Pearls before Swine - Items of quality offered to those who aren’t cultured enough to appreciate them

Approach Our society slowly starts to realise that we need to make the lives of our meat a bit more bearable, however, we tent to make it easy on ourselves. Their ‘toys’ need to be cheap, fast in production and to avoid more work, last long. By photographing the objects we use to ‘entertain’ our meat I try to make a big story - that of the intensive meat industry- as small as possible. We all know the pictures that depict huge farms and distressed animals, it looks like we don’t react to it anymore. By showing something simple like their toys I hope that people can relate more to the story. Also, my strategy is not en-tented to shock anyone, I used a more aesthetic approach so people will pay attention to a story they would otherwise ignore. Text out of the book Guideline 2008/120/EC 1.1 Pigs have permanent access to a sufficient quantity of distracting material to improve the welfare of the animals. 1.2 A chain alone is insufficient. - The Council of the European union laying down minimum standards for the protection of pigs. ----------------------------------------------------- Nobody could have predicted that such an idealistic and important invention as farming would grow out to the out-of-control situation as we know it today. The intensive meat industry is one of the most complex man-made-systems ever created. Nowadays we are creating more and more laws and guidelines to keep this ‘monster’ under control. Together with input from society, the government puts a lot of effort into creating laws to look after animal welfare, protect the environment and control food safety. However, that is not the only thing our society cares about, in it’s role of consumer we are also very focused on the price, we want -and are used to eating lots of meat for a relatively cheap price. We can’t have both. These obviously contradictory desires - those of enough legislation combined with the desire for a low meat price- are hard to explain. After all, humans belong to the most intelligent beings on earth, as do pigs. Only apes and dolphins are between us.