Meat Manifesto

I am an omnivore.  I do enjoy all sorts of foods, and try and eat conscientiously.  What does that mean?  To me it means being aware of where the food comes from (the closer the better) correlated with how it is raised (organic? pasture raised? sustainably produced? happy critters?) with an attempt to mostly eat veggies (thank you Michael Pollan).  I do think about becoming a vegetarian, (probably not a vegan though), and I do consume less meat than I used to.

Most of us don't really understand what it means to eat a living animal that walks on the ground.  Fishing is perhaps the closest we get to killing, cleaning, and preparing a food stuff, and fewer of us are doing that these days.  Plus our oceans are so very over harvested that I decided to fish less and less these past years.  But how many of us have killed and cleaned a chicken?  Something that most of the world eats (one figure I read online was 97,000 chickens a minute).  I did this a couple years ago when I culled all the roosters out of my flock.  Believe me, they were annoying, and I didn't want to piss off my neighbors any further as they crowed constantly (yes even at night).  They kind of beat up the hens too.  So taking their lives wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.  It certainly wasn't pleasant, but it was somewhat rewarding too.  A rite of passage if you will.

I raised these birds since they arrived at my doorstep newly hatched.  Fed them, provided them green grass to eat, play and scratch on, and learned a great deal about them if not from them.  Hey, I've eaten chicken in its various forms all my life, and it was about time I got close and personal and truly understood what it means to eat chicken.  Animals die to feed us plain and simple.  Remember that these animals evolved with humans with that purpose for thousands of years, their qualities (including deliciousness) are a result of selective breeding over time.

Anyway, chickens are well suited and adapted to living with humans who care for them (see my previous blog on raising chickens).   So I grabbed them at night, and cut their heads off, letting the blood spurt out onto a fire I made.  I know, it sounds creepy, but I didn't want a bloody mess for my dog to go nuts after or worse, attract rats.  Then I boiled a big pot of water, and began the dirty job of plucking feathers (needless to say, the odor was foul, nyuck, nyuck, nyuck).  Two hours later, I had three small roosters plucked, resembling more closely to what we purchase at the store.  I then went to task eviscerating them, and cleaning out their insides, being careful not to pierce their oil gland and gall bladder.  It was strange to hold a warm raw chicken and know that it was okay to eat.  I then spatchcocked the meat, and froze it.  Perhaps with practice, I'd get better at it.  I barbecued them with some friends over the Christmas holidays.

Now these roosters were bantams (small chickens).  I had a Dominique, and two English game cocks both being heirloom chicken breeds.  Dominiques (or Dominikers as my mother calls them), a U.S. breed, were once the most popular breed in America.  They were a utilitarian breed, being reliable egg layers and a good meat breed, but not the best of either category.  By the 1970's the breed was close to extinction in the U.S., reduced to only a few flocks.  Careful management by concerned poultry aficionados brought them back to suitable numbers, and can now be purchased at many hatcheries across the country.  Eating these types of chickens is a different experience from the "veal chicken" we get at the grocery store.  Both the breed type and the healthy lifestyle contribute to the different eating experience.  The flesh is chewy, and the breast meat  is about 1/4 to 1/3 the size of the steroid monsters we are accustomed to.  But the flavor was intensely rich and delicious.

So what if the whole world were to go vegetarian, or perhaps vegan?  What would happen to all the breeds of edible livestock.  Would we envision some Vonnegut-like scenario where people only see them in zoos?  Would all the different breeds go extinct?  Or, perhaps some other scenario.  Would they run rampant and outcompete our existing indigenous fauna, causing their extinction? Is it possible that these species are successful biologically because they are delicious, and are an important partner to our civilization?  I say yes.  Pigs, cows, chickens, goats, sheep, and many more would not be as successful spreading their genes around the planet if it weren't for people.

Even still, we need to treat farm animals like the marvelous creatures they are.  Raise them on healthy farms that are ecologically sustainable, provide them with all the resources that make them excel at what they are, allow them to live a sufficient life period, and respectfully take their lives when it comes time to harvest them.  I wouldn't expect everyone to raise their meat at their own homes (although you'd be surprised how easy it is to raise chickens and rabbits in a suburban setting), and lucky for us conscientious consumers we can purchase sustainable, humanely raised meat products.  Click here for more info.