Pets for Tea!

Nobody does fake moral outrage like The Sun. Well maybe The Mail but they're infinitely more spiteful about it. The Sun is like a fat, drunken uncle rambling on in a xenophobic yet vaguely amusing manner while The Mail is a lemon lipped mean spirited auntie who hates everyone and writes poison pen letters on her day off.

ANYWAY - the Sun ran a story spluttering in outrage over Pets for Tea. Apparently a primary school which won an award for healthy eating is breeding animals and letting the children help run an organic farm to show children where their meat comes from. Sounds laudable to me. Then one day, the pet piggies disappeared, only to reappear as (gasp!) sausages at 3.25 a pack. One mother has suggested this might be insensitive. Meanwhile the Headmaster cheerfully admits that he ate the back leg of a pig named Ginger for Sunday lunch. And The Sun has turned it into Piggygate.

Personally I think children are far less squeamish than we give them credit for and it's brilliant that more schools are taking children to farms and trying to reconnect between animals and the shrink wrapped meat we pick up in supermarkets. And without being too hippy dippy about it, I wonder why we're so bothered teaching or even exposing children to the idea of death. I remember clearly being in floods of tears while we had out old cat put down, but The Girl stood by quite calmly. No we didn't eat the cat. The Husband is still complaining about back twinges after digging a hole big enough to bury his enormous furry body. And we left a little memorial reading:

Here lies Sydney, the favorite cat. He was old and very very fat.

(The Girl insisted on the second line) And then a few weeks later I overheard her saying to a neighbour: 'We have a cat called Sydney. But he's dead.' One day she'll say that about me, I thought. Or maybe by then I'll be turned into sausages too.