04/13/2026
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"But why show it?"
I get that question a lot.
"We know that you raise and home butcher your animals, but why the pictures? Why put it all out there for everyone to see? Why do you feel compelled to talk about it, to write about it, to SHOW IT?"
Because it should never have been hidden away in the first place.
It should never have been relegated to large concrete rooms with big drains.
It should never have been left to people who didn't know or care for the animal before it showed up to die.
It should never have been able to be shunted aside, dismissed, forgotten.
We should never have become so divorced from the knowledge of how our food lived and died.
This is where are food comes from. This is how it should be viewed. As part of a natural process. A part of the natural life and death process.
Not as something to shy away from, not as something disgusting, not as something that should be done away from the public eye.
That attitude promotes dismissal, it promotes callousness, it promotes casual cruelty. That attitude promotes and supports factory farming, it promotes "farming" practices that are inhumane.
Dissociation from where our foods come from, serves no one but the mega farms, hospitals, drug companies, on and on and on....it doesn't serve us, our animals, or our planet.
Meat doesn't grow in neat packages. Thank God.
This used to be seen as a part of everyday life.
I will continue to do my best to make it so again.
If that steak on your plate is not "disgusting", neither is the carcass that it came from disgusting.
If that bacon isn't "gross", neither was the process that put it on your breakfast table.
This is NOT something that should be hidden. It is not "disgusting".
It is a fact, and a natural part, of real life.
And that is WHY I "show it".
Normalize real life. Normalize being connected to our food, both before and after death.
Because it should be "normal".
Amazingly truthful words by
Emily OzarkJewels Dixon
