When you live on a farm and are able to eat food that you grow or raise yourself, you have a very different connection to what is on your plate. At Taino Farm, we try to base our meals on what is available. Eating this way can be a challenge as it requires some creativity; you think of ways to cook with what you have instead of basing meals on what you feel like and buying the ingredients. However, the reward is huge. When I eat food straight from our garden, not only do I notice the intense difference in taste by eating the freshest food possible, but there is a sense of pride that comes with being a part of the process of growing it – from planting to harvesting. I swear food tastes better just knowing that you were there helping it grow along the way.

Besides growing fruit and vegetables, we have animals including chickens, turkeys, cows, sheep and the fish in our aquaponics system. By raising animals in a sustainable, respectful and very humane way, we hope to provide omnivores with sustainable food options. When we have volunteers, a common want is to have more of a connection to the food they eat and this often includes meat. Our most recent volunteer, Andreas from Sweden, had the ambition to learn how to butcher a chicken. He feels that this is an important skill for all meat eaters to have. I asked him to write about the experience. The following excerpt is written by Andreas. It is not necessarily the opinion of Taino Farm, but we respect and appreciate volunteers having the courage to share their experience by writing for us.

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“Today I learned how to kill, pluck and prepare a rooster.

I think the killing itself is something we in the west are so distant from that we find the act itself repulsive and sickening, but it’s important to relearn how to prepare your own food and all aspects of it. On a farm you kill what you need to eat. You don’t kill for fun. We also try to use the most humane possible way of doing this – ways that are the least stressful for the animal in comparison to factory farmed meat that most people in the western world eat on a daily basis.

Meat bought at the supermarket is rarely local and the life of that animal has been, to say the least, horrible. The amount of fossil fuels that have gone into transporting, packaging and cooling the meat and the amount of non biodegradable styrofoam packaging and plastic wrapping that comes with it is a wasteful and unsustainable practice. It is a reminder of how society has long ago become detached from nature.

Juan Carlos and Andreas just before eating the farm fresh meal

We see our chicken fillets in the meat desk of the supermarket and somehow the connection between a living animal and our food in the toxic wrapping we buy is lost.

What happens if the world economy collapses and people don’t know how to kill and prepare their own food? Will we go vegetarian by default?

We are in the hands of big multinational corporations that control not only our food supply but print money out of “thin air” and keep us docile by poisoning everything we touch, wear, brush our teeth with, and use to wash our clothes and bodies. You name it – everything you think of contains poison that does not need to be there! And soon enough clean drinking water will not even be a human right anymore.

Bottom line, if we can’t kill and prepare our own food that we know has had a good life on our own or a neighbour’s farm, that is organic, sustainable, and part of the life we had always lived before the coming of industrialism and the discovery of oil, then we should stop eating meat at all.”

by Andreas Nordgren