DECEMBER 12TH, 2009
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I was born and raised vegetarian, and take a practical approach to my decision to continue the practice of selective eating: I learn how to kill animals. Simply put, if it makes me feel bad, and then I continue to not eat meat. At the Young Farmer’s Conference at the beginning of December, I chose a workshop called “Poultry Processing” run by Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. With the help of a fellow Evanston Township High School alumna (happy coincidence), I went through the process of killing and eviscerating two chicken and 14 lb turkey.
It’d been three years that I’d taken the life of an animal. In 2006 into 2007, I’d lived in the South Pacific, primarily in New Zealand. For a brief window of time, I’d apprenticed under a congenial pig farmed named Porky, while working with his son Ryan, a dairyman. I’d chosen pigs first because I was told bacon was the meat that always made carnivores-turned-vegetarian come back to the flesh. Bacon has an amazing hold over the American psyche. As a food educator, it seemed to me to be the most useful meat to start with. (Fried chicken, steak and fish sticks were next on the list.)
My younger sister is on her way to becoming a doctor, and we talk a lot about the feeling of flesh. As I’m deeply interested in human health and nutrition, anatomy fascinates me. Our bodies are wonderfully built, all pipes and tubes made to power us along. The tragedy of the American diet is tangible when you see how the inside of a body can be so beautifully functional, and so easily ruined. Once my sister had to disassemble a human cadaver so unhealthily obese that it took her a quarter-hour to cut through the fat. I don’t think I realized what really having to struggle to cut through flesh felt like (since you don’t see me cutting a steak, ever) until I killed a pig.
That came back to me again this past December while I trying to pull the guts out of a chicken. It’s tough. It is emotionally and physically difficult to cut through a recently-killed animal. Technically: the ominous green gall bladder needed to be pried off the liver without bursting into bitter fluids and ruining someone’s pate. Emotionally: the piece of skin that hangs at the juncture between wing and body looks sadly like our own flabby folds when the bird is plucked and cleaned. And when it came time to switch operations–to actually kill the chicken, not just disassemble them–well. I’d been able to be curious enough about anatomy to get through the first part of the day. But killing the birds (lifting them from their carrying crate, slipping them upside down into the cones, a gently pushing their trachea forward to deliver a quick, clean twist of the knife) was…what? Horrendous? Numbing? Fascinating? Tragic? Powerful? Sort of all and none. Ultimately, it was what many of us do every day when we chose to eat chicken. It was necessary to acknowledge.
We Americans (and the growing population of China, and the rest of the world) will continue to eat a lot of chicken. I for one will not. There are many people and philosophies out there about how to do it organically, or sustainably, or with good spiritual intention, as trend dictates at the time, and I think everyone engaged in that is the cream of the crop. At Stone Barns, and in all the spaces I’ve assisted in procuring and preparing meat, I’ve been lucky to work with good folks. You can meet them at farmers’ markets, or more famously read about a few in Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent new book, Eating Animals. However, for meat-eating, you can count me out. Just to know that killing makes me numb makes me forgo the flavor. At this point in my life, I don’t like having to squash compassion to eat protein.