'Being Gordon Ramsay' featuring dead pig!

a suckling pin is seen as a celebration - it’s showing respect to the animal.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool carnivore and would love to eat some suckling pig again, but to say that it's showing the animal respect is crazy talk.

I remember raising lambs for 'Calf Club' (agricultural school days) two years in a row, who my siblings and I named and loved - but it was always understood that we were only raising them to adulthood, and they weren't permanent pets. So when they became hogget age, my older siblings' sheep would go off for slaughter and we ate them!

I was much younger when I took on the task, and perhaps my mother feared I would be more upset, so instead my sheep got sent away to 'live with other sheep on a proper farm' 😅 I suspect we may have got them back in the form of meat without me knowing!

I think it's quite normal and healthy to teach children to be respectful and caring towards animals, even if you do plan to eat them. Someone has to look after the animals we eat until they're slaughtered, after all, and ideally you'd hope they'd care enough about the animal as a living creature to be kind to it.

I can't decide how I feel about it...it seems a bit cruel to let the kids get attached though. I come from quite a rural background too, and my dad went shooting. There were always pheasants hanging up in the garage, dad would gut some birds in the kitchen sometimes. There would be pots on the stove full of entrails. Maybe why I became a vegetarian at 17 😆but I don't think even he would want to kill something I'd gotten attached to.

I agree with you Paloma - people are utterly vile

You might as well go the whole hog (pun intended!)

I'm not always a fan of puns but this was very apt!

So along as meat is looking pretty in a supermarket all is ok? i am a meat eater and know meant comes from animals why on earth is this news op?

As someone who grew up and lives rurally, I totally understand.

At my children's rural primary school, at least half the children grew up on farms, raised pigs, or went wild pig or deer hunting, or fowl shooting with their families from a very young age, so it was pretty normal to them. And even the ones who didn't do that had loads of friends who did, so it was still fairly normalised.

I can imagine a few children being a bit sad about it, but when they know that's what's happening from the start then they're more prepared, and you can focus on teaching them about looking after an animal ethically, and being respectful and kind towards the animals you rear so you know they had a happy life.

How do you how a lot of meat eater will feel/think?

Ice been to lots of hog roast and no one has run off screaming 🙄

I can sympathise - I was traumatised by my country relatives drowning their cat’s kittens as they didn’t have the concept of neutering 😢

And that's fine for you because you a culture, a tradition, a civilisation onto yourself, as we all are. I live in SW France which has always been slaughterhouse heaven ; yet in Western Europe there is also a tradition if you will of questioning the ethics or meat eating

"But that is not what the thread is about. The thread is about the grotesque (in my view) spectacle of a baby pig, its eyes stuffed with flowers, in a restaurant because to many people - including meat eaters - this is totally unnecessary and repugnant."

What I don't get is: The pig is dead. What's the difference between serving it whole in a grandiose, theatrical manner, and carving it up in the kitchen and bringing the meat out on plates?

Is the issue that a suckling pig has been killed for meat, or is the issue just that you don't want to look at a whole cooked pig? The former is about personal ethics (understandable whether one agrees or disagrees), but the latter is just you being squeamish.

And everyone has different tolerances for what might make them feel squeamish, depending on the culture they've grown up in.

As a non-proselitysing vegetarian, I can’t help thinking that If people consume dead animals for food, they have already made the decision that animals’ lives are not sacrosanct. Why should it matter to them. therefore, whether the animal is displayed whole, or cut up into pieces and trussed in cellophane prior to consumption? In fact, the latter had less dignity about it, if anything. I don’t get why a whole dead body would be any more offensive than slices of the body, to either vegetarians or meat-eaters.

I mean that there will be enough milk for the rest. I suspect that there might be starvation issues otherwise.

The one time that I saw the piglet appearing on the dinner table, I don't think that it was any smaller than the rest of them. I do recall that when I yelled on my great-aunt because the sow was in trouble, it was because one of the piglets was stuck.

Much to my astonishment, Great-Aunt (bent double with osteoporosis) leapt over the dyke round the pigsty and quickly ensured that the piglet cleared and the rest could be born.

I twice went off bacon and pork when visiting the family. That was the second time. The first time was when I was eleven and I heard adult pigs being slaughtered for a wedding.

The thing is that - certainly at that time - apart from bread from the bakery, they only ate what they produced in the village. That was pork, chickens, turkeys, fruit, tomatoes, paprika and cucumber. Nothing else. (I believe that the next village over the hill had sheep and lambs.) For some reason, they didn't grow potatoes then.

The first time we were there, we were there for six weeks, the whole of the summer holiday. By the time we got home to Scotland I'd lost a tremendous amount of weight - by legs were like sticks and my parents were very worried about me. (Yes, I'd also been traumatised by seeing my aunty plucking one of the hens I'd been feeding.)

I had a discussion about it in an online language class one time and - according to the teachers "Ah yes...All our children from the city share that trauma when they visit the countryside."

I’m a lapsed vegetarian (was vegetarian for decades). I bloody love suckling pig!

I’m not squeamish at all about it. It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.

You have to order it in advance though at Gordon’s, you can’t just turn up and have it. So you aren’t likely to stumble across it on your table.

Yes, love living in Cumbria!

If you ever go to Portugal, never look in the freezers in the supermarkets.

Do you mean that the other piglets will put on more weight quickly if they remove one (I guess the ‘runt’ if there is one)? Is that where the idea of eating the suckling pig originates from?

I'd avoid Segovia if I were you OP.

Suckling pig is the local speciality

Shock - two different people have two different experiences! 🙄

As kids we all thought it was hilarious 🫣🤣

On holiday in Mallorca 2 years ago, then hotel has suckling pig on the dinner buffet. It was a whole roast piglet, cut up, but included all parts, including the head. As a child, butchers shops used to have whole pigs on displays in the windows. Whole chickens, rabbits, pheasants, lamb, large joints of beef. We were a lot less squeamish then than now, and we have gone a lot more squeamish than other countries. I think it's a good thing to let people know the origin of the food they eat, rather than just see the meat as a hygienically wrapped package in the supermarket.

Naming a pig after one of the top herbs to go with pork is... Gloriosly dark

Faery is hardly going to post that half the people didn’t turn up because their kids were upset now is she

That would ruin her story

Back in the real world and as I’m from a farming background with my grandad slaughtering and hanging his own pigs, I can assure you
Many of us were utterly distraught by the entire industry

( Even Ramsay was upset when his pigs went to slaughter )

No, not that I remember, but most of us came from rural backgrounds and were already well used to the idea of animals being raised and killed for meat so it wasn’t anything new. We also used to do trips to the local farm that supplied our school dinners so we knew where the meat came from anyway.

@faerylights it probably is best case scenario, but surely some of the kids were upset even though they knew it was going to happen? I know I would've been!