My daughter is a savvy little three year old. She is too smart for her own good and is one of those kids who never stops asking why. So I was caught of guard when she asked me "mom, where do hamburgers come from?" My family was sitting at the dinner table eating hamburgers and she was so content chomping down on that burger, until I answered her question that is. "Well Indiana, hamburger is cow, we are eating a cow right now." she dropped her burger on her plate and spit out her last bite. "Gross mom." my husband and I laughed and laughed because she is just so animated. We then went on to explain where all of our meats come from, bacon, sausage, steak, chicken nuggets, etc. She wasn't impressed or excited that this whole time she had been eating animals! However, it was nice to see as her mother, a lightbulb switch on in her head. Indiana started to name other meats/meals that we eat as a family and telling me what animal it was. when she was finished teaching me I asked her if she was going to eat her hamburger anymore. She looked at me and said, "meat is so good! I like eating animals!" I was grateful, since my husband and I like meat as well. Having a vegetarian three year old would have been a little bit difficult at dinner time.
Although this is a cute story, I remember when I realized that meat was the animals that we saw around us on the farms. I wonder if children often don't know what they are consuming because they never see meat in a raw or butchered state. I think about the meats I purchase, the chicken breasts are frozen, hotdogs look nothing like an animal, hamburger and sausage look like meat noodles. If children and the general population were able to see where our food comes from, I think we would make different food choices. That is probably why there have been so many pushes for free range, humane, and organic food choices in the past ten years. People care that the food they consume is helpful to the body and not harmful. I imagine I will have many other teaching opportunities with Indiana when it comes to farming, and hopefully I will be capable of showing her a different perspective since taking this class.
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