Around noon on Thursday, my roommate and I walked drearily to the local slaughterhouse, or abattoir, where we would see a pig slaughter. The building we arrived at looked eerie on the school’s campus. The abattoir stood alone, next to the bullpen and at the end of a dirt road. We walked in and a female student greeted us and told us to put on an apron, a hairnet, and a hardhat. The room smelled of warm blood. There were five people in yellow aprons and white hardhats amiably working together butchering a pig, which was currently hanging by its feet, bleeding from its neck. I felt disappointed when I realized we were late, and had missed the pig’s death. I felt my stomach jump into my throat as my visual and nasal senses were overcome with blood.
Having been bled, the pig was lowered into a large basin full of water heated to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Unconscious, the pig didn’t scream or move as it was lowered into the scalding water. The boiling bath loosens up the pig’s hair and nails, which are removed before the pig is butchered. After the bath, two butchers used levers to heave the pig from the water onto the “Cincinnation.” Resting on the wedge above a giant egg-beater on its side, the pig upon the Cincinnation was the most surreal part of the process. The pig spun around awkwardly and violently while the amiable foreman sprayed it with a high pressure hose causing chunks of pig hair to fly through the air. Stepping away from the jettisoning hair clumps, yet not taking our eyes off of the spinning pig, the whole room seemed to shrink as our focus did upon the pig.
My stomach’s queasiness was slowly subsiding as the pig was taken off of the menacing Cincinnation and ont...
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...he pig. After passing inspection, the workers in yellow aprons moved the carcass into a huge refrigerator. Inside an amiable man told us all about Cal Poly meat. The meat produced on campus is choice meat, sold at a good price right here in a building next to campus market. The animals on campus are all used for butcher, sale, or research. He had more work to do, but told us he could talk about their work all day.
Having witnessed what goes on to provide us our meat, I felt even more comfortable with what I eat. The camaraderie amongst the butchers extended towards all inside the room . Seeing people work on something that means so much to them with such passion was as much of a rare experience as seeing pigs slaughtered. The butchers’ confidence and excitement made for an unforgettable spectacle, visually stimulating and oddly heart-warming.
History tells about how a neighbor’s pig fell astray into the Nurse family’s yard and Rebecca Nurse yelled at her neighbor. Soon after the neighbor feel ill and died of a
Morse, Sidney. Freemasonry in the American Revolution,. Washington, D.C.: Masonic Service Association of the United States, 1924. Peters, Madison Clinton. The Masons as Makers of America: the True Story of the American Revolution. 3rd rev. ed. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Patriotic league, 1917.
Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?” (Steiner 845). With these questions the author tries to hook up his audience and make them think about how and where does everyday meat comes from.
Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president of the United States, from 1889-1893. He was 56 when he was elected president. Benjamin Harrison was born to a Presbyterian family on Aug. 20, 1833, on his grandfather's farm in North Bend, Ohio. He was named for his great-grandfather, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His grandfather was William Henry Harrison, the 9th president. Ben was the second of the 10 children of John Scott Harrison and Elizabeth Irwin Harrison. Harrison attended Farmers' College in a Cincinnati suburb for three years. While a freshman, he met his future wife, Caroline Lavinia Scott. Harrison and "Carrie" Scott were married in 1853. They had two children, Russell Benjamin and Mary. One year before their marriage, he graduated with distinction from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In 1854, Harrison passed the bar exam and moved to Indianapolis. In Indianapolis, he practiced law and campaigned for the Republican Party. In 1860, he was elected reporter of the Indiana Supreme Court. A deeply religious man, Harrison taught Sunday school. He became a deacon of the Presbyterian Church in 1857, and was elected the elder of the church in 1861.
After the pig died, they moved it into a vat of steaming hot water for about ten minutes to help loosen the hair from its skin. The carcass was then shifted onto a giant contraption which removes most of the hair from the now lifeless body of the pig. The machine is a giant metal basket that literally shakes the hair from the pig. As the pig violently rolled over and over, it resembled a hamster whose wheel had not stopped turning after it died.
André Breton wrote: "There is no art more exclusively feminine, in the sense that, in order to be as seductive as possible, it is only too willing to play alternately at being absolutely pure and absolutely pernicious. The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon about a bomb" (Herrera, 1983). Frida Kahlo has the most famous and conspicuous self portraits in the world today. Her paintings were highly controversial and caught the attention of the common people, art lovers and critics from art professionals. However, it was not until the publishing to Hayden Herrera biography Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo in 1983 that drew the eyes of most people to Frida’s art. Frida’s portrait of her own body was the central piece of her art. According to Frida in Mexico out of the 143 completed portraits of Frida, 55 of them were self portraits and the rest were representation of her self identity as a Mexican woman. Most people were captivated by her life stories and how she reflected them in her portraits.
The abuse of livestock is a widespread problem that affects everyone who buys and consumes meat products. Most people are not even aware of how slaughter-destined animals are treated while alive, what chemicals are forced into their bodies, what they are forced to eat, and how they are slaughtered. Fortunately, an increasing number of slaughter plants and small farms have been conforming to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA), after it was passed in 1958, and amended to be fully enforced in 2002, but there are still slaughter plants that abuse, neglect, and provide poor conditions for livestock (“Humane” Animal). When looking at the realities of mass producing meat and animal products, two serious problems arise: the quality of life for the animals, and the possible negative health effects for the people who consume these products.
One reason for this problem was that there was no real inspection of the meat. A quote from “The Jungle” tells of a government inspector checking the hogs for Tuberculosis, “This government inspector did not have a manner of a man who was worked to death; he was apparently not haunted by a fear that the hog might get by before he had finished his testing. If you were a sociable person, he was quite willing to enter into conversation with you and to explain the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was talking with you you could hardly be so ungrateful to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched.”# This obviously led to tubercular meat being processed in the packing house. Another problem was the incredible lack of sanitation and the use of spoiled meat, another quote from “The Jungle” tells of how dirty it was in these plants “There would be meat stored in gre...
Pollan shows a pig in multiple stages but only because he ties in an anecdote about his own pet pig that he had when he was younger. He includes pictures in this story to show the growth, and the audience sees the pig’s body after being butchered, but that is to show how the process of cooking the pig relates to the person raising the pigs. Pollan even connects the editing so that the audience finds out after that, the pig the audience has been watching be smoked on a grill is one of the pigs this farmer had butchered. What really connects it is the fact that the audience then sees the pig farmer at the barbecue picnic eating the pig that has been slow cooking over a fire for hours, showing that food truly does bring people together.
In the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, the author talks about, not only vegetarianism, but reveals to us what actually occurs in the factory farming system. The issue circulating in this book is whether to eat meat or not to eat meat. Foer, however, never tries to convert his reader to become vegetarians but rather to inform them with information so they can respond with better judgment. Eating meat has been a thing that majority of us engage in without question. Which is why among other reasons Foer feels compelled to share his findings about where our meat come from. Throughout the book, he gives vivid accounts of the dreadful conditions factory farmed animals endure on a daily basis. For this reason Foer urges us to take a stand against factory farming, and if we must eat meat then we must adapt humane agricultural methods for meat production.
Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter, born on the July the 6th, 1907. She was born in small town on the outskirts of Mexico, called Couyocan. Her family lived in a house they built themselves, La Casa Azul, or “The Blue House”. It’s name comes from the structures bright blue walls, and now stands as the Frida Kahlo Museum. At the age of fifteen, Kahlo was enrolled in the National Prepatory School of Mexico, where she was one of only a thirty-five female students. With the dream of becoming a medical doctor, Kahlo studied sciences at the school. But, on Septemer 17th, 1925, Kahlo experienced the fateful accident which changed her life forever. She had been riding on a bus with her boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, when the vehicle collided with a tram. The accident had left several people dead, and Kahlo with many injuries. Some of which were broken collar bone, fractures in her right leg, a crushed foot and a broken spinal column. The injuries left her in a full-body cast for months on end and was confined to her bed for this time. Kahlo also was left with fertility complications after handrail had pierced her uterus. The tragic event left Kahlo in a world of unbearable pain and also boredom. It was during her bed-ridden recovery where she took up the practice of painting, with herself as the subject. Her mother had made her an easel to paint in bed, where she developed her skills of painting. Her first self portrait, “Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress”, was her first serious piece which she painted in 1926. She painted it as a present to her boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias. The artwork was fairly muted in colour and was quite a traditional European-style artwork. But, as Kahlo continued painting her works transitioned from the acade...
Author- Agatha Christie was born in 1890 in England and raised by a wealthy American father and English mother. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 44 foreign languages. She is the author of 78 crime novels and was made a dame in 1971. She was married twice, her second husband being an archeologist whom she often traveled with on his archeological exhibitions to the Middle East. This gave her an understanding of that part of the world, which she used in this story. Agatha Christie died in 1976 in her home in England.
The piercing shrieks of these chickens begging for mercy still rings through my ears to this day. I went home with a lot on my mind that night. I asked my parents what they thought about me be going vegetarian.
Rings also often indicate a promise, vow or bond (for example, a purity ring standing for the vow of abstinence and chasteness). Bonds and promises are a centre point in The Merchant of Venice, and so too the breaking of them. This will be explored in more detail later in the essay.
Shakespeare, William, and Leah S. Marcus. The Merchant of Venice: Authoritative Text, Sources and Contexts, Criticism, Rewritings and Appropriations. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.