The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  15

  The Slaughterhouse

  WEDNESDAY MORNING

  I woke up Wednesday and wished for a moment I had overslept again. It wasn’t because I was tired, although I was. It was because I knew this was the day we were going to “process” the broilers. To put it plainly, we were going to spend the morning killing chickens.

  So far, I’d enjoyed the beauty of this organic food chain. I’d watched as the sun fed the grass, the grass fed the cattle, and the cattle fed the chickens. There was one more link in that food chain, however. That last link was when the chickens fed us. An important part of that last step took place right here on the farm, in an open-air shed out behind the Salatins’ house. That’s where, six times a month, several hundred chickens are killed, scalded, plucked, and gutted.

  I had been trying not to think about this last link, and of course that’s what most of us do. We avoid thinking about, or having anything to do with, the slaughter of the animals we eat. Even most farmers have nothing to do with it.

  Not here. Joel insists on slaughtering chickens on the farm. He’d slaughter his cattle and hogs here too if only the government would let him. Joel has many reasons for wanting to do the killing himself. Some are economic, some ecological, some are political, and some are spiritual. “The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview,” he’d told me the first time we’d talked. To him that means every step of a chicken’s life must be managed correctly, including its end.

  THE CHICKEN ROUNDUP

  So that morning I managed to get up right on time—5:30 a.m., to be exact. I made my way to the broilers’ pasture. We had to catch and crate three hundred chickens. While we waited for Daniel to show up with the chicken crates, I helped Peter move the pens to a new spot of grass.

  After a while Daniel drove up on the tractor, towing a wagon piled high with plastic chicken crates. We stacked four of them in front of the pens and then he and I got to work catching chickens. After lifting the top off the pen, Daniel used a big plywood paddle to crowd the birds into one corner. Then he reached in and grabbed a flapping bird by one leg and flipped it upside down. That seemed to settle the bird. Then he easily switched the dangling bird from his right hand to his left, freeing his right hand to grab another. I could see he’d done this many times. When he had five birds in one hand, I held open the door to the chicken crate and he stuffed them in. He could fill a crate with ten birds in less than a minute.

  “Your turn,” Daniel said. He nodded toward the cornered mass of chickens remaining in the pen. To me, the way he’d grabbed and flipped the birds seemed pretty rough. Their pencil-thin legs looked so fragile. Yet when I tried to be gentle with the birds as I grabbed them, they flapped around even more violently, until I was forced to let go. This clearly wasn’t going to work. So finally I just reached into and blindly clutched at a leg with one hand and flipped it over. When I saw the chicken was none the worse for it, I switched it to my right hand (I’m a lefty). I went for a second and a third, until I had five chicken legs and a giant white pom-pom of feathers in my right hand. Daniel flipped open the lid on a crate and I pushed the pom-pom in.

  Daniel Salatin gathering up the chickens for slaughter.

  SALATIN VS. THE USDA

  After we had crated three hundred birds we went to breakfast (scrambled Polyface eggs and Polyface bacon). While we ate, Joel talked a little about the importance of on-farm processing. To hear him describe it, what we were about to do—kill a bunch of chickens in the backyard—was nothing less than a political act.

  “When the USDA sees what we’re doing here they get weak in the knees,” Joel said with a chuckle. “The inspectors take one look at our processing shed, and they don’t know what to do with us.”

  For example, government rules say the walls of a processing plant must be white. But Joel’s shed doesn’t have any walls. He believes fresh air keeps the shed cleaner than washing down walls with disinfectant.

  Incredibly, the USDA rules don’t set a limit for the amount of bacteria allowed in our meat. In fact, the rules assume that there will be bacteria in the meat, because in a giant slaughterhouse, there’s no way to avoid it. In most big plants expensive machinery is used to remove or kill the bacteria on the meat. Those machines, like a lot of things required by the USDA, are way too expensive for a small, local meat processor.

  More to the point, Joel says he doesn’t need this machinery because his meat is already clean. To prove it, he’s had his chickens tested by an independent lab. The tests showed that Polyface hens have a much lower bacteria count than supermarket chickens. Salatin is confident he could meet any health standard the government would set.

  THE SHED

  By the time we finished breakfast, a couple of cars had pulled into the driveway. There were two women who were raising their own chickens and wanted to learn how to process them. There were also a couple of neighbors Joel sometimes hires when he needs extra hands on processing day.

  After a few minutes of neighborly chitchat, we all drifted toward our stations in the processing shed. The shed resembles a sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab. There are no walls, just a sheet-metal roof perched on wooden posts. Arranged in a horseshoe along the edge are stainless steel sinks and counters, a scalding tank, and a feather-plucking machine. There’s also a line of metal cones to hold the birds upside down while they’re being killed and bled out.

  I volunteered to join Daniel at the metal cones, 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. I guess I felt that if I was going to be a meat eater, then at least once in my life I should take part in the killing of my food.

  I stacked several chicken crates in the corner by the killing cones. Then, while Daniel sharpened his knives, I began lifting chickens from the crates. I placed each bird upside down into a cone. Each cone has an opening at the bottom for the chicken’s head. Taking the squawking birds out of the crate was the hard part. As soon as they were snug in the cones, the chickens fell silent.

  Once all eight cones were loaded, Daniel reached underneath and took one chicken’s head between his first finger and thumb. 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 shot from the cut and poured down into a metal gutter that funneled it into a bucket. Daniel explained that you wanted to cut only the artery, not the whole neck. That way the heart would continue to beat and pump out the blood. The bird shuddered in its cone and its yellow feet jerked around.

  The Polyface processing shed where chickens are killed, scalded, plucked, and gutted.

  It was hard to watch the chicken die. I told myself that its suffering, once its throat was slit, was brief. I told myself that the birds waiting their turn appeared to have no idea what was going on. Honestly, there wasn’t much time to reflect. We were working on an assembly line (or, really, a disassembly line). The work soon took over and I had no time to think. Within minutes the first eight chickens had bled out. Then they had to be lifted from the cones and moved to the scalding tank. Daniel was calling for eight more, and I had to hustle so as not to fall behind.

  MY MEAT EATER’S DUTY

  After he had slaughtered several batches, Daniel offered me his knife. He showed me the steps I was to follow: First you hold the chicken’s little head in a V between your thumb and forefinger. Then you turn the head to expose the artery but avoid the windpipe. Then you slice down toward at a spot just beneath the skull. Since I am left-handed, I had to learn every step from the opposite direction. Then it was my turn.

  I looked into the black eye of the chicken and, thankfully, saw nothing, not a flicker of fear. Holding its head in my right hand, I drew the knife down the left side of the chicken’s neck. I worried about not cutting hard enough, but the blade
was sharp and sliced easily through the white feathers covering the bird’s neck. Before I could let go of the suddenly limp head, my hand was painted in a gush of warm blood. Somehow, a single droplet spattered the lens of my glasses. There would be a tiny red blot in my field of vision for the rest of the morning.

  Daniel gave his approval of my technique and, noticing the drop of blood on my glasses, offered one last bit of advice: “The first rule of chicken killing is that if you ever feel anything on your lip, you don’t want to lick it off.” Daniel smiled. He’s been killing chickens since he was ten years old and doesn’t seem to mind it.

  Daniel gestured toward the next cone; I guessed I wasn’t done. In the end I personally killed a dozen or so chickens before moving on to try another station. I got fairly good at it, though once or twice I sliced too deeply, nearly cutting off a whole head. After a while the rhythm of the work took over and I could kill without worrying about it. That almost bothered me more than anything else. I saw how quickly you can get used to anything, especially when the people around you think nothing of it. In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

  When I stepped away from the killing area for a break, Joel clapped me on the back for having taken my turn at the killing cones. I told him killing chickens wasn’t something I would want to do every day.

  “Nobody should,” Joel said. “Slaughter is dehumanizing work if you have to do it every day. Processing but a few days a month means we can actually think about what we’re doing,” he continued, “and be as careful and humane as possible.”

  FROM BIRD TO FOOD

  After my break I moved down the line. Once the birds were bled out and dead, Daniel handed them, by their feet, to Galen. He dropped them into the scalding tank. There the birds were plunged up and down in the hot water to loosen their feathers. They came out of the scalder looking like floppy wet rags with beaks and feet. Next they went into the plucker. That’s a stainless steel cylinder that resembles a top-loading washing machine with dozens of black rubber fingers projecting from the sides. As the chickens spin at high speed, they rub against the stiff fingers, which pull their feathers off. After a few minutes they emerge as naked as supermarket broilers. This is the moment the chickens passed over from looking like dead animals to looking like food.

  Three hundred or so freshly slaughtered chickens floating in a steel tank of ice water.

  Peter pulled the birds from the plucker, yanked off the heads, and cut off the feet. Then he passed the birds to Galen for gutting. I joined him at his station, and he showed me what to do—where to make the cut with your knife, how to reach your hand into the bird without tearing too much skin. You have to reach in and pull out the bird’s guts while trying to keep the digestive tract in one piece. As the innards 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). Some organs were to be sold, others were dropped in the gutbucket at our feet.

  I didn’t get very good at gutting. My clumsy hands tore large openings in the skin. I accidentally broke a gallbladder, spilling a thin yellow bile that I then had to carefully rinse off the carcass. “After you gut a few thousand chickens,” Galen said dryly, “you’ll either get really good at it, or you’ll stop gutting chickens.”

  GRASS FROM CHICKEN GUTS

  We hadn’t been at it much more than three hours when we were done. There were three hundred or so chickens floating in the big steel tank of ice water. Each of them had gone from clucking animal to oven-ready roaster in ten minutes, give or take.

  We cleaned up, scrubbing the blood off the tables and hosing down the floor. Meanwhile customers began arriving to pick up their chickens. This was another reason Joel has a slaughterhouse with no walls. 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. They don’t need USDA rules to ensure that the meat they’re buying has been humanely and cleanly processed. They can see for themselves.

  The customers pick their chicken out of the tank and bag it themselves. Then they put it on the scale in the shop next door to the processing shed. Teresa chatted with customers as she checked them out. Meanwhile Galen and I helped Joel compost chicken waste. This just may be the grossest job on the farm—or anywhere else for that matter. Yet as Joel would say, even the way Polyface handles its chicken guts is an extension of his worldview.

  Joel went off on the tractor to get a load of woodchips from the big pile he keeps across the road. Meanwhile Galen and I hauled five-gallon buckets of blood and guts and feathers from the processing shed to the compost pile. The pile, only a stone’s throw from the house, had a truly evil stink. It smelled like exactly what it was: rotting flesh.

  Beside the old pile Joel dumped a few yards of fresh wood-chips. Galen and I raked this into a broad rectangular mound about the size of a double bed. We left a slight hole in the middle and that’s where we spilled the buckets of guts. It was a glistening, multicolored stew. On top of this we added piles of feathers, and finally the blood, which now was as thick as house paint. Then Joel came back with another load of chips, which he dumped onto the top of the pile. Galen climbed up onto the mass of woodchips with his rake, and I followed him with mine. The top layer of woodchips was dry, but you could feel the guts sliding around underfoot. It felt like walking on a mattress filled with Jell-O. We raked the pile level and got out of there.

  Five-gallon buckets of blood, guts, and feathers, plus hundreds of chicken feet and innards waiting to be mixed with woodchips and made into compost.

  At a slaughterhouse, the guts would end up being turned into “protein meal.” Then it would be fed to factory-farmed pigs and cattle and even other chickens. But like every other bit of “waste” on this farm, Joel regards chicken guts as a form of biological wealth. It contains nitrogen he can return to the land along with carbon he’s harvested from the woodlot. He knows that by spring, this mass of blood and guts and feathers will become a rich, black, sweet-smelling compost ready for him to spread onto the pastures and turn back into grass. He sees the beauty in the compost pile, and who knows? Maybe to him it doesn’t even smell that bad.

  16

  The Market

  “GREETINGS FROM THE NON-BAR CODE PEOPLE”

  In the industrial food chain, the typical item of food travels 1,500 miles before it is eaten. Compared to that, the Polyface “beyond organic” food chain is incredibly short. Almost all of the three hundred chickens we’d processed Wednesday morning would be eaten within a few dozen miles of the farm.

  Remember, Joel doesn’t ship his products. That’s what brought me to Polyface in the first place—Joel refused to ship me a steak. I was learning that even where and how he sold his products was an extension of his worldview.

  Originally I thought Joel sold locally just to keep from burning fossil fuels. While that’s certainly part of his thinking, it’s only part. He sees his farm as part of a local food economy. He wants the sale of his eggs and meat to help other local businesses, like small shops and restaurants. He feels selling his eggs or chickens in a chain supermarket supports the industrial food industry, the very thing he is trying to get away from.

  The Salatins believe having a direct relationship with their customers is very important. “Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?” he asked me. Once a year he sends out a newsletter to his regular customers. A recent one began with this greeting: “Greetings from the non-bar code people.” That kind of sums up the way he looks at himself, his farm, and his customers. They are dropouts from the industrial agribusiness food chain, trying to build a new one.

  Sources: Joel Salatin and the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
.

  SOLVING THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA

  I met several of those customers on Wednesday afternoon as they came to collect the fresh chickens they’d reserved. These people were paying a higher price for Polyface food, and in many cases driving more than an hour to come get it. But they were not wealthy, upper-middle-class people. They were a real cross section of types, including a schoolteacher, several retirees, a young mom with her towheaded twins, a mechanic, an opera singer, a furniture maker, a woman who worked in a metal plant.

  What brought them all together at Polyface Farm? Here are some of the comments I jotted down:

  “This is the chicken I remember from my childhood. It actually tastes like chicken.”

  “I just don’t trust the meat in the supermarket anymore.”

  “You’re not going to find fresher chickens anywhere.”

  “All this meat comes from happy animals—I know because I’ve seen them.”

  “I drive 150 miles one way in order to get clean meat for my family.”

  “It’s very simple: I trust the Salatins more than I trust the Wal-Mart. And I like the idea of keeping my money right here in town.”

  What I was hearing, in other words, was the same omnivore’s dilemma that had spurred me to write this book. Somehow, getting meat and eggs from the Salatins helped these folks solve their dilemma, at least a little. Getting their food from Polyface lets them feel connected to their food—these customers know exactly where their food comes from. Plus, they think it tastes better. And of course, they might just enjoy spending a little time on a farm, chatting on the porch with the Salatins, and taking a beautiful drive in the country to get here.