“There I will suggest that using all the flesh of a well-cared-for pastured pig exemplifies a deep concern with authenticity, a value that derives from what is conceived of as a direct, unmediated, and un-commodified experience of one’s food” (Weiss 164).

“A primal creates a “benefit” shared by the farmer and the consumer, and it is the foundation for cooking the meat derived from the primal (Weiss 169).

“The primal is constituted by a set of integrated relationships among animal movement, bodily substance, culinary practice, and sensory quality” (Weiss 170).

“It is remarkable how women in farming have taken especially to livestock production. For many women, working with animals is, as some put it to me, a way of showing their commitment to caring about the well-being of animals and the health of other people who will eat the meat from their livestock. And the burgeoning interest of women in meat often goes beyond agricultural practices to include butchery—many programs have been developed that target women who want to develop their butchery skills. Toughness, then, might be seen as a quality that suggests overcoming the initial challenge to conventional gender expectation that butchery might connote” (Weiss 172).

“Taking animal life, then, engages a hunter in relations of reciprocity with animals. Their very lives are “given” to the hunter, and they must be properly thanked to show respect for this gift” (Weiss 174).

“The respect for animal life that both orients these actions and is generated by them is manifest in the careful attention to the welfare of the animal; the knowledge of the connections among the farmer, animal, butcher, cut, and cooking that these programs cultivate; and the intimacy of appreciation of the animal that derives from attending to its death” (Weiss 175).

“Vitality is not simply a given feature of life itself; rather, it is a quality that has to be (re)- infused into the animal-as-food (something that advocates of animal welfare feel that industrial confined animal feeding operations undermine) so that meat can become once again a medium of moral integration and thereby an expression of well-being and legitimacy” (Weiss 175).

“Like all sacrificial acts of expiation, then, these butchery programs are not performed as oblations to otiose beings, but they do perform a moral violation (i.e., killing) to a rm the truth of an envisioned wider moral universe (Hubert and Mauss 1964)” (Weiss 177).

“If the commitment to knowing your food that motivates so many endeavors is limited to intimacy with the life of the animal held in the butcher’s grip, then the possibilities of generalizing the potency that is generated in these [butchery] demonstrations are rather slim. If they can be harnessed to reframing our moral commitments to wider forms of social vitality, then perhaps there is room for optimism (Weiss 179).

Weiss, Brad. Real Pigs: Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork. Duke University Press, 2016.