by Manny Howard
Josh Eden, whom everyone calls Shorty, is a renowned chef I have known for more than a decade. Shorty has only just left the stable and comfortable employ of celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s haute empire to start his own thirty-two-seat restaurant, Shorty’s .32, on Prince Street in SoHo. Shorty arrives early, but demands that, before we start, we drive over to Coney Island Avenue and buy a ten-piece bucket of fried chicken. He thinks it’s funny, says it’s ironic. I disagree on both counts, but Shorty is raring to go, this is my first of many rounds of slaughter, and good help is hard to find.
When Shorty is finished with his lunch, I deposit the first Cornish in a stainless-steel cone screwed to a vertical plywood plank on the butchering table and wire its feet to the plank. In no time it appears to completely lose consciousness. Using the sharpest, longest knife in the house, I cut its throat, careful not to remove its head completely because severing the spinal column would stop the heart from beating, leaving too much blood in the body. I let the Cornish bleed out into a plastic bucket that has an inch or two of cool water in it to slow coagulation (I reserve the blood to add to an enormous vat of chicken-shit compost I have been collecting as fertilizer in a pair of plastic garbage cans for months—but will likely never use). When the bird has bled out, I remove it from the cone, drop it in the scalder until it appears thoroughly sodden but not long enough to start it cooking. While the first bird warms, I put the second bird headfirst into the cone. I remove the first meat bird from the scalder, hang it by its feet from the ceiling using bailing string, grasp the bird firmly with both hands, pulling toward the floor to remove all but the most stubborn feathers. In that first pass, almost all of the plumage slips off the carcass like a sock off a warm foot. “Cool!” exclaims Shorty. “Me next.”
Shorty puts the knife to the second Cornish. I burn the remaining pin feathers from my bird using a propane torch, then, using a sharp filleting blade, make a single incision at the outer edge of the bird’s anus (being careful to hold said anus in place so the contents of the bowel do not leach out and spoil the meat). From here I make an incision in the body cavity just long enough to insert three fingers. Then I do just that, pulling out as much of the contents of the gut bag as I can. To a bird, leaving my abattoir these Cornish Cross (averaging about four and a half pounds) weigh exactly one pound less than they did upon entering. I repeat this process until the cavity is clear of all organs (especially the digestive tract). I dunk the bird in the ice bath until the interior of the bird is extremely cold. As an afterthought I remove the head and the feet (discarding the head, but reserving the feet in the freezer for stock). Finally I bag and store the meat in the fridge for one day before roasting. I’m done with the first Cornish. Shorty has cleaned the second. So I position number three in the steel cone and draw the long blade across its neck.
By nine fifteen in the evening I’m hosing down the cement floor and brushing it with bleach. Five birds are on ice ready for roasting, with ten feet for stock.
Hopefully, not a typical day on The Farm in Flatbush. The work is rewarding, in its way. It doesn’t matter if I have any enthusiasm at all for the butchering. Rewarding or not, it’s necessary—central to the months of preparation that have preceded this day, and the thirty or more to follow. All the same, I do wish the work were even vaguely enjoyable. It takes hours, and while hunting with Tex in Montana I’ve killed much bigger animals, I am somehow not prepared for the psychological toll. Harvesting the chickens is tedious, gruesome work. When it is done, after Shorty and I have had one congratulatory beer each, and he has taken his leave, I lie down on the driveway and finish off the six-pack.
Pray for me, a sinner.
THE FIRST SUPPER
On August 15, the self-sufficiency project finally begins. As planned, the day starts with a breakfast of one egg, a tomato, and a few cups of black coffee.
The morning after I begin living off the fat of the land, I check the potato drill. I’ve never fully investigated how many potatoes are under the dirt, in part because I fear we may have started the plants too late, and I never wanted to know the truth enough to go rooting around in the drill unnecessarily if it might damage the crop. My father’s enthusiasm and ambition for the crop never flagged. His involvement is a balm, his conviction my only source of confidence. With the potatoes, at least, we were dealing with genuine expertise—genuine and, better yet, paternal. Given how many we’d planted, I am counting on no fewer than one hundred spuds.
I pull the plywood berm away from the drill and attack the soil with a gardening fork. I hit something solid and dig for it with my hands, only to realize it is a clump of compact dirt. I repeat this futile exercise until I’ve gone through four cubic yards of soil: zero. Sifting through the dirt more closely, like a miner panning for gold, I score ten of the tiniest potatoes the world has ever seen. I call my father. “The potato crop failed, Dad,” I say by way of greeting.
“Failed?” he splutters. “How?”
“I dunno,” I whine. “But I could only find ten, and they’re hardly as big as shirt buttons.”
“But I was there,” he says, incredulous. “We planted them together. What could you have done wrong?”
Alone again.
“Maybe it was all the rain.”
“Your potatoes grew in England, Dad.”
My father and mother immigrated to America, arriving in November 1963, the day before John F. Kennedy was assassinated. My father came, recruited by the navy and NASA to work on the Mercury-rocket mission. What does it say about the world that even when using an inexcusably expensive variety of artisanal, organic “seed potatoes,” and having a real-life, farm-raised rocket scientist as a consultant, a farmer can’t grow the one crop that has sustained even the most primitive cultures since before the beginning of recorded history?
One thing we do know, that we dare not forget, is that better solutions than ours have at times been made by people with less information than we have. We know too, from the study of agriculture, that the same information, tools, and techniques that in one farmer’s hands will ruin land, in another’s will save and improve it.
This is cold comfort, Wendell.
Maybe with another month in the ground things would have been different, but at least for now, my farm diet will be potato-free. What did I miss this time? What didn’t I know?
This is not a recommendation of ignorance, cautions Berry. To know nothing, after all, is no more possible than to know enough. I am only proposing that knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and that we need urgently now to put it in its place. If we want to know and cannot help knowing, then let us learn as fully and accurately as we decently can. But let us at the same time abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient; that it can of itself solve problems; that it is intrinsically good; that it can be used objectively or disinterestedly.
The First Supper consists of half a roast chicken, collard greens, and three slices of tomato. It is served with tap water. If my first of thirty dinners grown on The Farm will be potato-free, I hope it will not be family-free. The Farm experience is drawing to a close, with normalcy imaginable. I wish to share that possibility as much as my success, such as it is … to share the occasion—if not the actual food, since there isn’t all that much—with Lisa and the kids. Lisa is not interested. On the night of the First Supper, she schedules drinks for after work and arranges for Heath and Bevan Jake to stay after school with my mother.
Crushing, sure, but I refuse to eat this meal alone. I invite my friend Dan Bibb to join me. Originally from Alaska, he knows his way around homegrown poultry, and Dan Bibb gets downright nostalgic when a dinner of roast yard bird, collard greens, and tomato salad is served.
I blanch the greens before sautéing them and they stand up well against the green onion; the rock salt clings to the sweet tomatoes without dissolving and muddling the two flavors. My chicken defies comparison to the best, most well-tended, correctly processed
chicken I’ve ever purchased from a local butcher. In texture and strength of flavor the bird’s very skin is more robust, resembling pork crackling, just with a parchmentlike delicacy. While roasting, the schmaltz had liquefied, adding flavor to every forkful from the plate. The meat resists a bite not with mere toughness, say, a leathery obstinacy, but with physicality more akin to resolve.
You often hear folks talk of being able to taste a life lived in the meat of a freshly butchered animal; this texture must be what they mean. So for that, I am happy. I don’t look forward to the dozens of meals ahead of me. I don’t look behind me to the shambles I have made of my home, my marriage, and my finger. My life. Another forkful of my meat bird; I am momentarily unconcerned.
Dan Bibb is less excited about eating the First Supper accompanied only by water than I am.
“Nothing but water for a month?” he asks, incredulous.
“I didn’t grow any booze, Dan Bibb,” I reply, remembering for a moment that I originally intended to.
“Of course not. Still?”
“You’re welcome to open a bottle.”
“No. Not if you’re not drinking. It wouldn’t seem …”
“It’s fine, Dan. Open a bottle.”
“Well, don’t mind if I do.”
I’m not carrying on when I say that those first forkfuls of that First Supper washed away all the struggle, all the doubt, the disappointment, the heartbreak, and the horror. They would, of course, all of them, be back.
The table is clear and Dan Bibb is long gone when Lisa arrives home with the kids; I rush to them in the doorway, urging them to try some of the remaining chicken. Lisa refuses outright. Bevan Jake looks at his mom and then the chicken and says, “No thanks, Dad.”
“Really? Not even a taste?”
“I’m fine,” replies Lisa with counterfeit levity. Bevan Jake just watches the two of us.
“It’s totally amazing!” I insist. “Not like regular chicken at all.”
“I like regular chicken,” Bevan Jake says, searching his mother’s eyes for a cue, some approval for having taken her side.
August 23. I have lost twenty-nine pounds since March, as much as half of it gone in the last ten days. The fifth meat bird I eat has been in the refrigerator for nine days by the time I get around to cooking it. Coming out of the crisper, it smells pretty rank. I write that off as a part of the whole raised-by-my-own-hand experience. This is real food, not that prettified stuff from greenmarkets. My food rarely looks appealing in the least, but it usually tastes great. I rinse the bird carcass and throw it on the grill. Two hours later I begin suffering from an enfeebling bout of gastrointestinal distress. I had not grown a single saltine on The Farm, but that’s all I eat for the next five days.
THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS
On day ten of my dietary moonwalk, the rabbits come roaring back into the picture. It has been more than a month since I have thought of them as anything other than a nuisance, a waste of rabbit food, taking up precious space in my barn. I gave up hope of breeding them for food back in July. The remaining does and the two bucks free-range on the strip of lawn I put down in a vain attempt to placate Lisa (but tell everyone is essential for erosion control). Occasionally I might notice a bit of humping and laugh—thanks a lot, guys, where was that action when I needed it?
Then, naturally, on August 25, Doe #4 has a litter, and because the proper kindling box is in place, she doesn’t eat them. A few die, but she generally behaves like a responsible mother, and I go about my morning routine: change the water, clean up the poop, and add fresh food. During my rounds two days later, her neighbor Doe #3 lunges at my arm, tearing my work shirt with her claws and, mounting my arm, trying to gain purchase on my elbow with those big rabbity front teeth. A rabbit attack stops being farce when the critter in question weighs upward of twenty-three pounds and she’s chewing and scratching her way up your arm to your ear. Fighting her off with one arm is hard work. I muscle her into the back of the cage, but she comes back for more. She scratches and tears at my skin, so I bonk her on the head with the miniature, tin dustpan I use to clean cages. A warning shot, to be sure. But, undaunted, Doe #3 lunges again. One more warning shot. Again she counters. Hell with this. I whack her again, really hard. She is still for a moment, then howls. It is a sound like no other I have ever heard a rabbit make, primarily because, in addition to fear (quite common), there is anger in it, outrage even.
Doe #3 now appears unable to move. I gingerly lift a powerful hind leg, half-expecting her to whirl on me and bite my hand, but when I let the leg go, it thumps on the floor of her cage: paralyzed. Goddamned rabbits, nothing but fruitless misery, and now, fending off a vicious fit of pique, I’ve crippled one of the last of them. Like others before her, I’ll have to put this one out of her misery. Reflexively I go to fetch a trash bag and the lime, but on the way back to the hutch I think better of the plan. This is no occasion for standard operating procedure.
There are practical realities.
My potato crop has failed. I don’t have enough food to finish out the month. I’ll have to harvest Doe #3, salvage what meat the battle wound has not spoiled, and get her to the stew pot—probably for a good, long time. It’s not going to be the best meal I’ve ever eaten, but I really do have to eat her; there are moral implications to consider as well.
I return to her cage to finish the job. I open the door, and just as Doe #4 did two days ago, Doe #3 is kindling, giving birth to a litter of kits, despite my having paralyzed her. She looks straight at me as the fifth kit of eight slides from between her dead legs.
I close the cage back up and arrange a number of water bottles so that she doesn’t have to move to drink, and I leave her to her work. We were both playing rough, I just didn’t know why. It was unintentional; still, I can’t just hurl her in the trash. Something good has to come of this grotesque error.
An hour later I position the kits where I guess her teats are and I leave them there until sunset. I then remove the kits, hoping that if I put them with Doe #4’s litter, she’ll adopt them. I rub the maimed doe’s offspring on the belly of Doe #4 just as Sugar Ray had advised all those months ago and place them in the kindling box with her babies.
Then I fumble one step closer to completing this horrible process. I pull the chicken-harvesting station away from the wall, secure the plywood covering the scalding tank, and as carefully as such a task can be completed, I lift Doe #3 from where she lies in her cage in a pool of afterbirth. I hang her by her back feet from wire loops hanging from bolts in the ceiling of the garage, and I cut her throat. Unable to even shudder, she bleeds out. After a while, I take her down, still warm, hot really, and put her on the tabletop. Using a heavy, twelve-inch, well-used German kitchen cleaver, I chop her head off in one clean stroke. I hang her back up from the ceiling and prepare her carcass for skinning and cleaning.
“Hey, Manny!” Peter calls from the dimness at the top of the driveway, out for Gumbo’s evening walk. “What’re yah doing now?”
“You don’t want to know, Pete,” I reply, standing between Peter and the carcass.
“Probably not.” Peter laughs and walks on.
When I finish dressing Doe #3, I hang her by the withers in a blue recycling bag behind an out-of-the-way air-conditioning duct in the basement. I hang the meat to tenderize in a location I am certain Lisa will never find.
On Saturday morning, Lisa busies herself cleaning out the basement. “Is that a chicken hanging from the ceiling down there?” she asks, standing at the top of the basement stairs with an armful of Halloween paraphernalia.
“Nope. That’s a rabbit. Doe number three.” I add after a brief silence, “She … died.”
“She stinks.”
I begin to sob. I tell her the whole story, sort of, and inform her of my plans to eat Doe #3—partly out of desperation to see the project through properly, partly penance, but also as a tribute of some creepy, flaccid sort.
Lisa says this is the first time she
feels truly sorry for me since March.
Half an hour later I have thoroughly washed Doe #3 and rendered her into pan-size parts and have started browning her off. The smell is unbearable. No sooner has the meat started to caramelize in the pan than it begins to smell as if some prankster has pulled a footstool up to the stove, mounted it, and pissed directly into the pan. The smell permeates the kitchen and quickly all three floors of the house. I work furiously, cranking the heat to speed up the browning. The logic: the sooner I can get her buried under a sea of chicken-foot stock, the sooner this smell will go away.
Lisa enters the kitchen with her hands covering her nose, one of her more commonly employed gestures. It always precedes her exclamation, made more dramatic by the surgical use of her Mississippi drawl, “Ew! Staaaank!”
I was almost in a fetal crouch when I cut Lisa off. “I know! I know! Don’t say a fuckin’ word! Just leave! Out of the kitchen! I know! I know!”
Half an hour later, the rabbit is buried under three pints of stock made from the feet of previously butchered chickens, celery, and green onions; I enter the living room to make my apologies. I sit on the floor, where she is sorting and filing household bills.
“I am sorry. That was terrible of me. I was just totally overwhelmed. But I am sorry.”
“I know.” Lisa looks me straight in the eye for the first time in months. “It must be very hard for you.”
I cook Doe #3 for thirty-six hours in a slow cooker, then store the stewed meat in the refrigerator for two days. In the interim I kill five more chickens, eat three, and freeze two (out in The World, I would never consider buying a frozen chicken, but I’m intent on never again eating a nine-day-old chicken). I eat only vegetables for three nights rather than finish preparing Doe #3. On Labor Day, I separate meat from bone and fabricate a pungent tomato sauce aggressively spiked with Scotch-bonnet peppers, salt, and even some contraband garlic. The stink is not as strong, but even through the green onions, garlic, peppers, and herbs, the rabbit gives off a ureic waft. I fix myself a bowl and set to finishing it while standing in the middle of the kitchen. The sauce is powerful enough to mask most of the giant doe’s gamy flavor. In truth, the stew is so intensely seasoned that I could just as easily be eating one of the neighbors as Doe #3, and I feel just as guilty. The texture, that of bad canned tuna, or cat food, is a substantial hurdle. I persist. Since the first moment that I accepted the horrible magnitude of this episode, my resolute belief has been that the only thing worse than eating Doe #3 would be not eating Doe #3. I have now eaten Doe #3, and I am not yet certain that I was right. Not a single one of Doe #3’s kits was accepted into Doe #4’s brood. All are long dead.