Christien Meindertsma is dutch designer. She put together this incredible book about a pig, number 05049, and what happens to it after it is slaughtered. The book is three years work of finding and cataloguing each product that is produced from this one pig. Below is part of her exhibition of the project: each product, packaged as if it everyone considered it an animal product.
This is from http://ibrahimbaba.wordpress.com/ It's a nice rundown of some of the products included in her book.
Here is an excellent Ted talk about Pig: 05049
I didn't really understand what was behind this piece at first, but after watching and reading some interviews I realized that she's talking about the same farm to table pathways that I'm seriously interested in. My posts will probably head more that direction as my summer job at the Farm Institute approaches yet again. These pathways and networks have really become a dominant theme in my life, with the brassica tree, which will hopefully become a web, and the invisible network/pathway from farm to table.
I'm already thinking about creating a network of milk cattle breeds. I need to find a protein - I'm thinking one that occurs in milk. I think it'll be interesting because we think of species differentiation as very linear, when in fact it can be much more complex. With breeds, often the lines are crossed to form new lines, and lineages are rarely clear. This network would likely match up well on a map of europe, where most of these breeds were created. It could even be done in 3 dimensions, with the z axis showing time. I feel like this could be interesting from an anthropological perspective because it would show the migrations of people through the breeding of the cattle they brought with them.
Some sort of book like Meindertsma's following an old milk cow would be very interesting for me too. If only I had the time... Because they're not meat cows, the different paths followed by their parts after death must be incredible. It makes me wonder how different the processes are in the Netherlands versus the United States. I bet American farmers and meat processors throw more away.
