This is where the meat comes from

My dad was a butcher, and spent much of his working year employed at the big local meatworks, which sits on the Timaru coast. Sometimes he would take me around the place, and while he still had the smarts not to take me into the actual killing room, I still saw cows stuck in gates get a bolt to the head, and lambs that had been happily running around a field earlier in the day skinned and filleted.

It probably should have made me a vegetarian for life, seeing that kind of thing at such a young age, but it didn't. I still eat meat, and my reasons for doing so are as complex and contradictory as any other human's, but at least I know where it comes from. You should always know how the meat is made.

I often feel the same way when I read and see things that show what goes on behind the scenes of the movies I enjoy, which invariably include some pretty terrible things, and some awful people.

Like the wholesale slaughter of other creatures for my own sustenance, I'm not ignoring any of that, and certainly not condoning it, but I do have to acknowledge it, and acknowledge my own failings in saying that I can live with that, because films require hundreds, if not thousands, of people to get made, and the laws of human nature mean at least some of them are going to be complete pricks. 

It's somewhat different when it's one primary creative voice who is the shit. It won't be a problem ignoring JK Rowling or Kevin Spacey or a thousand other such dickheads for the rest of my life, and while I certainly did have some actual profound emotional reactions to comics written by Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman, I don't need to buy anything they do ever again. (I do, for all my sins, still love Father Ted so, so much, but I can attribute that show's success to Arthur Mathews, and ignore the other guy.)

It only takes a  small piece of research to get a little background and some actual context, and then you can see what you can live with. Because this is where the meat is made, and when you find that flesh is some rancid shit, you move on to a new hunting ground.

Anyway, they announced a few weeks back that they're closing down the local freezing works, the factory my father was convinced would close in 1986, and they will probably bowl the ancient factories and put up sparkling new subdivisions in the next few decades. and in 50 years time the shrieks of the ghosts of millions of dead livestock that went into that killing room might finally have faded, but it will be the place that helped show me how the world works.  

This is how the meat is made, said my Dad. Don't look away, boy.