For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for December 16, 2017

Welcome to the reality of farm life, Michael!

I think Michael and Elly may want to go Hindu for a while.

And now another addition to our theme of “All the reasons why you don’t want to go to the farm.”

First of all. Don’t name your food. That’s a good rule, any way you look at it. My experience is that people who butcher their own meat label the packages with the type of meat and not the name of the animal.

Second, the draw back to using brown butcher paper instead of plastic wraps or plastic containers to freeze meat is that it allows moisture transfer. This is going to result in less of a freezer shelf life for your frozen food. If “Daisy” is aged since last spring, that means summer and autumn have passed and “Daisy” is pretty old to be in a freezer wrapped in nothing but butcher paper. This might be a good meal for Elly’s family to enjoy the side dishes and not the meat.

As long as it’s Daisy, and not Mary.

“No, not the package marked Suzy—-!” “Is this… a human hand?” Gunshot “I’m sorry, Mike. Your mother knew too much. Put her in the freezer, and mark the package ‘Elly’.”

How on earth can they slaughter an animal they’ve actually named? That’s like killing a part of the family?

I vowed LONG ago I wouldn’t eat anything I’d named. “Lunch” and “Dinner” being exceptions.

But will Mike connect the ‘Daisy’ roast with the process that produces his next hamburger or beef taco? Unlikely.

That’s right Michael, farmers do eat their cows

A friend of mine was told by an obviously clueless woman that he shouldn’t hunt deer and eat venison but rather get his meat from the supermarket where no animals are hurt or killed.

What is going on? Didn’t these people know they were having company? If this was a surprise visit, I missed that day. They don’t look like they are old enough to be senile.

What is going on? Didn’t these people know they were having company? If this was a surprise visit, I missed that day. They don’t look like they are old enough to be senile.

" No wait: Daisy was the dog…"

We loved Daisy…. with mashed potatoes and gravy!

“Daisy — she’s what’s for dinner!”

The colorist got the message, and retroactively corrected Dan’s mustache and beard, and Michael’s hair.

Typical adolescent. “How wonderful it is to be miserable.”

I find this family very unsettling to visit. They seem….a bit weird!

Good line from King of the Hill; Hank is on a farm and the farmer leads a bull to the abbatoir.

Farmer: Say goodbye to Victor over there. He is on his way to the slaughterhouse.

Hank Hill: It is not so much “goodbye” as it is “see you later”.

This isn’t that weird. My husband’s family had a small farm. they usually kept unfriendly, huge charolais cows. Once they raised a cow from a baby near the family. His name was Freddy. Only the dad and a couple of the kids could eat Freddie.

We are having a pork roast tonite, I think I’ll tell everyone her name is Petunia. hahahahahahahaha!

I’d rather be pulling Daisy rather than pushing em.

When we would visit my sister’s farm, her kids would always tell us ‘who’ we were eating. It was just part of farm life and they didn’t bat an eye. (And they all seemed to have ‘people’ names too.)

Lynn’s Notes:

We really did look in the freezer for these brown paper packages but the cow’s name was “Mary.”

Daisy’s good eatin’. :D

One of my aunts worked as an English teacher. One of her assignments was teaching English to Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s. Some of her class asked where they can find the best dog meat. When she replied that we do not eat dogs in America, they asked “If you have no dog meat, then how come when we go into your supermarkets we see all these cans with pictures of dogs on them?”

Will he ever look at hamburgers the same way again?

Had some friends who ran a dairy goat farm. All of the girls had names. When the goat could not longer produce, she was sent to the meat packers. We always knew who we were eating when we ate there.