This story originally appeared on Rodale’s Organic Life in October 2017.

It stormed this morning in upstate New York, so the 90 or so head of Berkshire pigs at Sir William Farm are in hog heaven right now as they root, roll, and wrestle each other in a wet and muddy pen. “They like to play a lot. Sort of like dogs,” Justin Conover mumbles, as we lean against a fence, watching all the action. Justin, who along with his father, Bruce, runs the farm located just outside the town of Hillsdale, near the Massachusetts border, seems like the quiet type. So while I’m prone to rambling conversations, I follow his lead and answer with a simple, “Yep.”

Bruce grew up in Iowa, where his own father was known for the award-winning Berkshires he bred to compete at the Iowa State Fair. He moved to New York in 1970, and, along with Justin, has run Sir William since the mid 1990s, leasing the land from a retired farmer, and raising pigs, as well as angus beef. The pigs are born and weaned by one of the Conover’s relatives back in Iowa before they’re shipped 1,000 or so miles east for what they call “finishing”—which means basically being fed until they’re plump enough for slaughter. The whole process lasts no more than eight months, usually; a short life for a pig. But at least at Sir William, it’s a happy one.

The rich, succulent meat these pigs produce is sold at the Conover’s popular roadside farmstand, as well as 120 miles south in Brooklyn, where you can find it in the meat case of a hip Williamsburg butcher shop called The Meat Hook. Don’t mistake the Conovers for hipsters, though. Unlike some back-to-the-landers, they aren’t precious about what they do. These guys are lifelong farmers. They just happen to do things the old-fashioned way—the only way they know how.

Unlike industrial farms, where thousands of pigs live in deplorable conditions, and where animal rights activists nightmares like gestation crates and claustrophobic conditions are the norm, the pigs at Sir William are free to go inside and out whenever they please, no matter the season. No, it’s not a bucolic fantasy farm where happy pigs frolic through the countryside foraging on wild chestnuts. But inside the barn, there are no confining stalls; the pigs are able to lounge about in beds of hay, feasting on vegetables and grains the Conovers grow themselves that are free of hormones and antibiotics. (Here's why buying organic is a really big deal if you care about animal welfare.)

It’s part of the reason I came here in the first place. While I’d rather not say this in front of my four-footed friends who are cavorting happily before me right now, I’ve come to this farm for some pretty selfish reasons.

I want to feel better about eating them.

My Problem with Pork

I’ve made peace with eating just about every other animal typical to the Western diet by attributing certain fair and unfair attributes to them that make me feel better about it. In my mind, cows are clueless, chickens are jerks, and fish are, well, fish. But there’s something about eating pigs that’s never sat well with me. Maybe it’s because Charlotte’s Web traumatized me as a child; maybe it’s because Babe still makes me cry at the age of 46. It’s something I just can’t seem to reconcile.

It’s a fact that’s become especially palpable during the past few years, as pigs have become to food what Fugazi was to 90s indie rock. That is, cool. Very, very cool. Not long ago, bacon tattoos started replacing butterfly tattoos, cracklins became the new Camel Lights, and pig roasts turned into the two-thousand-teens’ version of Lollapalooza. My friends’ obsession with all things swine still shows no signs of slowing down, either.

This summer, my Facebook and Instagram feeds were filled with images of them lording over crackly-skinned swine, spinning on their spits or splayed on picnic tables where an assembly of inked and Warby Parker-faced men and women upped their social media cred with selfies of themselves smiling demonically next to the pig’s head as they prepared to devour every single part of the poor fella, head to tail. Don’t get me wrong, though. I understand the appeal of pig roasts. More importantly, I respect the fact that in some places they are an integral, even sacred, part of certain celebrations. But in this age of macho meat eating perpetuated so often by Brooklyn-based bros, most of the roasts I’ve attended strike me as downright disrespectful.

While I’ve remained pretty quiet about my distaste for pig roasts, I brought it up recently with a favorite chef of mine named Kevin Gillespie. The bearded and tattooed owner of Atlanta-based restaurant Gunshow, Gillespie looks like he’d be right at home at a pig roast. In fact, his most recent cookbook is titled Pure Pork Awesomeness. That’s why I was so surprised when he told me he felt the same way I do. “I find the cavalier nature of people posing with dead pigs weird,” he told me on the phone recently. “I guess it’s because I’m keenly aware of the sacrifice that animal makes to feed us.”

I was even more surprised when Gillespie’s told me that he only lets himself be photographed with pigs that are alive in his cookbooks—happy and alive. “I don’t want pictures of me displaying a dead animal, because I’ve always found that pretty peculiar,” he said. “I mean, I’m an avid hunter; I advocate knowing where your food comes from. That said, I feel like there should be a certain amount of reverence and respect for the animal.”

It’s a respect Gillespie learned as a child; back when his grandfather would slaughter a hog each fall on his north Georgia farm. His parents thought it was important for him to see it; to be aware of how the world works; to be aware of how we eat. Once the pig had left its mortal coil, a moment of silence would follow, then a moment of prayer. “I’m not as religious as they were,” Gillespie told me. “But I take a pig’s death as something very tragic and very positive at the same time. It’s not black and white. It’s not simple, and it’s not trivial.”

Knowing Better

Like a lot of conscious carnivores, my issues with eating pigs started back in 2006, when I picked up a copy of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Not since Sinclair Lewis had a writer driven home the horrible realities of industrial meat production to the masses. But it was Pollan’s descriptions of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), “where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth and straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank” that really got to me. Reading those descriptions both broke my heart and killed my appetite for eating pigs.

But it didn’t last. After a while, I longed for the sausage-strewn gumbos and tasso-seasoned etouffees I’d fallen hard for while living in Louisiana in my thirties. And I wasn’t always careful about the meat I bought. As a writer of limited financial means, I started buying commercial pork again, telling my conscious to hush up whenever it started getting to me. Eventually, I turned to my Catholicism for temporary resolve, swearing off pig meat for Lent each year, and using the time to reflect on whether I needed it in my life at all. Come Easter Sunday, though, I always devoured my ham with gusto. (Here's why it's more important to be an ethical omnivore than a vegetarian.)

But this past spring I had a much needed wake up call. Once again, it came in the form of a book, one that, like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, reminded me it was time to get serious about the choices I make when buying pork again.

In Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat, writer and food activist Barry Estabrook writes that, despite the growing availability of humanely raised pork at farmer's markets and specialty butcher shops, 97 percent of the 100 million hogs raised in the US each year still come from those brutal factory farms Pollan wrote about. And that brutality is especially disturbing when you consider pigs are smart enough to register just how bad things are.

“Pigs are by far and away the most intelligent creature that we raise to eat—so much smarter than I ever could have imagined,” Estabrook told me on the phone recently. “Just knowing that makes the paradigm of industrial pork production that much more horrific.” According to Estabrook, your average pig has the intelligence of a three-year-old kid. Your average pig is able to solve math problems, play musical instruments, and even perform card tricks.

Here's why one four-year-old turned vegetarian:

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Procuring Good Pork

As I’ve learned through the years, avoiding factory-raised pork takes commitment, as well as a willingness to pay a bit more money than you do at the regular old grocery store. The good news is that getting your hands on it is easier than ever. “Five or ten years ago, getting good pork was damn near impossible unless you raised the pig or knew somebody who did,” Estabrook told me. “But that’s not the case today.” Good pork is now within relatively easy access to almost anybody, whether it’s at the local farmer’s market, a hip new butcher shops, or even your local Whole Foods.

When shopping for pork these days, I always look for meat that’s Animal Welfare Approved, which means the farm the pig was raised on was inspected by a third party to certify the pigs were processed humanely, from birth through slaughter, with access to pasture or forage.

Even some factory farms are ceding to pressure from consumers, grocery stores, and fast-food chains and offering more humanely raised pork. In Pennsylvania, for example, New Hope farm—owned by the meat processing giant Clemens Food Group—sells pork under the Clemens Farm Promise brand from pigs that spend most of their time in large open group pens. And while their sows do spend time in gestation crates, the average time they spend in them is 75 days, instead of the typical 365. While it’s not perfect, it’s definitely an improvement, and hopefully one that will catch on. “Some say if you were building a pig farm today, you would be an idiot to put in sow crates,” Estabrook tells me. “They are going away and being replaced by these group pens. While pigs are still inside, they can at least run around a little, and have a bit of a life.”

Related: This Farm Is Trying To Change The Future Of Organic Pork

Happy Pigs = Tastier Pigs

Once you’ve tasted a humanely raised pig, it’s hard, both ethically and gastronomically, to go back to commodity pork. That’s partly because the former is fed a far better diet that leads to far better tasting meat. As Estabrook says, “factory pork is to properly raised pork as a winter tomato is to something you pull out of your garden in August.” And when it comes to smaller farms like the Conovers, there’s more variety in the kind of pork you can find, too. Most supermarket pork comes from Yorkshire pigs, whose meat has little marbling and back fat (they gained popularity in the 1980s, when consumers began demanding lean pigs, AKA, “the other white meat”). But these days there are a bevy of heritage breeds—the kind of pigs raised on small farms prior to industrialized farming—to choose from, all more flavorful, fatty, and porky than your run-of-the-mill Yorkshire.

While the most popular heritage breed is the rich, sweet Berkshires that the Conovers raise, there’s also the Tamworth (Gillespie calls them “the limo of hog breeds,” since their enormous midsections produce an almost unfathomable amount of bacon), the lean Hampshire, the tender Hereford, as well as the gamey, wild-boar-like Ossabaw.

A Reckoning

Of course, no matter how humanely a pig is raised, there’s no getting around the hard reality that it’s not as a pet nor a companion. The life of a pig is always cut short, and there comes the day when he’s taken away from his open pen and hay-strewn barn. On that August day when I visited Sir William Farm, I watched as Bruce and Justin corralled three pigs into a trailer that would carry them north to their final destination. It wasn’t pleasant. Those pigs fought back hard as Bruce shoved them onto the truck. They squealed. They cried.

And so it was strange when, moments later, Bruce handed me four frozen pork chops to take home with me to the city. It was even stranger a few days later when I thawed those pork chops out, sprinkled them with salt and lemon pepper, and slipped them into my cast iron skillet. As they sizzled in lard, I noticed how each chop was around three inches thick. How instead of the brownish grey grocery store chops I’d grown up with, they were almost red as steaks. While the preparation was simple, I minded the cooking of those chops as if my life depended on it. I needed them to turn out perfectly. Because I had met these pigs. Because they lived good lives. Because they deserved it.

“It’s OK to be happy eating pigs," Kevin Gillespie told me on the phone a few days afterward. “But you also have to understand the reality. What makes me mad is that our society has become indifferent to the loss of life; that it’s OK with the fact that some animals we eat have been tortured—that their lives have been diminished.” There is a big difference in the way meat is raised, Gillespie continued. “And choosing meat that’s raised well makes all the difference."