When dinner has a name: Raising kids on a farm

"What’s for dinner tonight?" Tim asked me at breakfast yesterday, as he does every morning.

“Something Grandma made for us,” I answered vaguely, not because I didn’t know but because I was trying to do four other things at the same time: reach a glass down from the shelf for Holly, feed the dog, listen to a voicemail, put away a bag of bagels.

“But what did Grandma make for us?” Tim persisted.

“I don’t know, something she served a couple of weeks ago and then froze the leftovers for us. Shredded beef of some kind.”

“Pulled Freddy!” Tim exclaimed, delighted. “I had that at their house last week!”

“Yay!” Holly chimed in. “Pulled Freddy was delicious!”

My kids can’t be the only children raised on a cattle farm who call dinner by name, but I tend to think they’re in the minority. Fern Arable they are not, that’s for sure. Unlike the wistful and ingenuous heroine of Charlotte’s Web, they’ve never gone to bat to save an animal’s life. Quite the opposite: their attitude is that they’d rather eat a friend than a stranger.

And all the cows on my parents’ farm next door to our house are their friends. My kids or their cousins generally grant themselves the job of naming each new calf. Pre-grandchildren, my parents didn’t name the animals. Like many farmers, they preferred not to distinguish with personal names animals that would eventually go to the slaughterhouse.

But that policy is long gone. My kids and their cousins name each animal and refer to each animal by that name not only throughout the critter’s lifetime but throughout its culinary existence as well. “Jake is in the freezer!” they announce, or “Let’s serve Maggie for the Memorial Day cookout.” I had to smile recently as I read about a popular dish from the 1950s called Steak Diane; that recipe is believed to have been named after Diana, goddess of the hunt, but in my household every steak has a name.

Dinner guests sometimes catch me hushing my children when they use proper names at the dinner table. “Pass me another slice of Jennifer,” they’ll say. I always try to put a quick end to that. “You mean roast beef, Tim.” He smiles innocently at me, confident that he, unlike the dinner guest, can picture this entree when it stood on four legs grazing.

Living on a farm has brought me nothing but pleasure; I subscribe to the belief of many small-farm operators that we ensure our cows have a healthy, happy, free-ranging life for as long as they live and are eventually slaughtered under the most humane conditions possible. Still, I used to find it a bit disturbing that my kids were so sanguine about the history of their protein. I thought often of E.B. White’s Fern Arable, fighting for the life of her pet pig, and wondered if my kids lacked a basic humanity gene.

But now I see it differently. My kids love the animals. They walk among the cows in the pasture and witness the birth of calves. And they love them all over again as part of the food chain. In reality, their perspective isn’t macabre as much as it is holistic. Their friends think of hamburgers as patties from the supermarket freezer; my kids know the life cycle of a hamburger almost from conception.

Does this make them inhumane? I don’t think so. As it happens, I’m a vegetarian and have been since college. It wasn’t for idealistic reasons related to farm practices; it was for nutritional reasons. In some ways, I don’t understand why anyone consumes animals. But at least my kids do it with a high level of awareness. They know where food comes from and how it is raised. They name it and pet it and choose to eat it anyway. And they do it all with respect for the life the animal lived – and the pulled beef barbeque with which they ended up at dinner last night.