Second Reflection on Growing a Farmer

Kurt Timmermeister in Growing the Farmer not only achieved the goal of showing us where our food comes from, but gave me a in depth view of someone who took his passion and made something out of it. He addressed the problem of ignorance of our food, because we have “collectively removed animals from our lives,” even though through out history we seen how our meat is made, today people completely remove that image of animals getting killed for our protein, even cringe in disgust. Even Kurt himself couldn’t watch the killing of pigs in the beginning, he attributed it to us humans wanting “to give these beasts human qualities-to be sad, to be fearful, and concerned about their fellow pig friend,” but in reality it couldn't be farther from the truth. Kurt really opened my eyes to realize about where our food came from what we eat today with almost no effort to get other than going to store, was a luxury in the past, and that required us to see and do things that the majority of people would never do today.

After finishing the book, I think one of the things I really liked about Kurt was how he went into farming without ever really doing much of it from before. He took his passion for food, and expanded it to farming and grew to become an expert. I think this takes a lot of perseverance and flexibility to do, for example for slaughtering he learned how to slaughter the pig even though it made him uncomfortable at first. Being uncomfortable and learning new skills is an important part of success for Kurt and the business he created from farming, and for us as individual for our own passions.