baa This sheep wants you to have fun this Holiday. Actually, I don't know what the sheep wants, it probably just wants to avoid being eaten. Monster and I visited the Lincoln Log Cabin Historic Site last weekend. As we turned the corner, we saw historical reinactors butchering a giant, hairy pig and a racoon. Monster accidently stepped in some entrails that were under the hanging carcass. He screeched "Get it off me!" and then asked the guy dressed like it was 1845 why he killed the pig. The man explained it was for meat and Monster told him "Well, I'll never eat a dead pig." The reinactor looked at me like "Hey, haven't you explained to your kid where meat comes from?" and I have to admit I hadn't.
It is so much easier to imagine it just comes prepackaged in styrofoam and saran wrap and that is the way it always was. I can't explain to him that we're eating those animals we saw at the pettting zoo and the cartoon pig in Dora the Explorer is different than real pigs. The real ones don't count in spanish and climb trees to eat apples. Though that would be somethin. The real ones live in corporate farm factories, stuffed with food and antibiotics and slaughtered so we can make bacon on Sundays. I never could have that conversation but now I don't have to- The Lincolns did it for me.
While we were there, I learned that Abraham Lincoln's mother died of milk sickness. Apparently, on top of worrying about dying of scarlet fever and small pox, settlers had to wonder if the milk they drank would kill them. Grazing cows would eat white snakeroot plant (Great name, snakeroot. Such an appropriately vicious name for a deadly root) and didn't die. The cattle would live to give milk that would kill its drinker. There used to be entire epidemics of milk sickness where people would be fine one day and dead the next.
I wonder if people were nicer to each other when death was more familiar and you never knew when a relative or friend would die. Hell, sometimes they didn't even name their kids until they were three because babies just didn't live that long. And, as a woman, you were lucky if you lived to see your kids to three years old. Think of all the people you know that have had c-sections due to complications when having a baby. All of those women, and usually their babies, would have died in 1845.
Now, we don't have to worry about milk sickness and most women don't die in child birth. Our meat comes in neat, bloodless packages at the grocery store. We don't live with seventeen of our closest relatives and wouldn't know how to self sustain in our environments. Imagine no possessions, it's easy if you try. Nothing to kill or die for.
How did we come so far in such a relatively short period of time?
){kind=link}