Two weeks ago I was visiting one of my closest friends who lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Unlike the Kennedy’s, Wall Street Executives and Barack Obama, my friend and his lovely family are not millionaires living it up on the island. It turns out that most of the people that live there year-round are middle class families trying to survive in a community that inflates its cost for the summer crowds. The cost of living there is so high that local folks get an “Island Discount Card” that provides a 10% discount at the grocery stores and other daily amenities.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that I did not visit Martha’s Vineyard to wine and dine with hollywood celebrities. In fact, beside spending time with my friend, his wife and their one-year old son, I traveled east to see his farm and kill his chickens.

When I learned that my trip would overlap with slaughtering chickens, I was overcome with joy. It’s not that I seek blood upon my hands. Rather, in my pursuit of being a conscious meat eater, I wanted the experience of killing and preparing an animal, one that I take for granted at the grocery store. And so begins the story of processing poultry on Martha’s Vineyard.

According to the Organic Consumers Association, an organization working on social justice and sustainability issues in the food system, factory farming kills 14,000 birds a minute. Over the course of one day, 20,160,000 birds are killed. Now I could definitely turn this into a rant on the evils of industrial agriculture, but I will not. I will try to keep this civil so as to maintain the perspective I seek to share. Whether or not you eat chicken, this number is incredible. We can only begin to imagine how an industry kills more than 20 million birds in a single day.

On the other side, the small scale farmer has little to hide. “Small” is a relative term. So let me clarify the smallness of the operation I attended. Looking at the image above, the total slaughtering operation took up about 900 square feet in total. The equipment needed to kill 40 chickens (aka cornish rock crosses) and 20 pekin ducks fits onto a small trailer that is hauled behind a standard pick-up truck.

Unlike the 18-wheelers hauling hundreds, if not thousands of birds to be processed, the 40 chickens fit into 3 crates:

Although you cannot see it in this image, the chickens had roamed about in Salatin-esque pens and traveled about 40 feet (roughly) from pen to crate. I mention this to emphasize the levels of stress animals experience in factory farming. Unlike birds that live in small quarters with no sunlight and suffer many other ills, these ladies lived a good life on the open pasture and did not experience the same levels of stress in their brief transportation.

From the crates, the birds are handled one by one. The man weilding the knife removes a bird from the crate. The bird is held horizontal with its neck resting in his hand. There are no cries of fear. The bird is calm and the sharpened knife slides easily across the jugular. Within moments the bird is dead.

I do think there is room for debate as to when the bird is dead. Does the bird feel pain? Is the bird conscious at the moment? Does it know it is dying? Ultimately I cannot provide those answers. The birds do convulse for a few minutes once they are in the cones, but my understanding is that their nerves are sending messages and the body shakes. Again, no crying or shrieking from the dead/dying birds. The birds lay upside down in the cones for several minutes, bleeding.

Once the bird is bled it is transferred to a hot, soapy bath that must be kept at 150 degrees. If it’s too hot the birds will cook and it it’s too cold the birds will not remain sanitized. The metal basket rotates the birds for about 45 seconds.

From the bath the birds are the places into a giant metal cylinder that has large plastic knobs protruding from its sides. The purpose of this machine is to remove any remaining feathers from the body of the bird. Interestingly, the variety bred by the industry, a breed not so dissimilar from the one seen here, loses its feathers easier than most. (Think genetically modified poultry.)

I suppose we could call this a half-way point in the processing. At this point the bird is tossed into a giant tub of ice water and proceeding requires that the temperature of the bird be lowered (to a degree I do not remember.) One birds have cooled down a bit, they are placed on a sanitized metal table and butchered. Though, unlike the chicken at the grocery store, these birds are not cut up into different parts (i.e. leg, wing, breast, etc). These birds will be packaged whole, minus the feet and the head.

In the hands of the butchers, first the feet and head are removed. The feet are placed in a bucket of cold water to be saved (great for stock.) The heads are thrown out. *Note, all blood, offal and other waste created by the process is collected and often absorbed by hay and placed in the compost. Small scale processing enables the farmers to return inedible parts of the bird back into the soil.

Once the head and feet are removed, the organs follow. Beside the feet, the liver, heart and gizzard are placed in a bucket.

The removal of the innards must be quick as there are more birds to follow. At the same time, while removing organs they must be incredibly careful not to tear the gull bladder. The little greenish-black sac in the bird’s intestinal track is filled with neon green bile. If the sac is torn it releases bile everywhere inside the carcass and will ruin the quality of the bird for the consumer.

Once the birds are properly gutted they return to ice water baths. The end of the process is packaging. Sadly, I did not take any pictures because I was helping them with the procedure.

Basically, a table sits with plastic tubes jutting towards the sky. The birds are placed on the tube through the excavated carcass. A bag is placed over it, the bird slips off with the bag, the bag is twisted and sealed at the top with a pinched metal staple. Then the bag is slightly cut open and the bird is soaked in a steaming pot of water (again around 150 degrees.) The hot water sucks out the air in the bag, creating a vacuum seal. A sticker is placed over the small hole and the bird is thrown in the fridge.

The bird that spent its life roaming on open pasture eating bugs, grass and a bit of grain, had its one bad day.

Related posts:

1. Chicken Stock
2. Simple, healthy and delicious
3. Head Cheese (part I)
4. Turkey Dealing in the Parking Lot
5. CRX: The Bird That Built a Nation

Tags: Chicken, food safety, Joel Salatin, local food movement