Who has to die for your Thanksgiving dinner....and more importantly, how did they LIVE?
That's the question we've been asking ourselves about our Thanksgiving turkey. Every year I usually just roll on over to the local market and buy a turkey frozen in carbonite. Generally I forget to thaw it out until the day before...because I'm not mindful of things like "thaw for several days" written on the turkey's packaging. The rest is pretty mundane. I get up around 8 am, turn on the Macy's Thanksgiving parade and start feeling pretty festive for a self-proclaimed "Holiday hater." Preparing the giant, Godzilla-like monster bird for the oven is not without it's dangers. Trying to pry the still-frozen innards out of the turkey. I always feel a great sense of accomplishment when I finally manage to wrench them out. This process sometimes draws my own blood. Frozen turkey cavern has sharp bits. I never know what to do with the neatly-bagged grossness. My grandma used to take the giblets and grind them into bits for the stuffing with a metal, very antiquated-looking grinder you attach to the counter. It always looked rather like some medieval torture device to me. Or reminded my of Pink Floyd's "The Wall." I left that gut-grinding tradition behind. Sorry, grandma, but it's really gross. Perhaps this year I'll actually follow-through with frying the guts up for the cats....or maybe not. I make no promises.
Here's where I'm going to veer into some uncomfortable territory for some of you. This year, we raised our own turkeys for the holidays, and we intend to eat them--even though they have become my friends. We named them--"Thanksgiving, Christmas and Brown Meat." This took thought and planning--so if it's "murder" then it's definitely murder in the first-degree. I raised them from tiny, fuzzy adorable chicks.....since May, they have been part of our family. When we first brought them home they were scared and lonely. They cried incessantly, so we cuddled them while we watched TV. They would fall asleep on my husband's shoulder. He would joke that he was infusing them with love, that we'd be able to taste that love in every delicious bite. This may seem morbid to you, but have you ever really considered where your Thanksgiving turkey came from? Did it live a happy life? Was it able to wander and forage in the fields, bask in the sunshine, fluff it's feathers in a nice, dry dirt-bath? We live in Washington State. It clouded up last month and got cold, as it's prone to do. These turkeys spent all summer enjoying themselves in the ample (and somewhat unusual) sunshine...now, when the sun is gone and it's freezing, their days are numbered. I wish I could leave on a vacation from the cold! Maybe not to the oven, but you get what I'm saying.
Many of my friends, and even some of my family are vegans or vegetarians. I tip my hat to you...I am not one of those people. I've tried. Our 14 year old daughter likes to recount the dark days of my attempt at vegetarianism as if they were some kind of mother-inflicted-torture-prison-camp, "Remember when you made us all be vegetarians? Why did you do that? It was horrible. I would have done ANYTHING for a piece of chicken!!" More tales to tell her shrink someday. Add to the collection of misguided parental love. Seemed like a fine idea at the time, then again, what "brilliant" idea hasn't?
As a family we have all but eliminated beef from our diets. It's an irresponsible food-producing model, raising cattle, and I'll admit I'm worried about "Mad Cow Disease." I won't go there....I remember what happened to Oprah. We primarily eat chicken and turkey. I am keenly aware of what kind of lives these animals have lived, what they are injected with, fed, and the highly dangerous methods in which poultry is farmed on a mass-scale. I'm very concerned about how these corporate farming practices are affecting our environment, food supply and overall health (thinking mass epidemic potential here). I wonder if the effort to produce poultry on a mass scale is overshadowing the need for healthy food. The conditions these animals are raised in is deplorable. They never see the light of day, the green grass and warm sunshine. I've been raising chickens for the last ten years (for eggs) and every single hen and rooster are sentient little beings. They appreciate the grass, the sunshine, catching bugs and worms. They have relationships and connections. They have friends and enemies. They have very distinct, individual personalities. If getting to know any creature on a personal level has pushed me just short of vegetarianism, it's my chickens. We have legendary family chickens--"One-Eyed-Willy, David Hasselhoff and Sammy Davis." They have all enjoyed happy, carefree lives. They have wandered free until recently when I had to coop them due to the large-scale predator problem here on our wooded 7 acre farm---backed by an additional 200 acres where coyotes, bears, bobcats, cougars and probably every other Northwest wildlife native lives---and needs to eat. We were becoming nature's version of Burger King. These wild animals were pretty rude---just dine and dash!
We don't eat them, and that's not to say we haven't tried. One year we did raise chickens to butcher and eat. We did eat a few. A few we couldn't consume because we had grown too attached. They were the fast-growing Cornish-Cross chickens, and the ones we let live eventually expired due to heart attacks because they were the most obese chickens ever to roam the planet. I have a video somewhere of "Bubba the Rooster" running across the yard--every time you'd get the food out you could almost hear him coming, "boom-babba-boom-babba." Lessons learned from that? Well, two of our children became vegetarians(and still are)after we butchered those chickens and we now have the knowledge that human beings have genetically altered chickens to get very fat very quickly...so we can EAT them. Those chickens are not pets. They are the poultry version of Rob Ford. Without the crack.
We raised these turkeys as a family because we felt that we were disconnected from our food. We have lost touch with where it comes from and how it lived before it reaches our table. If you eat meat, you owe that animal your thanks and appreciation. I don't believe you show that appreciation by consuming an animal that lived a miserable life for the sole purpose of you consuming it. There are videos on YouTube that show how mass-turkey farming truly looks. I'm sorry, but if you haven't seen, you should probably give them a look.
I'm not helping you pack your bags to go on a guilt-trip with me, but I would like you to consider, if you haven't already, where the food on your table comes from. I'm trying to come up with ways that we can--as a family--be a little more conscious about what we eat and how that animal lived. It's either that, or become a vegetarian. I consider that almost daily. I've tried and failed, but if I can't do this-- I'll be working to make our food choices more in keeping with how I'm trying to approach life. I don't want to be complicit with the inhumane treatment of animals anymore. We can do better. Not all of us can farm, or have the luxury of a big piece of land and the time to care for animals properly. They do require a lot of care. We can make choices for our animal friends---we can seek out humanely-raised critters. Yes, it costs a bit more..it's worth it to know they lived good lives. Maybe if more of us buy humanely-raised meat, it will make sense for small farm start-ups to be a viable business for the future. Small things, big changes.
Next week, we will kill one of our friends and eat them....because it was the right thing to do.
