The Pig and the Cold
The Pig and the Cold The cold comes first. Before the people, before the fire, before anything else, there is the cold — the first really hard cold of the year, the morning when your breath hangs in the air and the puddles have a skin of ice on them and the ground rings slightly underfoot. For most of us, now, that morning means reaching for a heavier coat. For most of human history, in most of rural Europe, it meant something far more consequential. It meant it was time to kill the pig. I should say at the outset that I am a thoroughly modern coward about this. I buy my meat the way most people reading this buy theirs — in tidy pink rectangles under plastic film, bearing no resemblance to any animal that ever drew breath, arriving in my life already divorced from the fact of killing. I have never had to look the source of my dinner in the eye. So when I tell you that I went, one cold morning, to see a matanza — a traditional pig-killing — I want to be honest that I went as a squ...
