The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [118]
“Make no mistake, we’re in a war with the bureaucrats, who would like nothing better than to put us out of business.” I couldn’t tell whether Joel wasn’t perhaps being a tad paranoid on this point; the pastoral idyll has always felt itself besieged by malign outside forces, and on this farm that role is played by the government and the big processing companies whose interests they serve. Joel said state inspectors have tried to close down his chicken-processing operation more than once, but so far he’s managed to stave them off.
It was a little early in the day for a full-blown prairie populist stem-winder, but clearly I was going to get one anyway. “The USDA is being used by the global corporate complex to impede the clean-food movement. They aim to close down all but the biggest meat processors, and to do it in the name of biosecurity. Every government study to date has shown that the reasons we’re having an epidemic of food-borne illness in this country is centralized production, centralized processing, and long-distance transportation of food. You would think therefore that they’d want to decentralize the food system, especially after 9/11. But no! They’d much rather just irradiate everything instead.”
By the time we finished breakfast, a couple of cars had pulled into the driveway—two women from downstate, who had read Pastured Poultry Profit$ and wanted to learn how to process the chickens they’d started, and a neighbor or two Joel sometimes hires when he needs extra hands on processing day. Joel had once told me he regarded the willingness of neighbors to work for a business as the true mark of its sustainability, that it operated on the proper scale socially and economically, as well as environmentally.
“That’s another reason we don’t raise a hundred thousand chickens. It’s not just the land that couldn’t take it, but the community, too. We’d be processing six days a week, so we’d have to do what the industrial folks do: bring in a bunch of migrant workers because no one around here would want to gut chickens every day. Scale makes all the difference.”
After a few minutes of neighborly chitchat, everybody drifted toward their stations in the processing shed. I volunteered to join Daniel, the designated executioner, at the first station on the line. Why? Because I’d been dreading this event all week and wanted to get it over with. Nobody was insisting I personally slaughter a chicken, but I was curious to learn how it was done and to see if I could bring myself to do it. The more I’d learned about the food chain, the more obligated I felt to take a good hard look at all of its parts. It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, which I was then and still am, that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.
I stacked several chicken crates in the corner by the killing cones and, while Daniel sharpened his knives, began lifting chickens from the crates and placing them, head first, into the killing cones, which have an opening at the bottom for the chicken’s head. Taking the squawking birds out of the crate was actually the hard part; as soon as they were snug in the cones, which kept their wings from flapping, the chickens fell silent. Once all eight cones were loaded, Daniel reached underneath and took a chicken head between his first finger and thumb, holding it still. Gently, he gave the head a quarter turn and then quickly drew his knife across the artery running alongside the bird’s windpipe. A stream of blood erupted from the cut, pulsing slightly as it poured down into a metal gutter that funneled it into a bucket. Daniel explained that you wanted to sever only the artery, not the head, so that the heart would continue to beat and pump out the blood. The bird shuddered in its cone, its yellow feet dancing spastically.
It was hard to watch. I told myself the spasms were involuntary,