The Girl Who Cried Pig

We went on another lovely field trip today for my GSCI 101 class this morning. Today's destination: T&E Meats, where many local farmers in Harrisonburg and surrounding counties send their animals to be slaughtered and chopped up for sale. Blunt, I know, sorry I can't think of a nicer way to put it right now. So we get through all the facts (3,500 animals slaughtered here last year from goats to cows to pigs and even a bison!) and then we enter the building with our little blue lab coats and super cute hair nets. It was really cold to keep the huge chunks of animal meat hanging from industrial sized hooks from spoiling. It was all on a track system hanging from the ceiling. FUN FACT: Henry Ford got the idea for the assembly line from the industrial meat packing's "disassembly" line.... I was doing okay even with giant chucnks of flesh being hacked off with a saw and people slicing and throwing chunks into different bins. Walking by the meat grinder was a little rough, especially as I stepped over the little pieces of flesh that escaped the bucket intended to catch the ground beef. The next room is where I lost it a little bit: the kill floor. It is as terrifying as it sounds, even if we didn't get the pleasure of seeing a live kill like the other class did last week. He started talking about shooting a metal rod through a pigs brain in vivid detail and I started to cry a little but made it out of there just in time to pull it together! All in all, a very educational and eye opening trip.