The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [120]
Peter pulled the birds from the plucker, yanked off the heads, and cut off the feet before passing the birds to Galen for gutting. I joined him at his station, and he showed me what to do—where to make the incision with your knife, how to reach your hand into the cavity without tearing too much skin, and how to keep the digestive tract intact as you pull the handful of warm viscera from the belly. As the viscera spilled out onto the stainless steel counter he named the parts: gullet, gizzard, gallbladder (which you must be careful not to pierce), liver, heart, lungs, and intestines (have to be careful here again); then he showed me which organs to keep for sale, and which ones to drop in the gutbucket at our feet. The viscera were unexpectedly beautiful, glistening in a whole palette of slightly electric colors, from the steely blue striations of the heart muscle to the sleek milk chocolate liver to the dull mustard of the gallbladder. I was curious to see the gizzard, the stomachlike organ where a chicken uses bits of ingested grit to crush its food after it’s passed down the gullet. I slit open the tight, hard nut of gizzard and there inside found tiny pieces of stone and a blade of bright green grass folded like an accordion. I couldn’t make out any insects in the gizzard, but its contents recapitulated the Polyface food chain: pasture on its way to becoming meat.
I didn’t get very good at evisceration; my clumsy hands tore unacceptably large openings in the skin, giving my chickens a ragged appearance, and I accidentally broke a gallbladder, spilling a thin yellow bile that I then had to painstakingly rinse off the carcass. “After you gut a few thousand chickens,” Galen said dryly after I’d torn another chicken, “you’ll either get really good at it, or you’ll stop gutting chickens.” Galen had clearly gotten really good at it, and he seemed to enjoy the work.
Everybody was making desultory conversation as they went about their jobs, and the morning had something of the flavor that I imagine a barn raising or a November session of corn shucking once had: people who ordinarily work alone having a chance to visit with one another while getting something useful done. Much of the work was messy and unpleasant, but it did allow for conversation, and you weren’t going to be at it long enough to get bored or sore. And by the end of the morning you had something to show for it—and a great deal more than you would have had had you been working alone. We hadn’t been at it much more than three hours before there were three hundred or so chickens floating in the big steel tank of iced water. Each of them had made the transition from clucking animal to oven-ready roaster, from killing cone to holding tank, in ten minutes, give or take.
While we were cleaning up, scrubbing the blood off the tables and hosing down the floor, customers began arriving to pick up their chickens. This was when I began to appreciate what a morally powerful idea an open-air abattoir is. Polyface’s customers know to come after noon on a chicken day, but there’s nothing to prevent them from showing up earlier and watching their dinner being killed—indeed, customers are welcome to watch, and occasionally one does. More than any USDA rule or regulation, this transparency is their best assurance that the meat they’re buying has been humanely and cleanly processed.
“You can’t regulate integrity,