Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

This past Wednesday I went down to New York City to visit Jake Dickson and to finally see his butcher shop, Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, where about 80% of the animals I raise end up. While I was there we also had a small “meet the farmer” event. About ten people showed up. They asked a lot of really good questions that kept the conversation rolling for a good while.

In addition to seeing the shop, the other main reason I was there was to check out the quality of the pork that I am sending down there. Because I deliver the pigs to the slaughterhouse and Jake picks them up and trucks them down to New York, I do not have an opportunity to see how the pigs turned out, and the quality of the pork that I produce is as important to me as the way in which they are raised and the effect that my farming practices have on the farm ecosystem.

Since Peter has been on the farm long enough to be comfortable taking care of it by himself, I was finally free to get off the farm and get down to New York to see the pork first hand.

Jake thought, and I agreed, that the best way for me to check out the quality of the pork would be for me to handle it directly, so I donned a white shirt and apron, hung a hand towel over my apron string, and went to work helping to break down seven pigs into primal cuts — loin, leg, belly, shoulder — and cryovacing them, after which they are placed in the cooler, from which they are pulled and cut into retail cuts over the course of the week. The cryovacing process works such that the pork comes out of the bag in the same state of freshness that it went into it because it creates a vacuum seal, especially when it is only in the bag for a week. Cryovaced meat stays fresh for three to four weeks, if not more.

My job in the process was to place the primal cuts in the cryovac bags and then set them aside for another worker to place them in the cryovac machine. Doing that job meant that I handled every single piece that came of off all seven pigs. I was definitely able to get a sense of the quality — good, but with lots of room for improvement.

During the beginning of the process, while the butcher was finishing up breaking down a beef forequarter, we bagged up some of the pork organs — the liver, the heart, and the tongues. When I have pigs slaughtered and cut up for myself for retail sales at the farmers market or from the farm, I will often get the organs back because there are occasionally people who ask for them. When I get them back, however, they are frozen, and well sealed in cryovac bags.

At Jake’s, however, they were fresh, and unceremoniously thrown together in a plastic bag inside a box. When I opened the box, I saw a jumble of soft hearts and bloody tongues. I am not sure why it happened. I have no idea what it was about seeing the hearts and tongues like that — after all, I have watched my pigs be killed, I have watched them then be stuck with a knife in the throat and have their blood gush out onto the floor, I have watched them skinned, have their feet cut off, and their bellies sliced open and their innards come tumbling out, I have seen them cut up into retail cuts — but when I opened that box and saw that jumble of soft hearts and bloody tongues I was overwhelmed. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I felt, quite frankly, like a cold-blooded murderer, a serial killer really, waking up to the reality of what he had done. I nearly threw up.

Of course, I couldn’t let on to anyone what I was experiencing, I couldn’t pause even for a moment. I am a professional, after all. I am a livestock farmer, and livestock farmers don’t get overcome by the results — the consequences — of their profession. They just do their work. So, I clamped down, grit my teeth, and went to work without a pause.

The first tongue I picked up nearly floored me. The tongue was dripping with drops of bloody liquid that had accumulated in the bottom of the box, and since it was fresh, it was pliable and spongy to the touch. The only indication there was that it came from a dead pig was that its color was very pale. With the tongue in my hand as I slowly placed it in the bag, I couldn’t help picturing the pigs, the same pigs that were hanging on hooks behind me, as they were when they were alive. Whose tongue was it? Was it Table Top’s? Did it belong to Great White? Had that tongue only two days before been inside the mouth of She Who Hates Us? I saw them flicking their cute pointy pink piggy tongues out, lapping up bits of feed out of the trough.

“What have I done?” I thought to myself as I reached down into the box and picked up another tongue to place in the same bag.

I carried that question without answering it while I methodically placed the tongues in the bag, and then passed it off to the person that was placing the bags in the cryovac machine.

And then I moved on to the hearts. Again, I have seen dozens of pork hearts. But never like this. The hearts were soft and heavy for their size. With the first heart in my hand, I believed I could feel it still beating.

“What have I done?” I thought to myself.

I placed the soft heart in the bag while I tried to deal with the questioning, the doubt, of my own soft heart, which was still, unlike the pigs’, beating, loudly and heavily, inside of my chest, my living chest, my living heart. I wanted to cry, but of course I couldn’t, so I clamped down and kept at my work, placing first one and then another and another of the soft, heavy hearts in the bag until all of the hearts of all seven of the pigs that I had cared for — fed and watered, rotated around the pastures, petted and rubbed their bellies — and then had killed so that we can eat their meat were in the bag. And then I passed the bag off to be cryovaced, to have all of the air sucked out of it, to be sealed with a vacuum, which would preserve the hearts in their soft, heavy state so that they could very soon become bits and pieces of delectable, savory treats like paté.

“What have I done?” I thought to myself as I pushed the ends of the plastic bag back into the box and folded the box flaps down. I slid the box under the counter with my foot to be taken care of later and then took a step back and looked around the butcher shop. I noticed the customers up at the counter. I watched one of them coincidentally point to the pork chops, my pork chops, from my pigs, neatly arranged in the case on pale salmon colored butcher paper. I saw the customer, a neatly dressed young woman with short blond wavy hair, hold up two fingers. And then I watched Jake reach into the case, pick out two pork chops and place them on the small square of butcher paper he held in one hand. Then he weighed them and wrapped them up. He handed them across the counter, and as he did so, I heard him say, “That’s the farmer right there, Bob, who raised these pigs.” He pointed at me.

The woman looked over in my direction and we made eye contact. She said, “Oh, really? Wow, hi” and took a single step towards me, closing the distance between us a bit. And then she said, “Thank you so much for what you do.”

I smiled and nodded to her and said, “You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.” She smiled back, paused for a second as if she were deciding whether to say anything else, then turned and walked out of the shop.

“What have I done?” I asked myself as I watched her leave.

This time I had an answer, and I spoke it to myself, through the memory of the soft hearts and bloody tongues — “I have offered her, and others like her, an alternative, a way out of the jungle.”

I still felt discombobulated, de-centered, unsure, adrift, but I was grounding, finding my way back to confidence, to pride even, in what I do, and what I do, what I have done, is raise animals with kindness and care, and not just a little bit of love, so that we can kill them and eat their meat.

Is that okay? I still think so. I still think not.