Encounter - Meat

The meat trade has been a lucrative business at times, yet it's very dependant upon natural disasters and such like things overseas, and the times can be very volatile. So, one could say that it's a bit up and down.

– An owner of seven freezing works discusses the economics of the meat industry

There are just over 700 pigs in here at the moment, and we hope to be able to build that up to a thousand. The economics of this do appear to be particularly good because we have so many pigs in a reasonably small building. With three levels of pigs, it's like high rise buildings in cities.

– A farmer packs his pigs into his shed, early in this documentary

It's so important that vegetarians have contrived various meat substitutes to take the symbolic place of meat in main meals. And that, I think, is very ironic. It shows how important meat is in the structure of values and meanings that make up the culture.

– A man discusses meat being important in society

...I think it's like death among humans, I think that we shuffle it off into one of the many of the dark corners that we maintain in our society, and don't think much about it, or think as little about it as possible — like death, and like poverty, and like so many other things like old age. There's a lot of things like this that we pretend aren't there. But, I think that just strengthens my point, that the animals which are killed to make meat are themselves an important part of the way we think about the world. A lot of animals, we make a point of the prohibitions on the killing, or on the eating of them, like dogs, in our culture. And horses, we don't eat horse meat. We don't eat dog meat. We don't eat cat meat.

– A man talks about Kiwi attitudes to eating animals

It's rather surprising when you're doing the job how quickly you get used to the handling of intestines, offal, guts and whatever it may be.

– An employee of the meatworks on how workers get used to killing animals and cutting them up