The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [122]
The compost pile repulsed me, but what did that say? Beyond the stench in my nostrils (which, believe me, was not so easy to get beyond), the pile offered an inescapable reminder of all that eating chicken involves—the killing, the bleeding, the evisceration. And no matter how well it is masked or how far it is hidden away, this death smell—and the reality that gives rise to it—shadows the eating of any meat, industrial, organic, or whatever, is part and parcel of even this grassy pastoral food chain whose beauty had so impressed me. I wondered whether my disgust didn’t cover a certain shame I was feeling about the morning’s work. Just at the moment, I wasn’t sure I could imagine eating chicken again any time soon.
I certainly couldn’t imagine keeping this rotting heap of chicken guts an errant summer’s breeze away from my dinner table. But Joel probably saw that pile in a very different light than I did; who knows, by now it might not even smell all that bad to him. For Joel, yet another of the advantages of processing chickens here is that it allows him to keep the whole cycle of birth, growth, death, and decay on the land. Otherwise, the waste would end up in a rendering plant, there to be superheated, dried, and pelleted, turned into “protein meal,” and fed to factory-farmed pigs and cattle and even other chickens, a dubious practice that mad cow disease has rendered even more dubious. This is not a system he wants any part of.
It could be that Joel even finds a certain beauty in that compost pile, or at least in its redemptive promise. He certainly hasn’t hidden it away. Like every other bit of “waste” on this farm, he regards chicken guts as a form of biological wealth—nitrogen he can return to the land by locking it down with carbon he’s harvested from the woodlot. Having seen what happened to last year’s pile, and all the piles before that, Joel can see the future of this one in a way I can’t, its promise to transubstantiate this mass of blood and guts and feathers into a particularly rich, cakey black compost, improbably sweet-smelling stuff that, by spring, will be ready for him to spread onto the pastures and turn back into grass.
THIRTEEN
THE MARKET
“Greetings from the Non-Barcode People”
1. WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
Following the corn-based industrial food chain had taken me on a journey of several thousand miles, from George Naylor’s Iowa fields to the feedlots and packing plants of Kansas, through any number of far-flung food processors before ending up in a Marin County McDonald’s. After that, it didn’t surprise me to read that the typical item of food on an American’s plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater. By comparison, the grass-based food chain rooted in these Virginia pastures is, for all its complexity, remarkably short; I had been able to follow it for most of its length without leaving the Salatins’ property. The farm work in Virginia may have been more taxing than in Iowa—killing chickens as compared to planting corn—but the detective work here was a relative cinch. And all that remained to do now was to trace the grass-based food chain along the various marketing paths linking Joel’s pastures to his customers’ plates.
What had brought me to Polyface in the first place, you’ll recall, was Joel’s refusal to FedEx me a steak. I was given to understand that his concept of sustainability was not limited to agricultural technique or processing method, but extended the entire length of the food chain. Joel is no more likely to sell his grass-finished beef to Whole Foods (let alone Wal-Mart) than he would be to feed his cows grain, chicken manure, or Rumensin; as far as he’s concerned, it is all of the same industrial piece. So Polyface does not ship long distance, does not sell into supermarkets, and does not wholesale its food. All three hundred chickens we’d processed Wednesday morning would be eaten within a