Buying a Pig From The Wallow
| January 24, 2012 | Posted by Issa under Animals |
Last year Joshua and I raised extra pigs to sell to our friends. It completely delights me to be able to help more people get meat from animals who are raised in non-industrial conditions. And it makes me happy that I get to have more pigs! I’ve just started talking with people about this years pigs, and I thought the information I’ve compiled for my friends might be interesting to someone else out there, too.
Buying a Pig From The Wallow
You are paying for Joshua and me to buy and raise a pig for you and deliver the pig to the processor once it reaches market weight. We are NOT legally able to sell you meat, which means you are required to pick up and pay for the meat at the processor’s yourself. There’s a lot of information here, so be sure to ask any questions you have!
Price:
- The goal cost for you is around $500, but this price will vary depending on the exact weight of your pig at slaughter time.
- You will owe $1.75 per pound hanging weight to me, payable in two parts: a $200 deposit due by March 1st and the balance to me due when you come to pick up your meat.
- You will owe a $30 slaughter fee and $0.40 per pound hanging weight to the processor on the day you pick up your meat. I am not in charge of processor fees, and they are subject to change. I will let you know as soon as I know if they change.
- If you are splitting your pig with someone else, one person should be chosen to be the person who pays me and the processor. You can work out collecting the money between yourselves, and then one person does the paying for each whole pig.
Pig Details:
- I aim for a live weight of around 300 pounds per pig. This results in approximately 216 pounds hanging weight and 144 pounds of stuff for your freezer. This post gives more information about these terms.
- The pigs live at The Wallow until the day they go to the processor. You are welcome to visit at any time and are encouraged to ask any and all questions you have about their care.
- The pigs’ diet is primarily commercial feed, supplemented by hay, pasture forage, cull chickens, and kitchen scraps.
- We do not do any preventative medication (no antibiotics in the feed, for example), and we take steps to prevent medical needs, but I do treat medical issues as they arise.
- Your pig is NOT raised vegetarian and is NOT raised organic. Your pig IS raised to be happy.
- If you have ANY questions about the care of the pigs, please ask. I don’t know what you might want to know, but I’m happy to tell you anything.
Pick Up Logistics:
- I buy piglets in March. They will be ready for slaughter sometime between July and October.
- I will coordinate the slaughter date with you so that pick up works with your schedule. I will be able to tell you a few weeks leading up the slaughter what the trajectory looks like based on the pigs’ weight.
- You need 3-4 large coolers. The meat is already frozen when you pick it up, so you don’t need extra ice. You just pack it in coolers and then head home. This post talks about space needs so you can judge your cooler and freezer space needs.
Meat Details:
- I am not responsible for any cutting errors made by the butcher.
- This post talks about how much meat and what kinds of cuts you can expect from your pig.
- For hams and bacon, you have the option of taking them home to wet cure on your own or having the processor send them to Benton’s (a local business) for curing and smoking. If you have Benton’s cure and smoke for you (smoking is optional), there is an extra cost of $1.50/lb for the ham/bacon, payable to Benton’s when you pick up the meat.
- The bacon is ready about 6 weeks after being dropped off at Benton’s and the hams are ready after 4 months. After Benton’s cures/smokes the meat, it can go back to the processor and they can slice it up for you.
- What Benton’s does is called salt-cure or country-cure. It may be very different from the ham and bacon flavor you’re used to and its preparation is different. You may want to Google around to learn about country-curing so you’re not surprised.
The Unexpected:
- If your pig dies prior to processing, I will refund your $200.
- Some things could result in your pig needing to be processed prior to the weight goal. A broken leg is an example. In this case, you will still be responsible for the hanging weight prices to me and the processor, but these amounts would be much smaller than estimated, and you would get less meat than expected.
- If you are unable to pay the remaining balance on your pig, you do not get a refund of your deposit, nor do you get your pig or the meat. You are free to try to find someone else who wants to buy your pig or split it with you. It is up to you to work something out with the other party.
Parenting Philosophies – What Do You Do With the Ice Cream?
| January 23, 2012 | Posted by Issa under Parenting |
Near the beginning of my childcare career, I read the book How to Behave So Your Children Will, Too by Sal Severe. As a newcomer to childhood development theory, it made comforting sense, seemingly outlining sensible ways to react to children’s misbehavior. These days I don’t look on this book so highly. It’s full of behavioral modifications and reactionary prescriptions. Your kid does this and then you do that. The book presents a view of the parent-child relationship that is transactional, overly rigid, and entirely carrot-and-stick. Severe recommends charts and stickers, total parental consistency, punishment escalation until the child complies, and utilizing his detailed lists of reward options for different age groups.
One section of the book stood out to me, and I’ve thought of it many times over the years. Chapter Six begins with a tale of Severe spending the day with a couple and their 3 kids. The day ends with everyone taking a trip out for ice cream. When the dad later asks Severe for parenting advice, Severe says that they did the ice cream thing all wrong by not connecting the special treat to the kids behavior.
Successful parents connect special events to good behavior: “You have had an excellent day today. Mom and I would like to take you out for some ice cream.” You can be more specific: “I saw you sharing several times today. That’s something that makes Mom and me feel fantastic. When we feel good, we like doing something special.”
The chapter is called, “Never Give Away the Ice Cream”.
That phrase stuck me through the years, even as my childcare philosophy radically veered away from this conditional, controlling mindset. “Never give away the ice cream” became a catchphrase in my mind, representing the kinds of relationships I did not want to have with children.
Now, fast forward. For parenting advice, I’ve come to rely much more heavily on Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting (UP) and people advocating a consensual parenting approach. I also ran across Taking Children Seriously (TCS), which is a philosophy that seeks to be entirely non-coercive with children. On a TCS email list, one person was asking for suggestions about getting kids to leave a business that is closing when the kids don’t want to leave. Another person suggested offering the kids ice cream on the ride home or some other enticing thing.
Hmm. In the Severe book, he advocates withholding the ice cream until it can be a reward for good behavior. In this email conversation, someone is recommending the ice cream as an enticement for good behavior. Those seem like they could be opposites, yet they veer awfully close to one other with the tactic of using ice cream to gain compliance.
Then another TCS list member asked if ice cream makes the time-after-leaving nicer, why not offer it to make the time-before-leaving nicer, too? Why would you only offer it at this specific time?
This exchange caused a real light bulb moment for me. If ice cream is such a good thing, why are you withholding it all the time? If you aren’t withholding it, if your child can freely choose when to have ice cream or not, then ice cream is removed as an option for coercion. This was a sharp reminder that while parenting philosophies seem to swing along a spectrum, it’s also possible to just get off the spectrum entirely.
In Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn talks similarly about love, punishment, and rewards. People often think that punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior are vastly different, but they are really just shades of the same thing, and the name of the thing is control. Kohn talks about the emotional dangers of withholding parental time, attention, and love, even through such widely accepted practices as time-out.
Love is even better and even more important than ice cream and should be ever-present in the parent-child relationship. In a very real sense, love is the food and fuel that grow the child. Or it ought to be anyway. What happens if you take your love off the table as tool for control by making sure love is always, actively given and (more importantly) received?
Coming back around to ice cream, let me just say that ice cream is really, really yummy, and I eat it whenever I want. Should I suddenly start hiding it or not buying it because I have a child? Should I reserve it only for times when I deem that he’s been good? Should I save it up for times when I need to prod him to do something?
How about this instead? What if there was ice cream in the freezer now and then, and Dylan could eat it or not eat it whenever he liked, the same as I can, the same as Joshua does, the same as you do? How might my relationship with Dylan be entirely different if, instead of the ice cream sitting between us as a tool of control, ice cream was just the yummy sweet treat that it is? I’m guessing that our relationship will be a bit sweeter as well.
Parenting Isn’t Hard Syndicated at BlogHer
| January 19, 2012 | Posted by Issa under Blogging |
Last Monday I posted Parenting Isn’t Hard, and the lively comments rocketed that post to the top of my Most Popular list over on the sidebar. Thank you to all of you who joined in the discussion.
Today, that post has been syndicated at BlogHer as No Excuses: Parenting Isn’t Hard. They haven’t been as talkative a bunch as you guys! I was nervous about what kinds of comments the post might generate, but so far the comments aren’t flying.
I’m really excited to have a post up on BlogHer, and I hope to have more over there in the future!
Diets Don’t Work
| January 18, 2012 | Posted by Issa under Fat Acceptance |
(Photo from Fat From the Side submitted by fiercefattyflavor who says, “On the runway modeling Size Queen designs. If you told me in high school that my fat, beautiful ass could do these things, I would have rolled my eyes. But I’m so happy to be walking the road of body acceptance, and doing all the things I never thought I could.”)
When you talk about fat-discrimination, like I did a few posts back, there’s usually someone around to shout out the common rebuttal – that while you shouldn’t discriminate against something that someone can’t change, fat people are fat because of their own damn fault, and if they don’t like it they can simply lose weight. That’s the undercurrent to most fat-hate. It’s the great big justification for it all – you’re fat by choice, which means not only are you this horrible thing called fat, it’s all your fault, which is even more horrible and unfathomable.
So this is an idea I want to explore really thoroughly. I’m sure you’re all familiar with it, but let’s state the claim outright. The idea goes something like this: If you’re fat, all you need to do is eat less (or differently), and then you will be thinner. It’s so basic! Calories are energy, and we store our excess energy as fat. If we eat fewer calories (or burn more calories), our weight will go down. Calories in! Calories out!
There are all kinds of suggestions about how to go about this and more diets than I could possibly list, but the gist is the same. You wouldn’t be so fat if only you would put down the fucking cheeseburger. It’s so obvious, that thin people cannot grasp why we fatties can’t get on board. It’s so obvious that fat people can’t figure out why they themselves can’t get on board.
But if it’s SO obvious and SO simple, then it should be SO true, don’t you think? So let’s look at what science has to say about this so obvious thing.
LOTS of researchers have looked into whether or not dieting works to treat obesity, since Medicare guidelines provide funding for obesity treatments that work. There’s lots of data I was able to look at. Looking at scores of studies over the years, the first finding is that dieting works. Sort of. Dieters in weight-loss programs lose an average of 5-10% of their body weight.
The first problem with this is the small numbers. I weight 225 pounds and am obese. If I lost 10% of my weight, I would weigh 203 pounds and be obese. Anyone who talks about a weight-loss program as a solution to the “obesity problem” is talking out their ass. In one study, participants lost 6-10 pounds. In another, they averaged a 4 pound loss. When someone touts a weight-loss program as “working”, is that the amount of loss you have in mind? In another study, there was no difference from the control group after three years.
This New York Times article talks about two large studies that show no weight-loss results. In one, women followed a low-fat diet for 8 years with no change in their weight. In another 8 year study, researchers did all those things people say we should do to fight childhood obesity rid the world of fat children: expand PE, serve nutritious cafeteria food with less fat, teach students about nutrition and exercise, and get the parents involved. These changes also didn’t lead to weight loss.
Even when dieters show small losses, those losses tend not to stick around. The main thing that changes across the studies is the rate of regain. One study says 90% of dieters gain back their weight within a year. Another study says 95% gain it back in 2-3 years. Another study says only 3% keep it off. And most of these dieters gain back MORE than they lost. One study shows that two year later, 23% gained back more than they had lost. When followed for more than 2 years, 83% gained more than they had lost.
According to Traci Mann, UCLA associate professor of psychology and lead author of a study looking at 31 studies on diets:
“We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all. Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people.”
So what about exercise instead? A British study followed 200 children over 3 years, monitoring fat and exercise levels and found that varying levels of physical activity did not lead to changes in fatness. How about people doing one hour of aerobic exercise, 6 days a week, for a year? Their weight loss averaged 3-4 pounds. A whole year! In one 6 month study, people doing 50 minutes of exercise 5 days a week lost the same as those using diet alone. Other studies that looked at programs combining diet and exercise found that the losses were slightly better than with diet alone, but still not very impressive, and you’re still likely to gain it back.
I looked at study after study, charts, graphs, numbers. I did the math, I read the conclusions, over and over again. Diets don’t work. People generally do NOT lose weight and keep it off.
It’s hard to state this strongly enough, and I’m going to keep repeating it as I go forward, it’s a really important message:
Diets. Don’t. Work.
Lard
| January 17, 2012 | Posted by Issa under Kitchen |
Lard rendered from the fat of our own pig, then canned for storage. Beautiful. 
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