You tell your kids that God put animals on the planet for us to eat.
I would wait for the issue to arise, and then explain the simple ecology of nutrition sources for various life forms. Many species are carnivorous, which means they eat other animals, which are not usually too happy about being eaten, but that’s how things work. Every creature has just one life, and when it’s over, something else eats it. In the case of beef, we catch it before it before it rots.
You’re earlier statements compared to this statement is confusing.
So he knows meat comes from animals but he doesn’t know they have to die to get the meat? Is he under the impression that cows eat grass and then poo out the meat he eats?
“Well”, the farmer tells him, “A pig like that, you don’t want to eat all at once.”
When my daughter was four years old we were running a lot of errands one day. Having neglected to pack her a snack, she asked if we could get something from the food cart in front of a large local hardware store. It was a hot dog stand. The kind that sells large dogs, bratwurst and good condiments. A “step up” sort to speak from your usual hot dog stand. We split one; with me just breaking off roughly one quarter of this huge dog. We went back to the car to eat it - it was a cold day, and very windy.
I was watching her eat. She was completely absorbed in it, licking the Ketchup off, and enjoying every bite. All of a sudden she stopped abruptly, looked at it carefully, and asked THE question: "Mommy, what is a hot dog?
She was a bit young for me to go into some of the ingredients such as - fillers, preservatives, casing, etc. I realized that she didn’t know that it was an animal product. I told her that it was a mix of meat “parts,” mostly beef and pork, and not a healthy food over all. She then asked, “What’s pork?” I answered, “Pork is pig.” I prepared myself for the worst - she had just recently watched Charlotte’s Web.
She paused, looking at me, then looked back at her dog. Her little hands holding it sloppily. Her mouth covered with Ketchup, and said, “Mmm, I LOOOVE PIG!!”
She ate the rest while humming and singing with mouthfuls of hot dog - “I love pig. I love pig…Yeah yeah piggy pig pig…” <munch munch>
There was a scene in the Texas-based sitcom King of the Hill where Connie, the neighbor girl from the Laotian immigrant family, has dinner with the Hills, and she gets a little disgusted and snaps, “How many cows do you guys eat in a year?” Hank gets a thoughtful look and says, “Hold on, we figured this out once.”
I don’t remember having an issue with this when I was a child, but then my father worked at a meat packing plant (in the office, for which I’m grateful) from my earliest memory so there was no mystery in our house about where meat came from. (To balance that, my mother worked in the office at a cookie company. So we always had meat and cookies to eat.)
I’m not a parent so I don’t have any stories from that perspective.
Never came up; kid is in college now.
Just wait till the kid has Bio 101. Shit will hit the fan.
My kid’s not quite two, so she doesn’t know anything about this yet. From my own upbringing, I don’t ever remember not knowing where food comes from, but my mom grew up on a farm in Poland, and we visited it, so I saw the chicken for the soup get decapitated on the tree stump, or the rabbit getting skinned for dinner. I did feel a bit sad as a child seeing this and understanding that an animal died for my meal, but, well, it didn’t bother me enough not to eat the chicken soup or the rabbit stew.
The first three all work for me. I don’t have kids, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think about what I would do if I ever do.
I think I would wait until they ask, because it otherwise seems silly to bring it up if they aren’t at least curious. And I can’t imagine not trying to soften it at least somewhat. If the kid is asking in this way, they clearly are somewhat troubled. I’m going to have to soften it so that any choice they make is not based on feelings alone.
Then, if they decide to go vegetarian, and I can afford to accommodate them, I probably would.
I also could have gone with the last poll option, as it never came up for me, my sister, and most of the adults I know well enough to know if this happened to them.
It’s just something we gradually learned over time. As long as you don’t hide that meat comes from animals, I don’t think most people would care to find out about the details from elsewhere. Even my vegetarian friends all did–unless their parents were already vegetarians and wanted their kid to be, too.
Yeah, I didn’t vote because that’s the option I was looking for. Didn’t sit my 5 year old down to watch Fast Food Nation, but he knows meat is animals without dancing around the issue.
We watch lots of Bizarre Foods. She watches it with us. She has seen plenty of animals slaughtered, butchered, and turned into sausages (and other things). It has never bothered her. She’s four.
I had to laugh at scootergirl’s post because I just watched Charlotte’s Web last night with my 3.5 year old. This was the live action version from 5-6 years ago, not the old cartoon. She kept asking why Wilber was so sad and we explained that the family would probably eat him if Charlotte didn’t save him. [Cue wide-eyed look of horror.] Then explained that the ham and bacon we eat are made out of pigs. She seemed OK with that but asked a little later: “When is Wilber going to turn into a ham?” Um, that’s not quite how it works, Honey, they would have to kill Wilber to make him into ham. She seemed OK with that for now.
Faulty thread title. That yummy sausage means a PIG died. 
Or, for the pessimistic … a RAT died, together with assorted UNIDENTIFIABLE BITS.
It never came up because we never made any effort to hide it. I’m sure our kids figured out that meat comes from animals because my wife or I mentioned it in casual conversation when they were little. I mean, when I’m annoyed with our dog I’ve been known to make jokes about cooking him and eating him – I’m sure at some point when my kids were small I must have said something similar with reference to actual livestock.
Haven’t had to deal with it myself. But in my own upbringing, heck, I was a country kid until my early teens, it was damn obvious what happened to bring that meat to the table.
Maybe if I have kids I should move to the countryside to a farming community.
Most adorable ever origin story if she becomes a future BBQ Contest judge. The carnivore awakened! 
Do you ever serve your kids chicken carved from a roast, or shrimp/prawns in their shells? Or any kind of meat on the bone? Even if they only see their parents eating those sorts of things, it becomes patently obvious to them that it’s an animal. It clicked for my kids about age 5 maybe.
We did have a couple of weird conversations before that where the kids piped up something like “daddy, isn’t it strange that there’s a food called lamb, and an animal called a lamb?”. It wasn’t always the right time to have the conversation right then, but they figured it out shortly later.
Where’s the option for “I tell them about cows and farms and hamburgers as soon as they are old enough to understand those words”?
OK, I’m not a parent, so I’m excluded anyway, but it seems to me that parents ought to be finding teachable moments all the time. If you’re eating a hamburger or driving by a cow pasture, it seems entirely appropriate to initiate a discussion about where food comes from. “What kind of animals are those? Right! Cows. Do you know why we have cows on that farm?” and so on.
This is certainly how I relate to my younger relatives or to kids I work with in Sunday School type environments. It seems successful enough that I’d do the same as a parent.