you may live, slugs, you must die, and vegetation, you must grow in an orderly, single file of monoculture… Oh dear.

I seem to have become everything that I hate.

I kill the species that I do not like: grubs I throw out into the sunshine to shrivel, while slugs I lure to an early alcoholic grave. Encroaching vegetation must be stopped via mechanical or chemical means, and I rip out indigenous, symbiotic plant systems without a second thought. I inflict my will upon this patch of earth and call it my own and make it bend to my will.

Ladybugs may live. Aphids must die. Spinach may grow in neat rows, and will be killed if it deviates too far into my carrots. I am a cruel and heartless dictator, my colony an authoritarian state, my tiny garden plot a miniature of all the world being colonized and subjugated.

I am a monster. I am a tempestuous deity, killing things I don’t like, molding the Earth according to my wrathful whims. I stab at a dandelion root with a spade, whispering ‘die!’, feeling like I’m fighting a holy war. The dandelion clearly has Darwin on its side - it’s only fair that I have God on mine.

So I fight against the slugs with a rally cry lifted from the Old Testament. It’s genocide on a miniature scale, and because I have to eat, it seems to be the only solution.

My garden has turned me into everything I fear and despise; those vegetables had better be delicious.