As I travel I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to sum up my learnings of a particular farm, or conversation or even a critical moment in a day that will help people understand where their food comes from. I find times when I am at a loss for words in being able to adequately explain all that I am learning about our global agri-food system. While I will continue to strive to find the right words, sometimes it isn’t worth getting caught up in figuring out the perfect letters to put into words. Sometimes a picture is all that is needed.

Helping to care for and learn about raising pigs the past several weeks has been a treat! They eat A LOT, are quite messy and are pretty dang smart. One thing that has been top of mind as I watch these pigs grow up is knowing that one day they will become food. After being a vegetarian for 5 1/2 years, I have begun eating meat sourced from the farms that I am working on. It is important for me to be able to recognize that when I choose to eat pork, I am eating the pig that lived its whole like in the paddock down the hill.

This awareness of meat as an animal doesn’t make me sad, but it does remind me to stop and think about how what I eat and how much I eat does have an impact. It is easy to lose site of the fact that meat is coming from an animal when our modern food system does as much as it can to distance the consumer from the “pig down the hill."