How to kill your lunch??

The Huffington Posts has a video series (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-klein/how-to-kill-your-lunch_b_849501.html) exploring the life of smaller farmers.  In particular, the video series examines the sustaining food movement, and in essences, how farmers only butcher the animals that they need for food.

It got me thinking that not only farmers grow and kill their own food.  Growing up in my Italian-American family, though by trade we did not have any “farmers,” we definitely had our backyard garden (today, which is barricaded by twine and cinderblocks to impede any invading predators- ground hogs!)  and seasonal animal to be slaughtered.  During the Easter season, my uncle would have a lamb waiting for slaughter in his backyard.  As children, we’d watch and pet the lamb, not realizing that it would soon be on our dinner table. Today, we often purchase lamb from a local farmer. Another memory is that at times, we would have rabbits boxed up in our backyard, only to be stewed for dinner a few nights later.  A more common hunting-for-food meal is deer.  My uncle would often go hunting and come home with several deer, all which hung in his garage, waiting to be butchered and served.  

These are a few memories, I had from when I was a child.  It’s so easy to think that meat comes from a supermarket, but to remember it is a luxury we all have today, when not too long ago or even in different parts of the world, people still need to survive by killing for lunch.