If you had told me five years ago—when I was a vegan chef in Los Angeles—that I would one day help load a 250-pound pig onto a spit for a Fourth of July roast, I would’ve laughed. That would never happen. I couldn’t even look at raw meat without feeling queasy.
But here I am. Living on a farm in Texas. Raising animals. Feeding my family. Preparing for a pig roast. And learning, slowly, to look death in the eye.
In preparation for our Fourth of July celebration, my husband decided that we should do a trial run—roast a pig the week before to make sure we didn’t make any mistakes when the guests arrived. So he harvested one of our pigs. My children were nearby, running and playing, occasionally helping. They paused only for a moment to lay hands on the animal, pray over it, and thank it for feeding our family. Then they went back to playing.
As we set up the rotisserie, one of the pig’s legs kept catching and stopping the rotation. Without hesitation, my 2-year-old daughter called out, “Daddy, cut it!” Her voice was steady, matter-of-fact. Meanwhile, I could barely bring myself to look at the animal. The skin looked so human. The eyes, too.
One of the women on our farm—someone more used to city life—couldn’t even bear to glance in its direction. Another volunteer mistook it for one of our dogs and had a minor emotional breakdown.
And I get it. I really do. I didn’t grow up around death. I was raised vegan and vegetarian. I never saw animals being harvested. I never saw death up close. I flinch at dead things. I look away. My children don’t.
They celebrate life and honor death with the same breath. They understand, in a way that I still struggle to, that food is sacrifice. That life and death are not opposites—they are partners in a sacred dance. Death is not a failure of life. It is a function of it.
Everything we eat is, in some way, dead. Or will be. Even grass draws life from decomposing matter in the soil. Whether we’re eating plants, animals, or the animals that ate the plants, we’re participating in a cycle that began long before us and will continue long after.
I’m sure the lion doesn’t look away as he devours the gazelle. He understands his place in the order of things. But we modern humans—we’ve grown deeply uncomfortable with death. A whole roasted pig, stitched back together and filled with rice, herbs, and onions, can be confronting. It reminds us that our meat had a face. It had a life.
I remember being a child and seeing a whole fish on a restaurant plate, head still on, and feeling disturbed. I remember the deer heads on the walls of my grandmother’s house. They made me squirm. And even now, knowing that matter is never lost, only transformed—knowing that all of creation is recycled and reborn—I still feel the urge to look away.
But my children don’t, and I’m so grateful for that.
A few years ago, my daughter had a pig named Oreo. She loved that pig. But Oreo couldn’t get pregnant, and eventually my husband told her that we couldn’t keep feeding an animal that wasn’t reproducing. She didn’t cry. She didn’t throw a tantrum. She said: “I understand. Now she has to feed the family.”
Then she asked if she could go with him to the slaughterhouse. She woke up at 6 a.m., helped load Oreo onto the trailer, and rode with her dad to the Department of Agriculture-certified facility. She said goodbye with grace and strength. She was 7.
Of our entire family, she and I are the only two who don’t eat meat. But we are also the ones who perhaps understand most deeply the weight of what it means to consume another life. We’re not squeamish. We don’t look away. We know what it takes to put food on the table, and we carry that knowledge with gratitude and reverence.
Watching my children grow up on the farm has reshaped my relationship with death. Their maturity humbles me. Their reverence teaches me. Their steadiness gives me courage.
I’m still learning. Still growing. Still wincing a little when the eyes of a pig look too human. But I’m also getting up at 3 a.m. to tend to the fire. I’m raking coals. I’m participating in a sacred ritual that’s as old as civilization.
And I’m starting to understand that to celebrate life fully, we must also make peace with death.
This Fourth of July, as we roast a pig and gather with friends and family, I won’t just be serving a meal. I’ll be honoring a life. And with it, all the lives that make ours possible.
