Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Managed grazing is healthier for most landscapes, in fact, than annual tilling and planting, and far more fuel-efficient. Grass is a solar-powered, infinitely renewable resource. As consumers discover the health benefits of grass-based meat, more farmers may stop plowing land and let animals go to work on it instead. A crucial part of this enterprise involves recovering the heritage cattle, poultry, and other livestock that can fatten on pasture grass. It’s news to most people that chickens, turkeys, and pigs can eat foliage at all, since we’re used to seeing them captive and fed. Even cattle are doing less and less grass-eating, since twentieth-century breeding programs gave us animals that tolerate (barely) a grain-based diet for weight gain during their final eight months in confinement. For decades, the public has demanded no meat animals but these.

  More lately, though, conditions inside CAFOs have been exposed by voices as diverse as talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser. In an essay titled “Food with a Face,” journalist Michael Pollan wrote: “More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what Capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here, in these places, life itself is redefined—as protein production—and with it, suffering. That venerable word becomes ‘stress,’ an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution…. The industrialization—and dehumanization—of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do.” U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance.

  It’s that last one that finally ended it for me. Yes, I am a person who raises some animals for the purpose of whacking them into cuts of meat to feed my family. But this work has made me more sympathetic, not less, toward the poor wretches that have to live shoulder-to-shoulder with their brethren waiting for the next meal of stomach-corroding porridge. In ’97, when our family gave up meat from CAFOs, that choice was synonymous with becoming a vegetarian. No real alternatives existed. Now they do. Pasture-based chicken and turkey are available in whole food stores and many mainstream supermarkets. Farmers’ markets are a likely source for free-range eggs, poultry, beef, lamb, and pork. Farmers who raise animals on pasture have to charge more, of course, than factories that cut every corner on animal soundness. Some consumers will feel they have to buy the cheaper product. Others will eat meat less often and pay the higher price. As demand rises, and more farmers can opt out of the industrial system, the cost structure will shift.

  After many meatless years it felt strange to us to break the taboo, but over time our family has come back to carnivory. I like listening to a roasting bird in the oven on a Sunday afternoon, following Julia Child’s advice to “regulate the chicken so it makes quiet cooking noises” as its schmaltzy aroma fills the house. When a friend began raising beef cattle entirely on pasture (rather than sending them to a CAFO as six-month-olds, as most cattle farmers do), we were born again to the idea of hamburger. We can go visit his animals if we need to be reassured of the merciful cowness of their lives.

  As meat farmers ourselves we are learning as we go, raising heritage breeds: the thrifty antiques that know how to stand in the sunshine, gaze upon a meadow, and munch. (Even mate without help!) We’re grateful these old breeds weren’t consigned to extinction during the past century, though it nearly did happen. Were it not for these animals that can thrive outdoors, and the healthy farms that maintain them, I would have stuck with tofu-burgers indefinitely. That wasn’t a bad life, but we’re also enjoying this one.

  Believing in the righteousness of a piece of work, alas, is not what gets it done. On harvest day we pulled on our stained shoes, sharpened our knives, lit a fire under the big kettle, and set ourselves to the whole show: mud, blood, and lots of little feathers. There are some things about a chicken harvest that are irrepressibly funny, and one of them is the feathers: in your hair, on the backs of your hands, dangling behind your left shoe the way toilet paper does in slapstick movies. Feathery little white tags end up stuck all over the chopping block and the butchering table like Post-it notes from the chicken hereafter. Sometimes we get through the awful parts on the strength of black comedy, joking about the feathers or our barn’s death row and the “dead roosters walking.”

  But today was not one of those times. Some friends had come over to help us, including a family that had recently lost their teenage son in a drowning accident. Their surviving younger children, Abby and Eli, were among Lily’s closest friends. The kids were understandably solemn and the adults measured all our words under the immense weight of grief as we set to work. Lily and Abby went to get the first rooster from the barn while I laid out the knives and spread plastic sheets over our butchering table on the back patio. The guys stoked a fire under our fifty-gallon kettle, an antique brass instrument Steven and I scored at a farm auction.

  Really, We’re Not Mad

  * * *

  Cows must have some friends in high places. If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. When the voluntary recall is initiated, the federal government does not release information on where the contaminated beef is being sold, considering that information proprietary. Apparently it is more important to protect the cows than the people eating them. Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.

  One serious disease related to our friends the cows has emerged in the past twenty years: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or so-called mad cow disease. Mad cow, and its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, are invariably fatal for both cows and humans. Unfortunately, tracking mad cow is complicated by the fact that it frequently incubates for years in the victim. The disease became infamous during the 1980s outbreak in England, where more than 150 humans died from eating BSE beef, and thousands of cattle were destroyed. A tiny malformed protein called a prion is the BSE culprit. The prions cause other proteins in the victim to rearrange into their unusual shape, and destroy tissue. Prions confine their activities to the nervous system, where they cause death. How do cows contract prions? Apparently from eating other cows. What? Yes, dead cow meat gets mixed into their feed, imposing cannibalism onto their lifestyle. It’s a way to get a little more mileage from the byproducts of the slaughterhouse.

  An appropriate response would be to stop this, which the British did. They also began testing 100 percent of cows over two years old at slaughter for BSE, and removing all “downer” cows (cows unable to walk on their own) from the food supply. As a result, the U.K. virtually eradicated BSE in two years. Reasonably enough, Japan implemented the same policies.

  In the United States, the response has been somewhat different. U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows. Since prions aren’t destroyed by extreme heat or any known drug, they readily survive this food-chain loop-de-loop. Cow blood (yum) may also be dinner for other cows and calves, and restaurant plate wastes can also be served.

  After the first detected case of U.S. mad cow disease, fifty-two countries banned U.S. beef. The USDA then required 2 percent of all the downer cows to be tested, and 1 percent of all cows that were slaughtered. After that, the number of downer cows reported in the United States decreased by 20 percent (did I mention it was voluntary reporting?), and only two more cases of BSE were detected. In May 2006, the USDA decided the threat was so
low that only one-tenth of one percent of all slaughtered cows needed to be tested. Jean Halloran, the food policy initiatives director at Consumers Union, responded, “It approaches a policy of don’t look, don’t find.”

  How can consumers respond to this? Can we seek out beef tested as BSE-free by the meat packers? No. One company tried to test all its beef, but the USDA declared that illegal (possibly to protect any BSE cows from embarrassment). Would I suggest a beef boycott? Heavens, no; cows are our friends (plus, I believe that would be illegal). But it might be worth remembering this: not a single case of BSE, anywhere, has ever turned up in cattle that were raised and finished on pasture grass or organic feed. As for the other 99 percent of beef in the United States, my recommendation would be to consider the words of Gary Weber, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association head of regulatory affairs: “The consumers we’ve done focus groups with are comfortable that this is a very rare disease.”

  For more information visit www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.html.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  The girls returned carrying rooster #1 upside down, by the legs. Inversion has the immediate effect of lulling a chicken to sleep, or something near to it. What comes next is quick and final. We set the rooster gently across our big chopping block (a legendary fixture of our backyard, whose bloodstains hold visiting children in thrall), and down comes the ax. All sensation ends with that quick stroke. He must then be held by the legs over a large plastic bucket until all the blood has run out. Farmers who regularly process poultry have more equipment, including banks of “killing cones” or inverted funnels that contain the birds while the processor pierces each neck with a sharp knife, cutting two major arteries and ending brain function. We’re not pros, so we have a more rudimentary setup. By lulling and swiftly decapitating my animal, I can make sure my relatively unpracticed handling won’t draw out the procedure or cause pain.

  What you’ve heard is true: the rooster will flap his wings hard during this part. If you drop him he’ll thrash right across the yard, unpleasantly spewing blood all around, though the body doesn’t run—it’s nothing that well coordinated. His newly detached head silently opens and closes its mouth, down in the bottom of the gut bucket, a world apart from the ruckus. The cause of all these actions is an explosion of massively firing neurons without a brain to supervise them. Most people who claim to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, really, are not even close. The nearest thing might be the final convulsive seconds of an All-Star wrestling match.

  For Rooster #1 it was over, and into the big kettle for a quick scald. After a one-minute immersion in 145-degree water, the muscle tissue releases the feathers so they’re easier to pluck. “Easier” is relative—every last feather still has to be pulled, carefully enough to avoid tearing the skin. The downy breast feathers come out by handfuls, while the long wing and tail feathers sometimes must be removed individually with pliers. If we were pros we would have an electric scalder and automatic plucker, a fascinating bucket full of rotating rubber fingers that does the job in no time flat. For future harvests we might borrow a friend’s equipment, but for today we had a pulley on a tree limb so we could hoist the scalded carcass to shoulder level, suspending it there from a rope so several of us could pluck at once. Lily, Abby, and Eli pulled neck and breast feathers, making necessary observations such as “Gag, look where his head came off,” and “Wonder which one of these tube thingies was his windpipe.” Most kids need only about ninety seconds to get from eeew gross to solid science. A few weeks later Abby would give an award-winning, fully illustrated 4-H presentation entitled “You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day.”

  Laura and Becky and I answered the kids’ questions, and also talked about Mom things while working on back and wing feathers. (Our husbands were on to the next beheading.) Laura and I compared notes on our teenage daughters—relatively new drivers on the narrow country roads between their jobs, friends, and home—and the worries that come with that territory. I was painfully conscious of Becky’s quiet, her ache for a teenage son who never even got to acquire a driver’s license. The accident that killed Larry could not have been avoided through any amount of worry. We all cultivate illusions of safety that could fall away in the knife edge of one second.

  I wondered how we would get through this afternoon, how she would get through months and years of living with impossible loss. I wondered if I’d been tactless, inviting these dear friends to an afternoon of ending lives. And then felt stupid for that thought. People who are grieving walk with death, every waking moment. When the rest of us dread that we’ll somehow remind them of death’s existence, we are missing their reality. Harvesting turkeys—which this family would soon do on their own farm—was just another kind of work. A rendezvous with death, for them, was waking up each morning without their brother and son.

  By early afternoon six roosters had lost their heads, feathers, and viscera, and were chilling on ice. We had six turkeys to go, the hardest piece of our work simply because the animals are larger and heavier. Some of these birds were close to twenty pounds. They would take center stage on our holiday table and those of some of our friends. At least one would be charcuterie—in the garden I had sage, rosemary, garlic, onions, everything we needed for turkey sausage. And the first two roosters we’d harvested would be going on the rotisserie later that afternoon.

  We allowed ourselves a break before the challenge of hoisting, plucking, and dressing the turkeys. While Lily and her friends constructed feather crowns and ran for the poultry house to check in with the living, the adults cracked open beers and stretched out in lawn chairs in the September sun. Our conversation turned quickly to the national preoccupation of that autumn: Katrina, the hurricane that had just hit southern Louisiana and Mississippi. We were horrified by the news that was beginning to filter out of that flooded darkness, the children stranded on rooftops, the bereaved and bewildered families slogging through streets waist-deep in water, breaking plate glass windows to get bottles of water. People drowning and dying of thirst at the same time.

  It was already clear this would be an epic disaster. New Orleans and countless other towns across southern Louisiana and Mississippi were being evacuated and left for dead. The news cameras had focused solely on urban losses, sending images of flooded streets, people on rooftops, broken storefronts, and the desperate crises of people in the city with no resources for relocating or evacuating. I had not seen one photograph from the countryside—a wrecked golf course was the closest thing to it. I wondered about the farmers whose year of work still lay in the fields, just weeks or days away from harvest, when the flood took it all. I still can’t say whether the rural victims of Katrina found their support systems more resilient, or if their hardships simply went unreported.

  The disaster reached into the rest of the country with unexpected tentacles. Our town and schools were already taking in people who had lost everything. The office where I’d just sent my passport for renewal was now underwater. Gasoline had passed $3 a gallon, here and elsewhere, leaving our nation in sticker shock. U.S. citizens were making outlandish declarations about staying home. Climate scientists were saying, “If you warm up the globe, you eventually pay for it.” Economists were eyeing our budget deficits and predicting collapse, mayhem, infrastructure breakdown. In so many ways, disaster makes us take stock. For me it had inspired powerful cravings about living within our means. I wasn’t thinking so much of my household budget or the national one but the big budget, the one that involves consuming approximately the same things we produce. Taking a symbolic cue from my presumed-soggy passport, I suddenly felt like sticking very close to home, with a hand on my family’s production, even when it wasn’t all that easy or fun—like today.

  Analysts of current events were mostly looking to blame administrators. Fair enough, but there were also, it seemed, obvious vulnerabilities here—whole populations depending on everyday, long-distance lifelines, supplies of food
and water and fuel and everything else that are acutely centralized. That’s what we consider normal life. Now nature had written a hugely abnormal question across the bottom of our map. I wondered what our answers might be.

  Our mood stayed solemn until Eli introduced the comedy show of poultry parts. He applied his artistry and grossout-proof ingenuity to raw materials retrieved from the gut bucket. While the rest of us merely labored, Eli acted, directed, and produced. He invented the turkey-foot backscratcher, the inflated turkey-crop balloon. Children—even when they have endured the unthinkable—have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up. We got a little slap-happy egging on the two turkey heads that moved their mouths to Eli’s words, starring in a mock TV talk show. As I gutted the last bird of the day, I began thinking twice about what props I was tossing into the gut bucket. I was not sure I wanted to see what an eight-year-old boy could do with twelve feet of intestine.

  The good news was that we were nearly done. I encouraged the rest of the adults to go ahead and wash up, I had things in hand. They changed out of the T-shirts that made them look like Braveheart extras. The girls persuaded Eli to retire the talking heads and submit to a hosing-down. Our conversation finally relaxed fully into personal news, the trivial gripes and celebrations for which friends count on one another: what was impossible these days at work. How the children were faring with various teachers and 4-H projects. How I felt about having been put on the list.

  That question referred to a book that had been released that summer, alerting our nation to the dangers of one hundred people who are Destroying America. It was popular for nearly a week and a half, so I’d received a heads-up about my being the seventy-fourth most dangerous person in America. It gave a certain pizzazz to my days, I thought, as I went about canning tomatoes, doing laundry, meeting the school bus, and here and there writing a novel or essay or whatever, knowing full well that kind of thing only leads to trouble. My thrilling new status had no impact on my household position: I still had to wait till the comics were read to get the Sudoku puzzle, and the dog ignored me as usual. Some of my heroes had turned up much higher on the list. Jimmy Carter was number 6.