the GoodEater Collaborative

Author: Kenji Lopez-Alt (41 Articles)

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is a contributing editor for Cooks Illustrated Magazine, runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and writes a weekly column on burgers and food science for SeriousEats.com. He is also an occasional co-host of America's Test Kitchen . Kenji holds a BS from MIT and lives with his wife in Harlem.

CONCORD, MA – It’s July, nearly a year after the duck incident, and this time I’m hoping to gain experiences that will connect me to my food on a whole new level. Killing a single cute duck is one thing. Beheading, dressing, and gutting 100 chickens – all before lunch – is another.

As a business model, you have to admire Pete & Jen’s Backyard Birds. Their basic strategy: create a product with so much local demand that the your consumers are willing to spend a Saturday morning helping you with the dirty work, simultaneously building more loyal customers, gaining publicity, and saving you labor costs. That this product happens to be environmentally friendly in almost every sense of the word is just the icing on the cake. That it is downright delicious is the cherry on top.

As far as do-gooders go, it’s hard to find a couple that do more good than Pete Lowy and Jenn Hashley. The two Peace Corps. veterans met at UC Santa Cruz’s Center For Agroecology’s Sustainable Food System’s horticultural apprenticeship program, and soon after moved to Verrill Farms in Concord, where Pete is the assistant farm manager.

Like myself and many other Good Eaters out there, Jenn Hashley decided that she could no longer eat factory-farmed meat “If I didn’t raise the animal and didn’t know how it was killed, I didn’t want to eat it.”

Jen and Pete were more than willing to raise the birds themselves, and the Verrill’s had no problem giving them a corner of the farm to do it on,using the land-friendly techniques now being made famous by the quirky and outspoken Joel Salatin of Virginia’s Polyface Farms in movies like Food, Inc. and books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

But there’s a problem when it comes time to kill the birds and get them ready for market: There are no USDA-sanctioned slaughterhouses open to small-scale producers in the Northeast and most larger farms with on-farm licensed facilities are loath to open their closed doors to smaller, pasture-based producers for fear of contaminating their sheltered flocks with real-world bacteria. Coupled with the prohibitive cost of a licensed bricks-and-mortar slaughterhouse, this means that it is very difficult for a small-scale producer to break into the market, despite the large demand for such birds from customers who are willing to pay up to $4.50 a pound once they’ve tasted what a few weeks of rooting for grubs, bugs, worms, and other pasture goodies can do for the meat of a chicken.

Enter the Mobile Poultry Processing Unit, an all-inclusive bird-slaughtering facility on wheels. The idea is simple: small-scale chicken farmers can’t bring their birds to the slaughterhouse, so why not bring the slaughterhouse to them? Licensed farms can lease the MPPU on slaughter day, and have their chickens dressed and ready for market the next morning. Pete & Jen have been instrumental in the MPPU’s pilot program, and are now in the process of raising funds for a second unit. Jen even supplies materials and training courses for farmers thinking of breaking into the poultry market.

Just about the only thing that the MPPU doesn’t come with is man-power. That’s where we come in: a dozen or so unpaid volunteers milling around the farm’s kitchen at 6:30AM on a Saturday morning drinking mint tea and filling up on homemade muffins before we get our hands dirty. It’s a motley crew that spans several generations worth of ages, and ranges from MIT and BU professors to recently unemployed textbook editors. Some have done this before and come prepared: rubber boots, old jeans, and bandannas to protect hair from flying feathers and blood. Others, myself included, are newbies, wearing nothing but sneakers and t-shirts. Oops.

There’s a sense of anticipation and excitement in the air, and I think some of the others are thinking the same thing I am: “I’m about to kill several hundred chickens. Does the fact that I’m as eager and excited as the MIT guy on Beauty and the Geek make me a man of questionable morals? Should I be a little more somber and slightly less giddy at this point?”

Before I get into some of the gory details (more squeamish readers may want to skip to the very bottom after the next couple paragraphs), I want to say that having gone through the entire process and having added a few more dozen notches to my animal-slaughter tally, I still can’t answer that question. Undoubtedly, part of the excitement came from knowing what a fulfilling experience animal slaughter has been for me, an avid meat-eater, in the past, and the positive ways in which it has brought me closer to my food, and influenced my enjoyment for the better. I’m still a strong believer that those of us who are willing to eat meat should be willing to look their meal in the eye before enjoying it. But the same time, I can’t help but think that part of the excitement truly was sadistic in a way – a form of the primal urge to hunt expressing itself in my repressed, modern urban mind.

In this case, the hunted are a mix of Cornish Crosses and Red Ranger Broiler chickens, which are spending the last few moments of their lives in completely unfamiliar territory: caged up. Looking into the plastic crates housing about a dozen chickens each, it’s hard to imagine that most factory-farmed birds spend their entire lives confined to a space even smaller than this one.

After Pete expertly and efficiently dispatches a half dozen chickens and demonstrates the dressing process, I put on my blue rubber apron, opt out of rubber gloves, and jump in.

The first part of the process is the hardest – grabbing the chicken out of the crate by both of it’s legs. It has a tendency to flap around like, well, like it’s about to lose its life. The key here is to hold it against your body with your free hand, which seems to calm them down and resign itself to its fate.

The next bit, anyone who’s seen the infamous Sarah Palin turkey video will be familiar with: I place the chicken head first into an inverted metal cone, so that his head can be gently pulled out through the hole in the bottom, while his feet stick straight up in the air. Next, I firmly grasp his head, place the electrified knife against his neck, and push the button to zap him. His body convulses incredibly trongly when I do this, all of his muscles clenching simultaneously as he is stunned into unconsciousness.

With the bird totally unconscious, pulling the knife across his throat is a surprisingly simple operation – one which doesn’t even make me wince after the first two or three. The Warner Brothers got it right – when an animal dies, it kicks it’s legs wildly for a few seconds before suddenly straightening them out stiff as a board. What they missed was the frequent and often violent final discharge of excreta from the cloaca that comes with death. Keep your face well clear.

There is something quite beautiful about the way the bright red, slightly viscous blood splatters and eventually pools in the slick stainless steel trough below the cones. Chickens have bright eyes that remain wide open during the entire process up until they lose their last drop of blood a couple minutes after their throats are slit. I’d like to watch the dead birds for a few minutes more, but efficiency is the order of the day, and the next stage is the one that transforms them from cute cuddly farm animal to meat – from chickens, to just plain chicken.

After a few minutes spent rotating in and out of a hot water bath, their feathers are sufficiently loosened that they can be easily plucked. This is accomplished by placing them in a device that resembles an open-topped washing machine lined with rubber fingers which none-too-gently and very efficiently strips them of nearly all their feathers.

What I would have given to have one of these machines the last few times I had to pluck ducks and geese by hand.

The whole operation is arranged assembly line fashion, so once the birds are cleaned of any remaining feathers by hand, they get passed down the line where the heads and feet are removed (the feet are sold to chefs who like that kind of stuff and the heads are sold for pet food) before the rest of the body is passed on to be eviscerated and chilled.
It’s a surprisingly quick operation, despite the fact that most people present have never killed an animal, let alone gutted one, and with only a few slight mishaps – I manage to shock myself twice (should have worn gloves after all), more than one pair of glasses gets splattered with blood, and one unlucky soul literally gets shat upon – we end the day with sandwiches and more mint tea, a few hundred chickens later.

I can’t sufficiently express in writing how great it feels to participate in activities like these. Like my friend Clay Martin who came along for the ride said, “Wow – I feel like I just did the first honest day’s labor that I can remember.” I felt exactly the same way. Knowing that I did something as powerful as taking a life with my own two hands and was able to do it in a way that respected both the life and death of the animal is no small matter, and worth feeling good about.

The real question: do the birds taste better? I’ve already written about this in other publications in the past, but if you believe the many local chefs who use their birds, or the hordes of customers who put their names on a waiting list for birds or who seek out the egg speakeasy (a door on the farm marked with a sign that says “chicken” where eggs are sold on the honor system at around $5 a dozen), then the answer is undoubtedly yes. The chickens are more flavorful and the eggs brighter and richer than anything you can get in the supermarket – even at the fancy organic ones. That I personally helped bring them to the table only makes them better for me.

Beautiful Blood

Jen teaches proper eviscerating procedure.

Final Breaths

Output: Feathers, Heads, Feet, Bodies

Pete & Jen’s backyard birds are available on their website, and you can read about their exploits on their blog