About eight weeks ago we received a call from our neighborhood post office. This is what they said on our answering machine, "Um...hello. We have a package for the Glick residence...it is...err...it's a box of chicklets." And so we became part of the urban poultry movement! Twenty-five "chicklets" to be exact. The colorful journey has included the untimely death of some baby chicks as well as full grown roosters (14 of them) trying to kill one another -- and succeeding on several occasions. We had no idea what we were getting into when we began this endeavor. And, although I could pass on crawling into the poop filled coop in galoshes and rubber gloves to apply pine tar to 11 bloody, oozy fowls, mostly the experience has been positive, albeit a lot of work, and also ripe with good story material.
So last Saturday Greg loaded the old truck up with 11 not-so-bloody-oozy roosters, happily popping their heads out the rear window, en route to Simla, Colorado...home of the local poultry processing plant. He returned with 11 plucked, processed, and plasticked chickens in a cooler. One of the roosters we had fondly named Fattie (naming him was our first mistake) when he was a chick. Fattie was...well...quite fat and put on weight rapidly -- (some chickens are apparently bred for this feature). Greg triumphantly placed nine of the neatly wrapped chickens in the deep freeze and proceeded to roast the remaining two. I was dismayed. Could I really eat Fattie?
It has been more than six years since I jumped off the wagon of vegetarianism. Since that time I have done my best to be a conscientious consumer purchasing "free-range" meats that, as Toby so succinctly put it when he was 4, "were treated nicely before they were killed." But eating an animal that I have fed and raised? Consuming the flesh of an animal that I had once held tenderly held in my hand?
Needless to say, I did not partake in the ceremonial eating of rooster Saturday with my boys. However, this afternoon I gingerly took the Fattie leftovers out of the frig and made chicken salad with him. I haven't eaten the chicken salad yet but I did prepare it...all the while feeling like I really should be a vegetarian again. I am struck by how removed I have become from my food...especially from the animals that I eat. So I sit here struggling with how to let go of my anthropomorphized version of our chickens while having integrity around what I consume.
At this moment, there seems no easy or clear answer. Maybe my solution lies somewhere between saying goodbye to Fattie and his friends with a ritual of thanks and prayer, to assuage my guilty conscience, and consuming meat with more awareness. Regardless, it looks like we're having chicken salad for dinner tonight.
Thanks Fattie.
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1 comment:
You're funny. :)
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