Saturday morning seven o’ clock seems to be the best time to cut a pigs throat. I woke up and thought I heard a school class that tried to get to the high C, but soon I realised it was some pig in the village again, whose last hour had struck.

It ’s always a deafening screaming when such an animal faces its death. The Roma in our neighbourhood do the butchering themselves, and you ‘d better start early if you want to get the whole process done in one day. Once it happened on the other side of the hedge, so I could have a close look, but very soon it became to unappetizing for me.

Last week I went to the big market in town. I like to go there to buy vegetables, fruit and sometimes meat. You can choose which butcher has the best price and the best meat, since there are quite a few in a row. And you can buy anything you want: from goose neck to pig head or legs. I decided to make a picture of it, because I couldn’t imagine someone buying that, until the older lady in front of me had it wrapped for her. I wonder what she did with it.

An advantage of these – for us rather unappetizing -scenes is that within our family we started talking more about why we eat meat. We started reading about it, and once we joined the ‘week without meat’; a very nice experience in which we learned what the result for our environment is when we leave meat for even just one day.

Nowadays it ’s only a few days a week still that we eat meat. One time I even forgot to prepare the meat that I had already bought for the meal, because without it it also tasted really good. The most confronting to me was that part of poverty in this world is being caused by excessive meat consumption in the West. Much farmland where food for people should grow is being used to grow animal feed.

But I am happy with our market, and especially with the biggest part where they sell vegetables and fruit. If you would like to see some images of this, then this is a nice short movie, in which a group of young people do a flashmob in our market place by showing some Hungarian culture through dance and singing. And yes, our market is indoors 🙂