Title: Sacred Cow
Category: Video
Year: 1993
Synopsis: My very first video, this was made around the time I became a vegetarian. I videotaped the cows in the beginning part of the video near my dad's house in my hometown, Iowa City, Iowa. As for the slaughtering scene, that was appropriated from a certain famous war film. I think that we need to be reminded from time to time about the reality of where meat comes from. In the not-so-distant agrarian culture of the early US, people had to raise and slaughter their own animals in order to eat meat. Today, meat is a complete abstraction; sterile, packaged, processed. As the author of "Fast Food Nation" points out, when you're eating a burger from a typical fast food joint, you're eating a mixture of possibly hundreds of different cows. Anyway, if people today were required to raise and slaughter their own animals, I think a lot fewer people would be eating meat.

Production Notes: For the music, I played and overdubbed viola, guitar, tabla and other percussion. The style of the music segues from Indian-esque to Metal to Bluegrass. This piece, like many others from 1993 and 1994, was created only with analog equipment (no computers).