Roasted Griffin

I am not a vegetarian. That is not to say I don’t spend a fair amount of time thinking I should be. Eating animals is a way of life for me. I grew up in a house where a squirrel stealing from the bird feeder ended up in a meat pie for dinner, venison and grouse were a fall tradition, and tours of my father’s family slaughter house started around four years old.

Killing animals was never woman’s work in our family, cooking them was. Preparing meat has always been part of cooking and I, like most people, go out of my way to distance myself from the reality that pork is really a pig, beef is really a cow, and boneless chicken breast is really a muscle cut from the body of a once live, feathered bird.

All that started to change when I began farming. I started my farming life with chickens, the egg laying sort-  happy hens who peck in the yard and provide beautiful blue eggs every morning. My chickens provided breakfast in exchange for treats and shelter. They did not sacrifice their very being for dinner.

However, as fate would have it, we ended up with one too many roosters.  Both our roosters, Griffin and Shadow, were gorgeous boys, but they fought. Over time it became clear one had to go. It seemed the most logical thing to do was prepare one for dinner.

It was decided that Griffin would be the one to grace the table that evening. I wish I could say it was I who had the personal courage to be the one to end the life I had so caringly raised. I still to this day find a tremendous amount of hypocrisy in my inability to kill an animal for food, yet I eat them on a regular basis. Although that is not entirely true, as I have mastered killing a chicken, but it is still a dreaded task, one that makes me weep in sorrow as soon as the head hits the ground.

A friend served as the executioner that day, leaving me the task of preparing the body. After plucking, gutting and cleaning, I was left with a scrawny four or five pound bird, certainly not the Perdue to which I was accustomed. Still, determined my family would enjoy and thoroughly appreciate the sacrifice Griffin had made for the nourishment of my family, I carefully seasoned and put the bird in the oven.

Here is where it all falls apart. I roasted Griffin with all the love and respect I had and it was horrible. He was tough and skinny. The amount of meat on his body was barely enough to feed one, which was fine because barely one person was interested in eating this awful tasting bird.

I was devastated. All my build up over producing my own meat and living the dream of eating food I raised and cared for myself, outside of the awful, cruel realities of the slaughterhouse, was crushed in one harsh blow. What happened? What went wrong?

It became my quest to understand why my chicken was so awful and why a Perdue was so juicy and tender.

I have over time, learned the answer. It is not pretty. My chicken was not a meat bird, but rather the useless male of an egg laying breed. Unfortunately the fate of these males in the factory farms, is death at birth. On backyard farms, the males might make  it to the dinner table, but only if they are young and only in a stew pot, never as an oven roaster.

Grocery store meat birds are no longer a natural breed. They are unable to reproduce and if not slaughter within 8 weeks, can no longer walk and often will die to an exploded heart. On top of this gruesome fact, our tender juicy Perdues are injected with a salt water solution. Even the manufactured Frankenstein birds are not juicy enough for our palette and are artificially flavored and enhanced.

Roasted Griffin never stood a chance. My desperate desire to feel an intimate connection with my food, ended in a reality far worse then simply my lack of ability to be the executioner. It forced me to understand the challenges we face as a culture in regards to meat production and consumption are not so easily solved. 

For me, the whole experience made me think hard about my relationship with meat. Although I still have not made the commitment to a purely vegitarien diet, I am much closer then I was. I try to eat meat sparingly and when I do, I make a conscious and concerted effort to prepare it with care.

Animals play a key role in sustainable agriculture. Their waste is invaluable fertilizer, and their offspring provide much needed income during non-vegetable seasons. Their presence on the farm is also an endless source of inspiration, without which, farming for me would be incomplete.

The reality that our reliance on factory farming to feed our population’s unrelenting desire for large quantities of meat has created a system of highly processed and medicated meat of which that production can not be reproduced on any small humane farm for a price considered affordable by the masses is heartbreaking.  Unless as a culture we collectively value the animals and demand dignity to their life from birth through slaughter, and adjust our diets and budgets accordingly, factory farms will continue to be the ethical abomination of our society. One that  I, who spends many hours fretting over such issues, still play too large a part.

Every day I get up and take care of my animals, some who are destined for the table, and I dream of a different future. I know if we all become vegetarians, maybe the world would be a better place. But in that world my pigs would have no future. I instead prefer to dream of a future where meat is sacred and we all consume small amounts of this precious gift from the earth, always remembering the sacrifice made for our meal, while rejoicing and being thankful for the place we hold in the circle of life.