On Eating Meat

Twice during the summer, we set up the outdoor kitchen behind the woodshed. Twice, we entered the tarp-covered chicken hoop and pulled pullets and cockerels from their sleeping roosts. At the end of those two harvests we had slaughtered enough birds to get the four of us through the winter. We determined to take out the final birds – a few old hens, no longer laying, and two or three ducks – when the band got back from tour. Even though the days would be shorter and the winds cold from the north, it seemed like a manageable project. After all, we were only talking about a half-dozen birds.

            But when it comes to killing poultry, numbers are misleading.  Killing twenty birds is a lot easier than killing six. Those summer birds were only distinguishable by gender and breed. When lowered into the killing cone, they were thanked for being a tender Buff Orpington or a proud Jersey Giant.  The next slaughter will not be so ambiguous. We knew each of them by name.

            A few days before The Event, we ran into an acquaintance at Agway. “How are the chickens?” she asked. “We have to kill some old hens,” I blurted out, much too loudly for a checkout line. “And two of the ducks,” I squeaked. “ She nodded sympathetically. “I let my hens die of old age,” she said. The cashier agreed. “Once the hens stop laying, we just keep them as pets.” I looked at Alison imploringly. “ It’s a space issue,” added my partner. “There’s not really enough room for them to overwinter in the henhouse.” The women understood. “Chickens can get pretty mean with one another if they don’t have enough space.” Dead-Eye Dixie, Sheila, and Bumpy would have to go.

            At the holiday party at work, I sought out the math teacher’s wife. “We have to kill two ducks,” I said. “They’re terrible to pluck, but the duck fat is worth it,” she responded. “But I love them so,” I said, unable to stop myself. “I love the way they duck their heads when they walk and the way they wiggle their tails.” I paused. “But I guess we’re going to kill the drakes.” “Duck sex is pretty terrible,” she pointed out. “They are so mean to the ladies.” Duck Fat and Gray-head would have to go.

I didn’t look for reasons to kill the nameless birds of the summer. They were bought with a specific kind of tenderness in mind, not the pornographic tenderness of a factory-raised bird, but the sweet and sinewy flesh of a heritage breed. We bought them for us, we raised them for us, we killed them for us. We killed them because we eat meat. But now that we’re killing Dead-Eye Dixie and her friends, I’m looking for other reasons to put them down. It’s not enough to say we purchased Bumpy with Chicken Marbella in mind. Now that they have names, are on their way to becoming pets, I can only justify their deaths by calling them mean.

Of course, this entire ethical problem could be avoided. We could either (1) stop eating meat; or (2) stop killing the meat that we eat. Of the four of us involved in this homestead operation, three of us have experimented with the vegetarian option, but none of us made it meatless through a New England winter. That leaves the second option: we could have someone else do our killing for us.

My son had an old t-shirt that said, “Nam: good soldiers, gutless politicians.” It pretty well summed up the problem of having someone else do your killing. Politicians have no problem sending other bodies off to war because, as George Orwell pointed out, they “are always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” Writing during the 1930’s, he observed how “the Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder.” Rather, they hide their atrocities with terms like “‘liquidation,’ elimination,’ or some other soothing phrase.” I would put factory farming in a similar category as these totalitarian regimes. Those animals are not killed, rather “meat units” are “processed.”

Tonight we’ll go out to the henhouse and snatch the unfortunate chickens from their roost. In the morning, I’ll corner the two drakes. I comfort myself by describing the killing of these particular birds as good flock management, but the real reason I am plucking Dead-Eye Dixie and Bumpy off this mortal coil is because I eat meat. The Chicken Marbella we had last week was not just divine because the breasts and thighs marinated for two days in wine, olives, oregano, capers and prunes; it was life-giving because a pullet was put to death.

In this era of industrialized food, we don’t like to see the death in our dinners and for that reason I apologize for the content of this week’s column. And yet, I can’t help but think that our aversion to killing makes us too easily soothed by the Hitlers and Purdues of this world. When we know the real work that goes into making a meat entrée, we are more likely to use that chicken well. The feet give oomph to a pot of black beans; the gizards, heart and back make a vibrant stock. Knowing what it took to make this food makes us very frugal cooks.

Industrialization encourages us to waste animals and waste soldiers. As more and more units are processed, we grow numb to the scandal. That numbing can be addressed, however, by getting closer to killing, by bringing it down to a human scale. The same argument, I think, could be made for war. Let those who still feel the pang of killing decide when it is truly necessary to kill more.