This Little Piggy

Recently, I guest posted on my stepsister's blog about the important role adults have in educating children about their food - where it comes from, what it looks like, and how it's made.

It was at that point that I realized I was being a bit...hypocritical.  You see, I have access to twenty little minds every day of the school year; little minds just waiting to be filled - and I was doing little to educate them about their food.

So I took a trip to the library.  I found the nonfiction food section.  And I raided it.  That bookshelf looked like the final days of Borders by the time I was finished with it.

Source

Every day for the last three weeks, I've read a book to my five-year-old students about food.  We've learned how wheat becomes pasta, how a cacao bean becomes chocolate, and - you bet - how Babe becomes bacon.

Out of the five farm animal books I've read to them (from the Heinemann First Library series), only the book about pigs mentioned "organic" or "natural" farming of animals.  The authors simplified the idea of "organic" and explained that organically-raised pigs are allowed to walk around outside and are only given real food to eat.

You can imagine the sorts of questions I received after reading this book to my five-year-olds.  And I'll admit, I used this as a bit of a soapbox moment.

Though I love a good steak, a crispy slice of bacon, and a juicy breast of chicken, I also am a true believer in animal rights.  I believe that we eat waaaaaaay too much meat in this country, and that factory farms are a result of that seemingly insatiable appetite.  Factory farms where chickens spend their entire lives in cages too small for them to even stretch out to full height, where cows spend their last days standing in crowded pens, walking through piles of their own excrement, being pumped full of antibiotics as a more "economical" fix for the illnesses they pick up from living in their own waste.  Don't even get me started on the meatpacking plants.

Did I explain all of this to my five-year-olds?

No.  That might be taking it a little too far.

However, I did tell the children that I try to be as careful as I can when I buy meat.  When I can, I buy from locally-sourced, organic farms.  I don't buy from companies or fast food places that knowingly buy from factory farms.  And I try to only eat meat every other day or so.

I told the children that I feel better knowing that the animals that I eat, the animals that give their life for me, have as happy of an existence as possible before they are killed.

The pig book I read to them also mentioned that organic meats tend to be a bit more expensive than other meats.  This prompted one of my children to raise his hand and ask why.

It took me a moment to formulate an answer.  How could I put this into terms that a five-year-old mind might comprehend?  I looked around my classroom, and I had my answer.

I asked the children to look around as well.  Then I said:

Imagine that this classroom costs us $100.  Just for us to be here and use this space, we need to pay the bank $100.  Now imagine that this classroom is a farm, and it costs $100 just to use the area.  Now, a farmer could put 100 pigs in here, and when they are grown and ready to be sold for meat, he would only have to charge $1 for each pig in order to make enough money to have this farm.  What would it be like if there were 100 pigs in here?

Their answers:

Crowded.  Loud.  Dirty.  Messy.

I continued:

Now imagine that there are only ten pigs in here.  Just ten, in this whole room.  Does anyone know how much the farmer would have to charge for each pig to make the $100 he needs to keep the farm?

(One of the children correctly answered, "Ten dollars".  These were Montessori children, after all.)

I concluded:

So there you have it.  In order to have enough space for the pigs to move around and not be so crowded, the farmer can fit less pigs on the farm.  So in order to make enough money to pay for the farm, the farmer has to sell each pig for more money.

That was a good enough answer for them.  Thank God, because Lord knows I didn't want to start talking about dirty factory farms.  I could just imagine the angry phone calls from parents: "My kid won't eat his burger because he says you told him the cow rolled around in its own poop before they shocked it in the brain and killed it!"

I asked the children to draw what kind of farm they would have if they were farmers.  Some of them drew big buildings with lots of animals in them, some of them drew large, open fields, with just a few animals running about in the sunshine.  The little girl whose drawings I sampled for this post drew both - one on each side of her paper.  She said she couldn't decide which one she wanted, but that the pigs running in the grass looked happier.

I think so, too.



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