Hellobee Boards

Our baby is only 3 months old so she doesn't know where I come from when I pop up from behind a muslin cloth yet (!) but this is something DH and I have talked about a lot.

We are both meat eaters and it is very important to us that our daughter understands where her food comes from. We fully intend to teach her that her pork goes oink and her beef goes moo.

It's an essential part of being a meat eater I believe, not to stick your head in the sand but to understand how your meat gets on your plate and make decisions appropriately - to have genuine concern for the treatment of animals and our planet when considering which farming and transportation methods you are willing to support with your purchases. Can't face the truth of battery farms - buy free range. Can't face eating Babe - then don't!

I think you just have to be matter of fact about it. Most kids are satisfied with a simple answer when they ask a question. You don't have to go into the whole reason, but I do think it's important to call it what it is, pork, chicken, etc. I don't really see what you gain by calling a piece of pork "pig." It comes from a pig, yes.

Yup, we talk about it with the kids!

This post made me think of this -

Yes my 5 year old knows - he isn't phased by it at all. Actually when we see an animal he always asks what meat comes from it.

We're mostly vegetarian (occasional fish, very rarely a steak or turkey for DH and LO). LO understands that he's eating fish meat/turkey meat/cow meat, etc. I haven't gone into depth about how the animals are killed, but he's seen enough people fishing and gutting their catches to know that the fish die once they've been caught and that we eat their bodies. He's also seen birds fishing and eating what they've caught and he understands that bigger animals hunt and kill smaller ones for food, so I think he has a good grasp of the rudiments of the food chain. We talk about food choices as a matter of health and the environment occasionally too.

@FarmWifeGina: This is the ideal for me - although living in the city and both working means that we probably wont be able to do it!

It reminds me of when TV chef Gordon Ramsey raises pigs in his garden and his children fall in love with them!! He has to be very clear that the pigs will be going to slaughter in a couple of months.

DS1 just asked about meat a couple nights ago. He was asking about everything on his plate and when I told him the chicken was an animal he thought I was joking! Lol. His eyes got huge and he looked a little scared when I repeated myself. After a minute he said "So the chicken grows and turns into meat?" I didn't want to go into the killing part so I dropped the subject. He doesn't fully understand yet.

My three year old knows, but my parents raise our meat, so the girls see the whole process.

Like some of the others, we are involved in the process. We used to raise our own pigs, now we buy from a friend. One interesting aspect of farm life to me, ours anyway, is the relationship with death. The girls see dad move dead pigs on occasion, and some of their first games have been playing at moving dead pigs (Ellie did it with playdoh at age 2.5, and Lorelei will do it with plastic pig figures and our toy bobcat (skid loader)). We see the dogs hunt and sometimes see them kill things like mice, shrews, or bunnies. We take our pigs to the place where they are killed and processed (we don't watch that part, but both girls know where that is and what is done there), and Eric hunts pheasant so they have seen the dead birds, complete with feathers, and then watched as they are cleaned. Ellie is the kid who can go in and play with some new piglets, tell you which are her favorites to snuggle, and then, in the same breath, tell you which one is the biggest that we should make bacon out of. Lorelei is small enough that her understanding is still evolving, but she does grasp the basic concept that animals will become the meat that we eat. My own views about life and death, what's fair and unfair, and how just plain brutal life can be have certainly changed with my current life.

It's extremely important to both of us that they know where ALL food comes from. That it's not just prepackaged from a super market. So we will be showing them.

No visits to slaughter houses though.

I'll let the know meat comes from an animal but no I'm not going get all political and talk about meat packing, animals in closed quarters and hormone injections.

We grow our own vegetables, herbs right now. And my cousin in law actually has a farm about an hour away where they will be growing CNG produce and raise livestock so I look forward to bringing her often.

I'm not sure how much my 2yo understands... We're Hindu so we only eat chicken and fish, and so the names are the same (unlike beef, etc) and he pretends to eat his toy fish (and giraffes, etc, we just don't have toy chickens!), and has seen pictures of animals eating other animals (thanks for the national geographic books in-laws!) but we haven't introduced the whole process intentionally. I don't think he'll be upset by it when he does understand, he tells us he's going to eat the fish in our fish tank all the time

we plan to raise the majority of our own meat (and purchase the remainder from a friend- likely we won't do pigs because we rarely eat pork), so hopefully our kids will be exposed to the entire process.

I think its important to be cautious when talking to my children about my own food values. I buy local whenever possible, and mostly organic- but I don't want my child to turn up their nose at food at other places (for example, my parents don't buy organic). Although I feel like I have always had a very healthy relationship with food, I am scared of my children developing anxieties about food.