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Playing Chicken

At some point today 26 chicks are scheduled to arrive at the Morehead Post Office. Cute little fuzzy things, sure to delight little Maggie, who may or may not understand that it's bad form to name creatures one proposes to eat.

This was not my idea.

Dan came back from holiday and announced that it was time to raise chickens. His daughter -- my wife -- was delighted, for this has been a long-running (ahem) discussion in our household. I maintain you can't raise chickens in town, and you probably can't, even though my old friend Patrick has been doing so in Oakland and now in Portland. But they're going out to the barn by the orchard, and so I don't have much say in the matter. (My mother-in-law, whose father was one of Col. Sanders' early lawyers and who knows more than a thing or two about the killing and eating of fowl, is about as excited as I am.)

We don't eat a lot of meat, but we eat some. And we just put a quarter of a cow on the bottom shelf of our freezer. A local, grain-fed cow that we never met, thank you.

All summer I've been writing that it's important to know where your food comes from, and I believe that. My wife argues that it's hypocritical to eat meat if you're not willing to kill it, and I have no logic with which to counter.

But I have a story.

Back on the west coast a friend of a friend down in the Medford area raised rabbit, and more than once I was happy to dine on rabbit stew at Jack's house. Rabbit stew and Yorkshire pudding. Delightful. His son is all growed up and playing bass in some punk rock band. Funny how time slips away.

More recently, in the years before Maggie, we went to Belgium and ate at least one memorable dinner of rabbit at a small restaurant in a tiny little town accompanied by some of the finest beer known to man or woman. I'm not squeamish about meat, generally. Deer, bear, alligator? Sure, why not? (I don't eat seafood, but that's an entirely different matter.)

So we came back from Belgium and decided to recreate that feast. Susan tracked down an exquisite rabbit stew recipe and we spent most of a day running all over Nashville tracking down ingredients. Our last stop was at the farmer's market, where there used to be a first-rate butcher shop (before the powers that be decided the farmer's market needed to be yuppified and drove out all the good vendors who actually served their community). And, yes, they had rabbit.

It wasn't cut into little bits and pieces of meat.

It was a long, stretched out carcass, the plastic tight like a muscle shirt.

It looked just like one of our cats, skinned and dressed for dinner.

In my family we take our cats seriously. Honestly, we do better with cats than we do with people, for the most part.

I could not do it.

I made Susan put the rabbit back in the freezer. I could not do it. She was, quite properly, furious with me.

But I could not do it.

I don't do real well with heights, either, and occasionally I discover that there is a rung on the ladder past which I may not go.

That's life, and that's what this poor butchered rabbit felt like.

Now, I have no problem deboning a chicken breast, long as I can keep my hands warm. And chicken doesn't look at all like cat when it's huddled in the butcher's counter at the grocery store.

But we now contemplate the prospect of cutting the heads off however many of our 26 little fluffy chicks survive (and none may, rendering the whole discussion moot; there are plenty of predators out by the barn), dropping the carcass in boiling water so as to remove the feathers, then burning off whatever feathers don't come quietly and eviscerating the bird. Or something like that, I don't really know how the whole thing works.

What I'm pretty sure of is that I can't be a party to that process.

I might try, I don't know. Some days I can go further up the ladder than others.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure I won't have any problem eating the processed fowl. Especially if we get the garlic planted.

And I shall try not to become too attached to the little fuzzy things coming in today's mail.

P.S. For whatever reason, none of the chicks survived transportation, and so Dan picked up a very sad little box at the Post Office this morning (I was, apparently, wrong about their scheduled arrival time; we didn't leave them there overnight, not to fear). They're guaranteed, and so I'm confident another box will come our way.

Posted by grant on October 11, 2007 9:19 AM | Permalink