Oinks and Gobbles

NPR replayed a Commonwealth Club broadcast of Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation) talking about, among other things, how his new children's book, Chew On This, was written to help kids understand where food comes from. His commentary reminded me of a funny story.

A while back in one of those post-college just doing whatever comes moments, I inadvertently became the interim farm manager for a tiny non-profit demonstration farm. This place brought kids around the farm to show them how food used to be produced. It bore little resemblance to real agriculture. Nonetheless the kids came and we showed the a good time. One day a woman I knew came came with her little boy. She used to baby-sit me and my brother when we were small. She had her own little boy now, named Alexander (evidently she liked my name). Alexander loved coming to the farm. One day little Alexander came out with his Dad. Evidently, his Dad explained, they had some trouble at pre-school with little Alexander.

Alexander's grandfather had retired and became the best kind of gentleman farmer. On his suburban couple of acres, he had a small barn and would raise a few chickens or a turkey or two in addition to the couple of pigs he had had over the years. When little Alexander was first learning about animals, he was around real animals. So by the time, they started talking about animals at pre-school Alexander had a very convinced imitation of a pig and a turkey. (Just in case you did not know, turkeys do not actually sound anything like gobble-gobble and pigs snort, make more than the oink.) Of course, when the teacher tried to correct him again and again by telling him that the pig doesn't go snort-sniffle-snort, the pig goes oink-oink, he became very confused.