The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [117]
“Your turn,” Daniel said, nodding toward the cornered mass of feathers remaining in the pen. To me, the way he’d grabbed and flipped the chickens seemed unduly rough, their pencil legs so fragile-looking, yet when I tried to coddle the birds as I grabbed them, they flapped around even more violently, until I was forced to let go. This clearly wasn’t going to work. So finally I just reached into the flapping mass and blindly clutched at a leg with one hand and flipped it over. When I saw the chicken was none the worse for it, I switched it to my right hand (I’m a lefty), and went for a second and a third, until I had five chicken legs and a giant white pom-pom of feathers in my right hand. Daniel flipped open the lid on a crate and I pushed the pom-pom in. I don’t know if there is a more humane way to catch three hundred chickens, but I could see why doing it as fast and as surely as possible was best for all concerned.
Before we sat down to breakfast (scrambled Polyface eggs and Polyface bacon), Daniel turned on the gas under the scalding tank; the water had to reach 140 degrees before we could start. At breakfast Joel talked a little about the importance of on-farm processing, not only to Polyface but to the prospects for rebuilding a viable local food chain. To hear him describe it, what we were about to do—kill a bunch of chickens in the backyard—was nothing less than a political act.
“When the USDA sees what we’re doing here they get weak in the knees,” Joel said with a chuckle. “The inspectors take one look at our processing shed, and they don’t know what to do with us. They’ll tell me the regulations stipulate a processing facility must have impermeable white walls so they can be washed down between shifts. They’ll quote me a rule that says all doors and windows must have screens. I point out we don’t have any walls at all, not to mention doors and windows, because the best disinfectant in the world is fresh air and sunshine. Well, that really gets them scratching their heads!”
The problem with current food-safety regulations, in Joel’s view, is that they are one-size-fits-all rules designed to regulate giant slaughterhouses that are mindlessly applied to small farmers in such a way that “before I can sell my neighbor a T-bone steak I’ve got to wrap it up in a million dollars’ worth of quintuple-permitted processing plant.” For example, federal rules stipulate that every processing facility have a bathroom for the exclusive use of the USDA inspector. Such regulations favor the biggest industrial meatpackers, who can spread the costs of compliance over the millions of animals they process every year, at the expense of artisanal enterprises like Polyface.
The fact that Polyface can prove its chickens have much lower bacteria counts than supermarket chickens (Salatin’s had them both tested by an independent lab) doesn’t cut any mustard with the inspectors, either. USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don’t set thresholds for food-borne pathogens. (That would require the USDA to recall meat from packers who failed to meet the standards, something the USDA, incredibly, lacks the authority to do.) “I’d be happy to swab-test my chickens for salmonella, listeria, campylobacter, you name it, but the USDA refuses to set any levels!” As breakfast-time conversation, the topic left a lot to be desired, but once Joel gets started on the government, there’s no stopping him. “Just tell me where the finish line is, and I’ll figure out the best way to get there.”
The processing shed in question resembles a sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab, protected from (some of) the elements by a sheet-metal roof perched on locust posts. Arranged in an orderly horseshoe along the edge are stainless steel sinks and counters, a scalding tank, a feather-plucking machine, and a brace of metal cones to hold the birds