“I think that industrial livestock processing is, like all technology, a kind of magic. Peasant meatsmiths, on the other hand, worked miracles, not sleight of hand. Rather than turn pigs into pork at an astonishing rate and in unfathomable quantity, they multiplied fishes and loaves and this feeds more people with less and more deeply.” — Brandon Sheard, the Farmstead Meatsmith, putting into words a thought I’ve had banging around my head for some time. The Bible speaks of magic and sorcery as a kind of counterfeit miracle: the appearance of something arriving ex nihilo that disguises a considerable material and spiritual cost. Modern industrialism, agricultural and otherwise, is a kind of sorcery. But miracles take that same material and spiritual burden and make something new and good out of that raw material. That butchering your own pig fits that definition of miraculous will take more defending than I have time for here, but I will say that when I butchered my hog last October, we took up twelve large baskets full of fragments and scarcely had the space to store it all. March 19, 2013