Let’s face it. The industrial agriculture system in this country is not looking out for your or my health. Their job is to generate as much “shareholder value” (aka money) as they can in the least expensive way possible. Over the course of the past 5 years I’ve become more and more disillusioned with the methods of most food production in this country. I’ve come to the realization that my only recourse to fight that system is to vote with my dollars and effectively “Opt Out”. Now I’m not going to claim that I’m in the position or have the skills to produce all my own food. But you have to start somewhere. Hence why I have a large garden, support local farmers as much as financially possible and now am also looking for alternative ways to supply my meat. And that’s how I found myself yesterday at a friend’s homestead for chicken processing day. Perhaps if enough people decide to Opt Out as well, we can affect some change in society. That’s my hope at least.
Maybe you’re wondering why any of that matters. Or maybe you’re thinking, “It sounds like you’re just some hippie dippy, tree-hugging, elitist yuppie, save the world! type.” Hmm… maybe I am. Damn the truth hurts… 🙂
Okay, let’s say you love a good burger, can’t stand PETA ads and think animals sprouted legs to make it easier to walk them to the nearest plate and fork. And let’s even say the world is a ginormous place so who cares about the environmental impacts of disposing all that excrement and waste animal parts like gizzards and intestines and grow all that feed. You’re motto is “cheap food and lots of it!” I still think we’ve got a huge problem. It’s two-fold: “garbage in, garbage out” and “you are what you eat.” If you raise an animal on shitty feed, comprised of unhealthy grains laden with pesticides and antibiotics and other chemicals to fend off disease in the factory environment, you will be generating tissue and bone comprised of those same shit components. You are what you eat.
All that being said, I’m not going to lie. When I stop to think about yesterday, it’s tough. It makes me sad frankly. Both in what I did and in how callous we’ve become as a society. Most of us don’t even stop to consider that an animal gave its life when we take that bite of food. Hell, I know a kid who is so “citified” that she was grossed out to learn that carrots grow in the dirt! It’s that disturbing disconnectedness from our natural world, the alarming rise of disease in this country and my own digestive problems that made me decide to get closer to the sources of my food.
On the way home yesterday, I kept thinking about the first chicken I killed. Boy, is it tough to use that word. I mean, sure I swat bugs in the house. And just like probably every little boy has done since the invention of the magnifying glass, I popped ants on the driveway in the sun as a kid. But this was just different. This is a warm-blooded animal. Yeah, I know, I know. They say meat birds are about as dumb as a stump. But it still looks at you. Those damn eyes.
I’m sure the vegetarians/vegans out there will scream that I’m a horrible person for taking the life of an animal. And they’ll think I’m a horrible person for continuing to do something that makes me feel sad instead of stopping meat eating altogether. To them all I can say is that I eat plenty of vegetarian meals. But since I still like the taste of meat, I’d rather know the animal I’m eating was at least allowed a decent life.
There will also be the chest-thumping, “Suck it up! Be a man! It’s just an f-ing bird!” crowd. And I get why they might say that too. We’re far removed from our ability to truly function as a part of the natural world. We’re soft in that respect. Many of us are so dependent upon our modern-day “just-in-time” supply chain to fill supermarket shelves that we wouldn’t know what to do if it suddenly broke down. Heck, look at what happens when there’s a big snowstorm in the northeast. Suddenly, not a scrap of bread or bottle of milk to be had! God forbid we ever had to live off the land in any meaning way. Talk about a sudden drop in the pigeon and seagull populations!
But for the suck it up crowd, I simply feel sorry for them. I believe it’s our humanity and respect for life that separates us from a lion on the savannah about to take down a gazelle. Or a barn owl about to grab a mouse. Of course they don’t give a crap how their prey feels about suddenly becoming a meal. But I’m happy that I’m respectful of the life that’s being lost for my next meal. And I don’t expect the “suck it up” crowd to ever be able to understand that.
Frankly, at times while writing this I wonder if people will think I’m nuts to take the time to write so much from one day of “chicken processing.” But ultimately, I’d say, try doing it yourself. Then come talk to me. Take the knife in your hands and be responsible for taking that life. In fact, a friend said she thinks it should be a required experience for anyone who wants to be a carnivore. And I agree. And then if you still don’t feel anything, you can call me nuts. I’m okay with that. But for me, this memory of sadness will stay for a long time. Will I do it again? Yes, definitely. Because I feel it’s absolutely vital that we stop looking at the plastic-wrapped lump of food sitting on the supermarket shelf as simply “meat” and start associating it with the flesh of an animal that gave it’s life so that we can eat. Only then will we start to give a shit about what we put in our bodies and how it was raised.
As for the day itself, it flew by pretty fast. There were enough people helping out and chatting that I found myself distracted from what we were actually doing. In fact, it made a lot of the day actually fun. Like the chicken wrangling. Or the ass jokes when you’re doing the final cleaning. But the killing was not enjoyable at all. I think the best you can hope to do is be respectful as you’re doing it. And frankly speaking, there were a few times I got a bit choked up on the way home thinking about it. But I no longer want to look at the food I put in my body in the same way I would some other consumer product sitting on a shelf in Best Buy or Target.
Most farmers and homesteaders that I’ve heard talk about the subject, say they generally never name any animal that’s meant to be eaten. They tend to only name animals that are work, guard or pets. Now I know why. It would be tough to look down at the plate knowing that only several hours before it was a pet. Even without it being a pet, I don’t think I’ll ever look at another chicken on my plate the same.