What We Eat - Am I Chicken?

Aren’t they cute, the little chicks? But they grow up to be chickens, and then we eat them.  

1. With a Cluck in My Throat

I’ve been buying chickens at the farmers market for as long as I can remember, always wrapped in a clear plastic bag, sans the pointy toes and ugly head. I never really look at them as an animal that had feathers, a beak and a cluck in it’s throat, probably because I’ve been conditioned to deny or ignore the connection between what I eat and where it came from, especially when it comes to meat.

If you are a regular reader of “Edible San Francisco”, you’ve no doubt noticed I seem to be obsessed with how we kill animals for food. It’s a gruesome topic because the slaughter of livestock is an untidy business. But my fascination doesn’t preclude me from eating meat, rather it has forced me to search out purveyors who raise their animals humanely and take the utmost care when it comes to ending their lives. It’s also led me down this path to the end of the line, so to speak, to the point where the only cure for my obsession is to become a willing participant in securing my dinner. The chickens I buy at the market are live birds until it comes time to slaughter them, at which point they become an ingredient for a recipe. But someone has to kill them, and I want that someone to be me.

2. Running Around Like a You Know What

Wanting to kill your dinner is not a novel idea. It’s called hunger and referred to as hunting. Needing to do the deed is an all together different matter. Part one of this two-part article explores why I want to slaughter a chicken, assuming by the end writing it down, I still do. Part two involves meeting the fine-feathered-fowl that will exchange its life for the sustenance of my family and personally inflicting the fatal blow, assuming (please excuse the obvious pun) I don’t chicken out.
 
Why do I want to kill a chicken? Well, for starters, I imagine it as slightly more manageable (and involving much less blood – the sight of which unfortunately causes me much discomfort) than killing a cow. Yes, the quest to meet my meal should also include Mr. Beef at some point, but there’s a disturbing scene in my "Ask the Meatmans Beef Slaughtering" DVD that might change my mind. Mr. Meatman walks up to a cow in his pasture, points the barrel of the rifle at its head, and you know what.

Yep, he shoots it.

That’s just not how it’s done with chickens. Growing up, I did used to plunk the cooing turtle doves off the telephone wires with my trusty Daisy air rifle, so I imagine a clear shot to the head of a chicken would do the trick. Or not.

The old-fashioned farmyard method, which employs the farmer and his just-sharpened axe, is the most direct route with a bird in the hand. It’s also an act that at some point coined the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head chopped off”, which they sometimes do. And like the Energizer battery, sometimes a headless chicken keeps going, and going, and going. You may have heard the story of Mike, a Wyandotte rooster living peacefully (maybe not so peacefully since he found his neck on the chopping block) in Fruita, Colorado, when on September 10, 1945, farmer Lloyd Olsen’s errant axe ended up severing most of his head.  Lloyd’s sideswipe managed to leave just enough of Mike’s brain stem and part of one ear, so that he went on living for another 18 months (he was kept alive and fed with an eyedropper that dispensed food down his gullet). Dubbed “Miracle Mike”, the headless chicken became a sideshow attraction, traveled to New York and Atlantic City, and was eventually featured in Life Magazine (October 25, 1945 issue). Alas poor Mike - you can imagine the endless stream of “chicken with his head cut off” jokes he had to endure. {Link to more about Mike}

For the pastured poultry farmer with a small flock, the standard slaughtering practice involves slitting the jugular vein, a flick of the wrist technique that requires a razor sharp knife and a relatively calm bird. It doesn’t help matters that the best way to drop a chicken head first into a “killing cone” (where the neck is conveniently exposed and the rest of the bird is confined from flapping and kicking ) is to grab a chicken is by its feet and hoist it up in the air. Getting a frantic chicken to calm down enough to shunt it into a cone sometimes means having to stroke its breast or throat , a method which brings to mind “The Hen Flower”, a passage from Galway Kinnell’s hallucinatory epic poem, “The Book of Nightmares” (funny how my mind can conjure up poetry and poultry slaughter at the same time).

and be stroked with a finger
down the throat feathers,
down the throat knuckles,
down over the hum
of the wishbone tuning its high D in thin blood,
down over
the breastbone risen up
out of breast flesh, until the fatted thing
woozes off, head
thrown back
on the chopping block, longing only
to die.

If the chickens of the world only knew of Miracle Mike’s story, then perhaps they might be willing to take the chance of putting their neck on the chopping block. But the axe method is for the few, not the flock, and when there are dozens of birds to be processed, the technique requires finesse not flailing.

3. Playing Michael Pollan

The photo of the chicken in the traffic pylon, à la chicken cone, is courtesy of Lily Binns, a cookbook editor at Ten Speed press (see Lily’s essay on Mexican food in this issue). Lily shares my fascination with how animals are raised and processed for food, but she’s way ahead of me in the killing column. Rather I should say she came thisclose to harvesting her own chicken dinner, but in the end she, well (you know what’s coming), chickened out.

As Michael Pollan relates in his latest book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (Penguin Press, 2006), to slit a chicken’s throat requires a precisely placed blade. An accurate swipe across the windpipe, which if it goes astray, can decapitate the chicken, making the already messy job, a bit more untenable.

Lily grew up in Cornwall CT, and lived right down the road from Pollan, who was a friend of her father’s. Pollan, the author of “Botany of Desire” (Random House, 2002), had yet to finish writing “The Omnivores Dilemma”, although the events that follow would seem to foreshadow part of the book.

Three years ago this spring, Pollan set out on a quest to replicate the delicious quality of a local farmer’s chickens that were raised on yogurt and cereal. He purchased his own birds, fed them the special diet and made plans to complete the circle by slaughtering and processing his tiny flock (or what was left after the raccoons invaded his hen house). Lily had been following his progress and was invited along to participate. She jumped at the chance.

So I asked her, why?

“It was a sensational story for one thing”, she replied with her food writer’s hat in place and it gave her a chance to follow in her fathers footsteps. Lily’s dad pastured his own sheep while she was growing up and always insisted on doing the slaughtering himself, a pastime that introduced her to the concept of raising animals for food. Lily also mentioned the ethics of Wendell Berry as an influence. Berry, the well-known author of many books on sustainable agriculture and agrarian ideals stresses that stewardship of the land is vital to the survival of the American farmer and part of that responsibility is the humane treatment of the animals we raise for food. While sticking a chicken into a cone for slaughter may seem inhumane to some, the way of death visited upon them in an industrial processing plant is beyond imagining.

Pulling my copy of Berry’s book, “Another Turn of the Crank” (Counterpoint Press/ 1995) down off the shelf, I can’t help but notice the synchronicity when looking at the cover illustration. “Plucked Clean” (1882), a canvas by American trompe l'oeil painter William Harnett, depicts a freshly killed chicken carcass with nary a feather, hanging upside down from a board. Like all of Harnett’s work, it is hauntingly real, with extraordinary detail right down to the nubbins of the chicken’s skin.

4. Which Came First?

If there’s one more chicken story to be told, it’s of the live bird sold on the spot that most likely is intended for a poule au pot. Chef Thom Fox of the Acme Chophouse tells me the story of a former girlfriend’s grandmother who dragged home a couple live chickens for dinner. Her “old country” insistence at preparing only freshly killed poultry for soups or stews presented him with a hands-on opportunity most fledgling cooks never experience. So in a rural Pennsylvania basement with a dull knife and a chicken neck hanging over the edge of the sink, he killed his dinner for the first (and last) time. Thom relates that it was a “wild experience”, one of those events which just unfolds without notice, and he happened to be in the right place at the right time. Reaching into the still warm carcass to eviscerate the bird and pulling out an egg is something he can still recall with vivid detail. “There’s nothing fresher than that” he says, although I’m not sure whether he means the freshly harvested egg or the just-slaughtered chicken.

Kinnell’s “Hen Flower” continues:

When the ax-
scented breeze flourishes
about her, her cheeks crush in,
her comb
grays, the gizzard
that turns the thousand acidic millstones of her fate
convulses: ready or not
the next egg, bobbling
its globe of golden earth,
skids forth, ridding her even
of the life to come.

5. Zen and the Art of Chicken Slaughter

20 years ago, I used to get up at 5 a.m., chant  a shivering nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo into a worthless wall heater and then rode my bike to work, all the while silently reciting Buddhist prayers that demanded an appreciation for all living things.

And now here I am wanting to kill a chicken. Not exactly in line with my former train of thought and yet I’m still after the same elusive truth.

The fact that I’m looking for it by way of completing a task described to me as horrific and terrible isn’t lost to this former Zen bicyclist. So what do I think after hearing these stories and trying to imagine myself axe or knife in hand? I think I’ll drag Kinnell into this one more time because he strides toward the end of his soliloquy on the sacrificed hen with this:

I remember long ago I sowed
my own first milk
tooth under hen feathers, I planted under hen feathers
the hook
of the wishbone,
which had broken itself so lovingly toward me.

For the future.

It has come to this.




Look for part two of this article in the fall issue of ESF.
{originally published in Edible San Francisco - Summer 2006. Copyright 2006 Bruce Cole}

Excerpt from “The Hen Flower”, from THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES by Galway Kinnell. Copyright 1971, renewed 1989 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.