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By Root 1022 0

life itself is redefined—as protein production—and with it, suffering. That venerable word becomes ‘stress,’ an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution…. The industrialization—and dehumanization—of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do.” U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance.

It’s that last one that finally ended it for me. Yes, I am a person who raises some animals for the purpose of whacking them into cuts of meat to feed my family. But this work has made me more sympathetic, not less, toward the poor wretches that have to live shoulder-to-shoulder with their brethren waiting for the next meal of stomach-corroding porridge. In ’97, when our family gave up meat from CAFOs, that choice was synonymous with becoming a vegetarian. No real alternatives existed. Now they do. Pasture-based chicken and turkey are available in whole food stores and many mainstream supermarkets. Farmers’ markets are a likely source for free-range eggs, poultry, beef, lamb, and pork. Farmers who raise animals on pasture have to charge more, of course, than factories that cut every corner on animal soundness. Some consumers will feel they have to buy the cheaper product. Others will eat meat less often and pay the higher price. As demand rises, and more farmers can opt out of the industrial system, the cost structure will shift.

After many meatless years it felt strange to us to break the taboo, but over time our family has come back to carnivory. I like listening to a roasting bird in the oven on a Sunday afternoon, following Julia Child’s advice to “regulate the chicken so it makes quiet cooking noises” as its schmaltzy aroma fills the house. When a friend began raising beef cattle entirely on pasture (rather than sending them to a CAFO as six-month-olds, as most cattle farmers do), we were born again to the idea of hamburger. We can go visit his animals if we need to be reassured of the merciful cowness of their lives.

As meat farmers ourselves we are learning as we go, raising heritage breeds: the thrifty antiques that know how to stand in the sunshine, gaze upon a meadow, and munch. (Even mate without help!) We’re grateful these old breeds weren’t consigned to extinction during the past century, though it nearly did happen. Were it not for these animals that can thrive outdoors, and the healthy farms that maintain them, I would have stuck with tofu-burgers indefinitely. That wasn’t a bad life, but we’re also enjoying this one.

Believing in the righteousness of a piece of work, alas, is not what gets it done. On harvest day we pulled on our stained shoes, sharpened our knives, lit a fire under the big kettle, and set ourselves to the whole show: mud, blood, and lots of little feathers. There are some things about a chicken harvest that are irrepressibly funny, and one of them is the feathers: in your hair, on the backs of your hands, dangling behind your left shoe the way toilet paper does in slapstick movies. Feathery little white tags end up stuck all over the chopping block and the butchering table like Post-it notes from the chicken hereafter. Sometimes we get through the awful parts on the strength of black comedy, joking about the feathers or our barn’s death row and the “dead roosters walking.”

But today was not one of those times. Some friends had come over to help us, including a family that had recently lost their teenage son in a drowning accident. Their surviving younger children, Abby and Eli, were among Lily’s closest friends. The kids were understandably solemn and the adults measured all our words under the immense weight of grief as we set to