Animal Farm!

A thing that I love- probably the main thing I love- about life in Greece is how psychologically close I am to the food supply. Of course, there's freshness and a sense of season and terrain, but there's more than that. There is a layer of gritty reality that connects you with life- yours and... theirs. I eat meat differently than I did when it was easy to suppose it just sprang into existence as a fillet in a styrovac package. Meat and poultry here- clean and safe- are none the less a lot more real than the meat I grew up with. Animals are less plucked, less tweezed, more whole: more animal than dish. Meat comes in abstract shapes and sensible portions in the local markets' refrigerated cases but in the central market it hangs large- half carcasses- from giant hooks that I grew up associating with deep frozen mafiosi stored in the back of a meat truck on the Goodfella's set rather than... dinner. It's a little vivid at first, but it's nice to know how everything fits together. (And about that- have you seen this 2009 advertisement for the Los Angeles County Fair?) 

The poultry and livestock fair is truly about dinner. Not so much our dinner as their dinner. Livestock health and nutrition dominated the fair, from yummy-looking fortified salt licks:

to apparently miraculously effective cattle feed:

Veterinary supplies glinted in their display cases:

Nest to these, a portable milking machine for mid-sized dairies who do not have a separate milking barn (many goats here are still milked by hand):

You can wheel this anywhere and milk 2 goats at once.

Some of the pavilions housed the stars themselves. In a word, they were majestic:

These beauties here, I mistook them for buffalo (we have a petite type buffalo here), on account of their being only about 2/3 the size of this milk cow:

But they are actually baby steer. (Maybe I am not so different from the ladies of LA?)

Poultry- what I had considered the light-weight meat, psychologically speaking, was actually the more hair raising pavillion. It starts out cute. Incubators:

Hatcheries:

and their products- baby chicks-

Juxtaposed unhappily with this:

What is this rubber finger-lined drum that's a little less than a meter across? Luckily there was no live demonstration, but a video showed that 2 slaughtered chicken get tossed in and emerge 90 seconds later as smooth as billiard balls.

Better news for our friends the chickens and their fabulous eggs- from 2016, all EU chickens will be free range. Maybe this is why goat and lamb are always s much tastier and more interesting- all that time with their thoughts, wandering around out doors. I know it is my favorite thing too.

When I wrote about the month of January having a distinctly Green Acres cast to it, I included a picture of these fabulous fashionable dogs who were waiting their turn in the ring at the fair. Let me end with them again because they were delightful: