I’d like to say up front, before I tell this story, that I love my wife very much. That being said, she was decidedly not brought up in the country.
Last summer, we were on a vacation for a bit, which at one point included taking the little nephews to a petting zoo. At the zoo, we were introduced to a truly huge pig, which the employee told us was a “lard hog,” a variety of pig especially raised for its lard rather than for its pork. If you didn’t know previously that there were different types of pigs raised for these different purposes, that’s pretty interesting.
So after the zoo, my wife, her mother, her stepdad, and myself are sitting in a restaurant, and we talk about the pig. My wife (did I mention that I love her a lot?) asks, “So, how do they get the lard out of the pig?”
I answered, “…well, the pigs don’t usually give it up willingly.” She was shocked. “They KILL them?” Apparently, she thought that lard was made by milking the pigs, then churning out the lard, the way butter is churned out of cow milk. We were pretty merciless with the “lard milker” jokes for the rest of the trip.
Yep, that’s my wife. The same woman who, when I told her that we routinely killed and ate the chickens that we kept on my parents’ old place, said, “You killed your PETS?!” Um, no, they weren’t pets, honey…