Somebody from church was given a turkey awhile back, and he gave it to us. We've had it in our basement freezer for awhile now, and I thought I should just go ahead and bake it. I've never baked a turkey before, but I brined it and mish-mashed several recipes together to prepare it, and -- voila! -- my final masterpiece.
Here's the thing, though, in the last couple of years, I've read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver as well as Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat (twice) by Hal Herzog. My parents have also recently been sharing some things they learned from Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. National Geographic also recently had a feature article on feeding our hungry planet. I also have a few friends who are vegan or who have moved in that direction. So generally, overall, I've become more informed about what it takes to create all the meat we consume. I get it and I feel concerned about it, though I haven't figured out how my moral feelings will govern my behavior.
But fixing this turkey was just one step more on the road towards cutting back on meat consumption. When you handle a whole turkey, you see how much meat is on this one animal. This was an 11 pound turkey.
I have some familiarity with animals because of my mom's farm. That experience mixed with my most recent major efforts in the kitchen combined to give me a truly hands-on understanding of what's going on here.
In Some We Love by Hal Herzog, he describes the life of the chicken on your plate in the hen house:
"Cheap meat comes at a cost. A broiler chicken's bones cannot keep up with the explosive growth of its body. Unnaturally large breasts torque a chicken's legs, causing lameness, ruptured tendons, and twisted leg syndrome. According to Donald Broome, professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, severe leg pain in chickens is the world's largest animal welfare problem. Arthritis, heart disease, sudden death syndrome, and a host of metabolic disorders are prevalent among industrial broilers.
"The living conditions of the animals destined to become chicken nuggets are Dante-esque. The chicks will never see sun nor sky. Because they are so top-heavy, broiler chickens spend most of their day lying down, often in litter contaminated with excrement. As a result, many will develop breast blisters, hock burns, and sores on their feet . . ."
So I've read that before and I've felt anxious about our food consumption around here, with five meat-eaters. But when you have a meat-made turkey lying on your cutting board and you're handling that thing, you can see that there is a very high meat-to-bone ratio. My mom has turkeys. They are the sweetest, most contented things. My mom loves them, because they follow her around and live in a little happy troupe. In the summertime, they have the run of the yard and they mostly forage for their own food. With that turkey in my kitchen, I imagined plucking my mom's healthy, wholesome turkeys and I knew that they would not look like this. They are not the same kind of turkey, but that's the point. The kind of turkey we're consuming in massive amounts are not, by design, healthy animals.
When my parents bought the farm property they now live on an older couple lived there. They owned a horse, a pony, and a sheep, which my parents inherited with purchase of the property. The three animals had all been excessively grain-fed. The pony suffered severe laminitis and the sheep -- the sheep was a horrid, massive, bulky creature whom we named "Mammoth." There was no hope for him by the time we inherited the property. My mom weaned back his grain consumption but he was too far gone. There came a day when the beast could no longer rise. He was just plain too heavy for his own legs. A neighbor came and put an end to Mammoth, may he rest in peace. Now, I know I've gone from turkeys to chickens to turkeys to sheep, but the point here is I would never have wanted to eat that well-fed enormous sheep, but I do regularly eat equivalent kinds of chickens and turkeys. Unfortunately, when I put that turkey meat in my mouth, no matter the fact that I'd been pondering the unfortunate circumstances of its life, I still felt satisfied and pleased with the taste of the turkey. It would be so much easier to align my beliefs and actions if I didn't like the taste of animals.
I'm not really sure what affect this experience will have on our meat consumption around here. My husband isn't all that fond of turkey anyway. When I told him about my experience with the turkey, I said, "Are you listening? Do you care?"
"Yeah. I heard you," he replied, "But, ya know, cruelty just tastes good."
He said this tongue-in-cheek about the turkey because he doesn't even like turkey. But he (and I) do like beef and pork and chicken. But I'd like to think that we weren't so crass as to feel that cruelty does taste good. I'd like to cut back on our meat consumption because that turkey on my table demonstrated full-on that grocery-store poultry absolutely truly is the result of some cruel experimentation, and I don't particularly want to be a party to it.
