I'd love to see the factory farming system torn down to be replaced (or rather returned to) individual small farmers.

Meats are too cheap in the first world, its all part of this damn convenience throw away culture we've developed. Its damaging us all, humans, animals and the environment.

Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork

This week's series on pork reminds me of raising pigs on a farm in Minnesota. We fed them a mix containing a lot of oats, so their meat was lean and tender and delicious.

When we first moved to a farm, we didn't have any animals of our own, but we rented our barn to a neighbor for some sows that were about to farrow. When the first one started giving birth, my oldest son, who was about five, came running in and said to me, "Mommy, one of the pigs is having babies, hundreds of 'em."

It's a great article, but when I click through to some of the producers that are linked, I take a look at the prices and am left wondering who can possibly afford it? Pork loins are going for better than ten dollars a pound. Even pork fat (depending on whether it is from the back or the belly) is not far from that.

I'd love to participate in this "humane" and sustainable farming/consumer/produce culture but frankly, I am simply priced right out of the market. What can I say other than it sucks to be poor...or at least not very well to do.

I address your comments about meat being too cheap and that we need to return meat processing to small, family farms -- in part because these are frequently stated comments in such forums.

Very few people disagree that the current high-speed factory farming methods are dangerous, filthy, spread disease, involve inhumane treatment of animals, etc. I certainly want to see reforms in that. But you can't abandon large scale food animal processing and still have adequate supplies of affordable food for our entire population.

The "idyllic" era you want to harken back to -- well, the population of US was also about half what it is today. People were poorer, and more accepting of a wide class divide between the haves and have nots, especially in food availability. There was also far more widespread hunger and malnutrition, and it was considered to be a normal consequence of poverty, which was just "too damn bad" if you happened to be poor. There was no social safety net, no food stamps, no welfare, etc. If you got poor enough, you simply starved to death.

When politicians used to promise "a chicken in the pot every Sunday", it was because a lot of people truly did not have such a thing -- it wasn't fanciful lingo.

I don't think anyone seriously wants to go back to that, but what divides us from such a past is that we have....widespread factory farming that provides low cost foods for everyone.

It's easy to talk about "meat should cost more money", when you are like Rebecca Traister and you can afford to live in an airy apartment in an elite neighborhood and order boutique meats to share with your chef boyfriend. It's easy when you are a singleton or a DINK, and you have six figure incomes and trust funds, and you eat at 4-star restaurants, and put tiny portions of expensive foods in your Sub-Zero refrigerator.

It's not so easy when you are a single mom with three kids, or elderly and living on a fixed income. When you have to feed four or five hungry people, and the "precious pork bellies" from Niman Ranch costs $12.99 a pound, and basically it comes down to this: you can't afford meat at all. And look around people (especially if you live near a Whole Foods): it's not just chi-chi meat....once you get started on that, then it's precious heirloom vegetables and precious artisan cheese from heirloom goats and precious stoneground heirloom wheat bread baked in a special heirloom hearth oven...

Pretty soon, there is nothing out there that is less than $22 a pound, and there is almost nothing that a family could cook and cheap inexpensively. Oh right -- except for lentils. As we all know, the poor should be eating lentil soup, every single solitary day of the week. It's so nourishing and cheap, and why, isn't that what the poor people ate in Dickensian England? Who wouldn't want to return to that scenario?

Not many "po'folks" will go voluntarily back to the days of eating lentil soup, no meat and frequent hunger, ergo nobody will be abandoning factory farming any time soon. If you want to do something really positive instead of stuffing your spoiled yuppie face with rare delicacies, try writing your Congressional representatives about slaughterhouse reforms and enforcement of human animal treatment laws -- something that could actually work instead of just enabling already "entitled" food brats.

Eating pigs is a choice, not a necessity, so Ms. Hepola, please spare us the false piety. If you truly believed what you wrote about these highly intelligent animals, you would join with those who choose to let them live. Instead, you've joined with those who choose to slit open their throats. You can live very well without "pork," but these animals cannot live without their lives.

Now that Salon has spent a week celebrating the eating of pig flesh, perhaps it will spend another week examining how the Taser company tests its painful shocking tools on live pigs. Salon can also report on the use of pigs in burn experiments. But best of all, Salon can skip the microscopic portion of producers who treat their pigs "humanely," and report instead on the hundreds of millions of pigs who suffer terrible pain and misery in factory farms -- factory farms which also produce incredible water and air pollution. That's the ugly reality behind the bacon you so crave.