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Tastes Like Chicken
On Wednesday, Lauren and I made a trek to the Hawkins Family Farm in North Manchester, IN to pick up chickens we'd ordered. For quite some time, I've believed that conventional factory farming is bad on so many levels. It's bad for the animals, from the de-beaking of the birds to cramming them into wretchedly-crowded and unsanitary conditions. It's bad for the environment as their concentrated wastes become a pollutant, and it uses a lot of water to control that waste. The chickens aren't particularly healthy (big surprise, given the conditions) and (quoting Joel Salatin in Pastured Poutry Profits here) "productivity is maintained by feeding antibiotics and hormones, poisons to enhance the appetite (like arsenic), heavy metals and a host of other additives that increase meat toxins. The meat therefore becomes soft, water-absorbent, lacks muscle tone, and is violently toxic to environmentally sensitive people" (9). Most of us are not so sensitive, which may be our loss in the long run.
Mechanical evisceration breaks open intestines and pours fecal material over the carcass, inside the body cavity, and contaminates the birds. Large chill tanks often have several inches of fecal sludge in the bottom. In fact, about 9 percent of the weight on department-store chicken is fecal soup. The soft muscle tissue is more conducive to insoaking, and the carcass sponges up fecal-contaminated chill water. Of course, this adds to the carcass weight, but certainly does not contribute any to the health of consumers.
This filth is why birds receive as many as 40 chlorine baths--how much of that permeates the meat? And now the Food and Drug Administration has approved irradiation of chicken to control Salmonella and other bacteria that are a direct result of high-speed automated processing. Irradiaion reduces vitamin C levels and reduces the nutrients in the meat.
Sounds bad, doesn't it? Of course, this meat is safe, as millions of Americans eating (I assume) millions of pounds of conventionally-produced chicken each day can attest. Equally, though, as books like Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food document, our American diet in general has in the last several decades made us less healthy. I'm not just talking about the much-discussed "obesity problem" here: as American food production has changed radically, we've seen a rise in many chronic illnesses including cardiovascular diseases, some cancers, and type 2 diabetes. There's certainly more to it than the way our culture raises and kills our chickens (and other meat animals), but I would be surprised if that isn't part of the answer.
Packaging, in general, doesn't help matters any. "Organic" definitely means something, and it's regulated, but it doesn't mean enough in this context. Organic may be just as likely to live a miserable life (but they get good, organic food!), die a miserable death, and have many of the nutrients processed out of them. "Free range" isn't a helpful label either: it's an easy standard to meet, even if the birds only have some time each day outside their cages on bare hardpan (or it could mean something much better than that, but there's no way of knowing from the label). The only way to be reasonably sure what you're getting is to go and visit the farm, talk to the farmer, form a personal relationship of trust. That's what we've at least started to do with Jeffrey Hawkins and his family farm. I've talked with him over e-mail and now in person, I've been out to the farm, and although I didn't go inspect the living chickens, I could see them in a distance and have no reason to think he isn't using the method he says he is, which is to say Joel Salatin's outlined in Pastured Poultry Profits and You Can Farm. To be really really sure about things, you'd have to go watch the slaughter (or perhaps even volunteer to help). Some day, when we have time, we probably will.
For now, though, we brought home three chickens, six pounds of grass-fed hamburger patties, some raw-milk cheddar (not actually from the farm, but from some local Amish), and a dozen eggs. On Thursday, I cooked the first of the chickens, drawing inspiration from Shannon Hayes's book The Farmer and the Grill for what I'm calling Beer Can Pesto Roasted Chicken:
Since our chicken wouldn't actually fit on our Weber Q grill, I used the oven to roast our bird. I made up an herb blend by putting 1/4 c olive oil, 1/2 cup fresh basil, 2 T coarse salt, 1 T black pepper, and 1 clove garlic into the food processor. I had to twist off the neck and remove the giblets from the cavity (incidentally, whereas the packaging of, say, boneless skinless chicken breasts can easily make one forget that what one is eating once actually walked around, preparing a whole chicken this way left no doubt). After the skin is loosened up, this herb mixture is rubbed under and over the skin. I took 1 can beer and dumped out about half of it, then put the can upright in a cast iron skillet, and put the chicken over the beer can, so that the beer can was inside the cavity and the two legs acted kind of like legs of a tripod. Anyway, it stood up. The recipe I used as a guideline suggested 1 1/2 to 2 hours for a chicken of about 4 pounds, but since ours was over 5 pounds I left it the whole 2 hours. In retrospect I should have checked it earlier because it was slightly overdone, but still quite good.
In a bid to use the whole bird, I cooked down the giblets with some veggies for stock, then cooked down the carcass once I'd picked it clean, adding more veggies. I figure I got about 8 cups of broth or stock from my two hours-long cookings, plus however much meat we got. We haven't eaten any of the leftovers yet, but I've got a new chicken salad recipe in my sights.