Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [46]
From time to time one of the babies would be overtaken by the urge for a power nap. Staggering like a drunk under the warm glow of the brooder lamp, it would shut its eyes and keel over, feet and tiny winglets sprawled out flat. More siblings keeled onto the pile, while others climbed over the fuzzy tumble in a frantic race to nowhere.
It’s a good thing they don’t stay this adorable forever. I’d raised turkeys before, with the cuteness factor being a huge worry at the start. When they imprinted on me as Mama and rushed happily to greet me whenever I appeared, I just felt that much more like Cruella De Vil. Inevitably, though, all adorable toddlers turn into something else. These babies would lose their fluff to a stiff adult plumage, and by Thanksgiving they’d just be beasts—in the case of the toms, testosterone-driven beasts that swagger and charge blindly at anything that might be a live female turkey (i.e., anything that moves). As time took its course, turkey nature itself would nudge us toward the task of moving them from barnyard to the deep freeze. This one little shoebox of fluff, plus grain, grass, and time, would add up to some two hundred pounds of our year’s food supply.
I can’t claim I felt emotionally neutral as I took these creatures in my hands, my fingers registering downy softness and a vulnerable heartbeat. I felt maternal, while at the same time looking straight down the pipe toward the purpose of this enterprise. These babies were not pets. I know this is a controversial point, but in our family we’d decided if we meant to eat anything, meat included, we’d be more responsible tenants of our food chain if we could participate in the steps that bring it to the table. We already knew a lot of dying went into our living: the animals, the plants in our garden, the beetles we pull off our bean vines and crunch underfoot, the weeds we rip from the potato hills. Plants have the karmic advantage of creating their own food out of pure air and sunlight, whereas we animals, lacking green chlorophyll in our skin, must eat some formerly living things every single day. You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened, or you can look it in the eye and know it. I would never presume to make that call for anyone else, but for ourselves we’d settled on a strategy of giving our food a good life until it was good on the table. Our turkeys would be pampered as children, and then allowed a freedom on open pasture that’s unknown to conventionally raised poultry. Thanksgiving was still far away. And some of these birds would survive the holidays, if all went according to plan. Our goal was to establish a breeding flock. These were some special turkeys.
Of the 400 million turkeys Americans consume each year, more than 99 percent of them are a single breed: the Broad-Breasted White, a quick-fattening monster bred specifically for the industrial-scale setting. These are the big lugs so famously dumb, they can drown by looking up at the rain. (Friends of mine swear they have seen this happen.) If a Broad-Breasted White should escape slaughter, it likely wouldn’t live to be a year old: they get so heavy, their legs collapse. In mature form they’re incapable of flying, foraging, or mating. That’s right, reproduction. Genes that make turkeys behave like animals are useless to a creature packed wing-to-wing with thousands of others, and might cause it to get uppity or suicidal, so those genes have been bred out of the pool. Docile lethargy works better, and helps them pack on the pounds. To some extent, this trend holds for all animals bred for confinement. For turkeys, the scheme that gave them an extremely breast-heavy body and ultra-rapid growth has also left them with a combination of deformity and idiocy that renders them unable to have turkey sex. Poor turkeys.