Explaining to Your Children Where Meat Comes From

The other day, Ruby asked me what meat was.  This was a fair question, as we were eating it at the time, and I explained to her that meat comes from animals, just like vegetables come from plants, and that life must consume other life in order to survive.  Plants consume nutrients from the soil that come from dead plants and animals, and animals either eat plants or animals or both for their food.  I thought that it might have freaked her out, knowing that she was eating a cow or a chicken, but she was surprisingly fine with it.

On the one hand, I couldn’t help but wonder how she hadn’t made the connection in the first place.  She knows what a chicken is.  Old MacDonald has scores of them on his farm, with a cluck cluck here and there and everywhere.  And she knows that what she gets from old McDonald’s is chicken as well, albeit in McNugget form.  Had it never occurred to her before that these might be the same thing?  But then, when you think about it, we have a lot of words with more than one meaning in our language.  She knows that we can park the car, as well as take a walk in the park, and that we can ride a horse or have a hoarse throat, so maybe it is plausible that we could eat a chicken and see a chicken at the farm and have those be two different things.

Regardless of whether or not it should have been obvious, the fact that we were eating animals was news to her, and not horrible news either.  She asked what kind of animal bacon was, and I told her it was from a pig.  “Eating pigs is my favorite,” she replied matter-of-factly.

The most disturbing thing for me was when she sat me down to play restaurant.  Ruby loves her kitchen set, as you might imagine from watching her cooking show, and she loves to have me sit down and order from her restaurant.  Normally, she brings out a blank piece of paper, or a book, and has me order from the “menu,” but the other day, after discovering what meat really is, she brought me over her farm book and opened up to a page full of cute cartoon farm animals staring back at me.

“Ok, now you point to which animal you want to eat,” she said firmly.  I gazed down at the happy creatures and reluctantly pointed to the anthropomorphized chicken.  “Ok, chicken?” she asked, pretending to write it down.  “And, do you want any bacon?”  I nodded.  “That’s him,” she said, jabbing her finger down onto a very friendly looking pig.  “Now, do we eat sheep?” she asked, pointing at some sheep dancing around in their pasture.  I told her that we do, and we call it lamb.  “Ok, some lambs too, how about some cow?”

One by one, we went through her book of jolly farm friends, and ate them.  I guess I was very convincing in my whole “circle of life” speech.  Now I just have to re-convince myself.