Day 133: Looking Dinner in the Eye

Just a little update on our small flock of chickens: our laying hens consist of 18 pullets just starting to lay cute little half-sized eggs and four rescued hens from Granddaddy's flock. His were getting picked off five at a time by some persistent predator so we took the last four down to our coop and have been getting at least one egg a day from them since. In our meat-bird flock we have fourteen full-grown broilers that need to be processed, and around a dozen more broiler chicks that will be ready in about six weeks for processing. 

I use the word processing, but I mean butchering. Maybe I should just say butchering and not shy away linguistically from the reality of killing animals for food. But I gravitate toward processing because it is less violent-sounding, and the way we kill chickens is not violent in nature, but rather is as gentle and quick and humane as possible, and is part of a natural process of energy changing form. The energy within that bird's body will live on in our bodies, and then will live on in the bodies of whatever we fertilize or feed, on and on. It's all part of a process. 

However you want to say it, today was the first day in my life that I have helped "process" any livestock. Five birds is about all a freezer can handle in one day, so that's how many we selected. William helped Jeremy pick out the five birds he thought were "old enough" to go into the freezer.  

Looking dinner in the eye.

The five fattest birds.

Jeremy had all the stations set up. The process started with Jeremy hanging the birds by their feet and slitting their throats so they would die quickly and bleed out thoroughly. Then he scalded them in a pot that we'd set up over a fire. This pot belonged to Jeremy's step-dad's parents, Cap and Nell Bedell, who had a farm in Gentry, Arkansas back in the day. We inherited it when Nell passed away and are now putting it to good use. 

 

After the birds were scalded Jeremy passed them to me to pluck. At this stage we plucked off most of the feathers before they went back to Jeremy for gutting. This step made some pretty impressive squelching sounds and I thought it would be gross, but actually it was kind of interesting to see all the organs. On one of birds, the gall bladder broke open and the liquid that came out of there was the most vivid phthalo green. Did you know chickens carry around a little sack of phthalo green within their warm, red bodies? I did not. He snipped out the livers, hearts, and gizzards to be saved for eating (by him - organ meat is not my favorite), and after he finished getting the guts out and the head and feet off, I did the work of getting as many of the little feathers off as I possibly could. It was slow work, but thankfully at this point the chicken looked very much like what I am used to dealing with in the kitchen. Once thoroughly plucked and rinsed, they went into bags and into a cooler of ice for chilling before being transferred to the freezer. 

The whole process wasn't as emotionally upsetting as I thought it would be. I told Jeremy as I was bending over a chicken carcass removing the fine little feathers from all the nooks and crannies of the little body, "If I could go back in time and tell my 16-year-old self that at age 38 I would be butchering chickens, I wouldn't believe me." My vegetarian 16-year-old self would have been aghast. 

Where were the kids this whole time? Did we use this as an opportunity to let them learn where their food comes from and to participate directly in the food chain? No, they were inside watching shows. We asked if they wanted to come out and see, and the answer was a resounding no. But, luckily for them we have nine more chickens to process soon, so they can learn that valuable life lesson (or be converted to vegetarianism) another day. 

And after all that work, did we celebrate by having a sumptuous dinner of roast chicken? Again, no. I had to put just a little bit of space between the processing and the eating of the chickens. At least a day or two to get the smell of wet feathers out of my nose. We had a summer feast, though: corn on the cob slathered with butter, tomato slices sprinkled with salt, green beans marinated with garlic, basil, and red wine vinegar, red beans with a little Tony Chachere's seasoning, all on a bed of white rice. In a day or two we'll cook up a chicken and savor it with full, deep appreciation.