The woman cautiously approached the stand. The wooden tables were set out in the shape of a horseshoe, covered in boxes of ice, and in each box there was unidentifiable meat wrapped in little packages.
She walked up to one of the packages, picked it up, and palpated the meat with her thumbs through the transparent plastic, seeing if blood would come out (it did.) She then noticed a sticker on the transparent plastic. It was a little happy sun with the words CRUELTY-FREE written on it.
She palpated the cold meat through the plastic with her thumbs, making small pools of blood in the dimples.
"This isn't cruelty-free," the old woman said, "this is meat. This is real meat. It feels like meat."
"It is real meat," said the man in the hat, "but we treat the animals --"
"It doesn't matter how you treat the animals," she said, "if you raise an animal as food, it's not cruelty-free, that's a lie."
"Now hold on --"
"Period." She hadn't felt this way for a very long time, but she felt the delicious feeling of righteous anger begin to bubble up. "You can't just anesthetize an animal before you kill it -- or shoot a bolt through its head-- and call it cruelty-free. I've lived a very long life -- look at my face," she pointed to her eyes, "these eyes have seen a lot. I wear my suffering on my face. I was a happy kid, but people have been awful to me. I've lived here fifty years and they get awfuller by the day, and they haven't even gotten to the part where they kill me yet..."
"That's true," said the man, "but--"
"And you -- right, I know what you're going to say -- you're going to say you put them out of their misery!"
The man looked at her.
"The misery that you all," she waved her finger around, "well I don't know about you specifically, but surely someone along this whole chain, caused."
"Ugh, listen --" but the farmer was interrupted yet again by a customer.
At that moment, the farmers wheeled out a live pig on a pallet. The pig was upright, standing there, unrestrained. The farmer turned to the customer, said something out of earshot, and the customer nodded. Then the farmer disappeared into the back of his truck.
The woman took the chance to approach the customer. "Excuse me," she said, tapping him on the shoulder.
"Hm?" they said.
"What's the pig for?" she said.
"It's for me!" they said.
"You're going to take a pig home just like that?" she asked.
"Uh, no!" the customer said, "they're about to pack it up for me."
The farmer came out of the truck with a bandsaw, and sawed through the head of the pig.