Reprinted with permission from the August issue of the Ester Republic.

I find it mildly ironic, as a researcher of and advocate for sustainable agriculture and community food systems, that I’ve never, myself, slaughtered a chicken. For all I preach in my research, writing and teaching about how important it is to be connected to the production of one’s food, the closest I’ve ever come is removing the bag of giblets from my cage-free, free-range, grass-fed, hormone-free butterball. So a few days ago when the opportunity rather abruptly presented itself, I approached the task with a mix of apprehension and academic curiosity.

You might wonder how I came upon a situation of having to slaughter and butcher a chicken with only the internet and my own sensibilities to guide me. I don’t raise chickens myself, but am house-sitting for a friend who does. He raises both “heritage” and hybrid breed chickens. Heritage breeds (also called heirloom), are those that have been bred over time to develop traits that made them particularly well-adapted to local environmental conditions. Hybrids, on the other hand, are commonly attributed to industrial agriculture and are bred in controlled conditions for specific traits: to produce lots of eggs, gain weight quickly, or yield particular types of meat within confined facilities. The lucky clucker in question was a hybrid, which, unlike her naturally evolved cousins wasn’t equipped with anatomically proportionate legs that could support her adult weight. As such, her feet and legs had actually started to break under the pressure. When I found her she could hardly stand, so it was as much of a mercy killing as it was a matter of cuisine.

Not surprisingly, the first decision you need to make when you’re about to butcher a live chicken is the manner of its death. “You can either wring its neck or chop its head off,” said my friend, in his first and only words of advice on the matter. I chose to wring its neck, over what I imagined would be a chaotic and blood-spattering alternative. Having never chased down a headless chicken I also had some concern about the fate of that evening’s main course. It was, after all, the first time I had slaughtered any sort of animal, and who knows what kind of range those things have.

The process was more than anything a tactile experience. Taking a cue from Native American custom I thanked the chicken for its gift then brought him out of the coop. No need for the others on the Green Mile to see what their future had in store. Breaking its neck (chickens have mighty flexible necks, mind you) felt eerily similar to cracking my knuckles. Now dead, its body put up a terrific fight, and I almost dropped the thing out of surprise. When the kicking finally ceased I figured that the hardest part was over. My reality had officially expanded to include the killing of another warm-blooded creature for food.

I’ll spare the reader the remainder of the gritty details; suffice to say that a good butcher’s knife is a must, and a Buck knife is no substitute. Instead, let me get to the reason I chose to share this story: there is a lesson here, beneath the inhumanity of mutant chickens that can’t stand upon their own two feet, about smallness in respect to community food systems. Small-scale movements are catching on like wildfire, though not without their skeptics and naysayers. A respected speaker at a campus sustainability event last year said, “Sustainability does not necessarily mean small, and small is not necessarily sustainable.” At first glance there’s not much to argue with there, nor is there any insight, for that matter. Certainly smallness of design is not the sole sufficient characteristic of a sustainable food system. But it seems to me that food systems are much like my friend’s chickens – if they have evolved to reach a size that is appropriate for local environmental conditions, they will be able to stand on their own; but if they have been artificially designed with only growth in mind, their legs are sure to break beneath them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 9:07 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Feature Stories, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.