The Life and Death of a Mighty Food Chicken

This is going to be a difficult post to write, not because I will struggle to relive the chicken slaughter we did last week, but because it is of the utmost importance to me that you understand the life and death of your meat. When I tell people that we slaughter our own chickens at Mighty Food, they generally react with disgust, not for me, but for the act of killing. They want nothing to do with death, especially the meat-eaters among them. Every carnivore knows of their complicity in their food's death, but most refuse to admit it to themselves. It's easy to ignore death when chicken comes frozen in bags from Tyson, breaded and ready to bake, but our collective ignorance has created the horrific meat industry in this country today. So whether you have an iron-clad stomach, or you tend to shy away from gore, whether or not you eat meat, read this post. I will not show you gruesome images; I will describe everything as it is.


On the big day, we gathered at Mighty Food to find six, yellow crates in the back of our truck, each full of chickens. Our employer Lisa had spent her morning catching the sixty or so chickens and putting them in the crates, because we were going to slaughter down the road at Seth and Fiona's Hidden Pasture Farm. Unfortunately, chasing and crating the chickens stresses them out, which negatively affects the flavor of the meat. Since we had no choice, I believe these crates limited the stress. They were three by four feet wide, but only one foot tall, leaving the chickens no room to move around. Had they been free to move, they may have injured themselves flapping and running into reach other. This way, they sat still, and were relatively quiet, although they squawked a bit when we pulled out of the driveway.

When we arrived, we backed the truck into a large shed where the whole operation went down. The first stop for the birds were the killing cones, similar to the ones at left, although ours were mounted on a wall. My boss Chuck carefully pulled each chicken out of its crate and placed it, head down, into a cone. This, I believe, is very important to keeping the chickens calm. The cones are very snug, so they prevent the chickens from moving around, which would let them flail and stress themselves out. To me, it's kind of like how being tucked in your bed helped you forget the monsters underneath when you were a kid. Chuck would then pull gently down on the head to keep the neck still and cut off the head as quickly as possible. This method proved quite violent, and the birds would flail for quite a while after the beheading. One chicken even jumped out of the cone, and flew, headless, around the shed.

As it turns out, this method cuts the trachea (the breathing tube), which then fills with blood from the jugular veins, effectively asphyxiating the chicken. The body, reacting reflexively to the lack of oxygen, flails around for several seconds. Fiona showed us a much better way after we slaughtered a few chickens this way. By carefully cutting only the jugular veins on either side of the trachea, the chicken will bleed out in seconds, and will not struggle at all, although you have to cut both veins; if you don't, the chicken will bleed out much more slowly. My mom winced when I told her about this method, since the chicken feels pain, but some pain is unavoidable (unless you use electricity to paralyze the chickens first). Cutting off the head is quite slow and much more painful, as well as more traumatic. The chicken lives for several seconds after, experiencing it's last seconds panicked, as a head with no body.

Once the chickens had finished bleeding, we pulled them out of the cones, and held them in a pot of water at 150 degrees Fahrenheit for 90 seconds. This loosens the feathers from the papillae (bumps on the skin, Latin for 'nipples'), so the feather remover (example at right) will have an easier time of pulling the feathers out. When the chickens were done simmering, we put them in the drum, which has a faucet and lots of rubber fingers. When we turned it on, the water flowed in to lubricate everything, and the bottom of the drum began to spin. As it spun, the fingers on the bottom pulled the chicken in a circular motion as the fingers on the sides stayed still. The stationary fingers grabbed the feathers as the chicken spun around, pulling them off and sending them out a hole in the bottom of the machine. To see this process, watch the video here. There is no killing in the video, just a demonstration of how the de-feathering machine works.

The next stop for the chickens was the eviscerating table. My coworker Ben would take the chickens from my boss Lisa and cut off the head and feet before passing them on to me and the other eviscerators. When I received the chickens, they looked a lot like a roast chicken, except they still had all their organs inside, so it was my job to remove them. I would start by making a 'y'-shaped incision from the bottom of the ischium (the ridge that runs along the bird's belly) around the anus. This makes the hole you'd expect to see in a chicken, into which you'd put stuffing and such before cooking it. From there, the removal of the organs begins.

First, you have to squeeze out any poop that's left in the end of the intestines, which really sucks. It smells the worst, although the whole inside of the chicken has a very unique smell I can only describe as 'gastric.' From there, you reach in and pull out the intestinal tract, which pulls out in a big pile of tubing, exactly as you'd imagine a pile of intestines looks. After that, you have to pull out the gizzard, which is the most interesting and beautiful of all the organs. It's the second of the chicken's two stomachs, and many birds, reptiles, and even earthworms use it to grind up their food, in place of teeth. When chickens eat food, they store it temporarily in the crop, a part of the esophagus. Little by little, bits of food pass through the glandular stomach (which uses enzymes to start digestion, like a human stomach), and enter the gizzard, which is full of rocks and grit that they've previously eaten. The rocks grind up the food, which can then either go back to the glandular stomach or proceed to the intestines. You can see three chicken gizzards in the picture at right. The gizzard comes out of the chicken looking like the first one in the photo. It feels very firm, because it's made of dense muscle tissue. To clean it, you have to cut along the side and peel it back, like the one in the middle, to expose the rocks and grit. Then, you wash it out, and you have something like the gizzard at the bottom. We saved all of the gizzards, because they're good to eat, like the heart and liver.

After the gizzard is out, you have to remove the next little set of organs, which include the liver, heart, and gallbladder. At this point, I feel a lot like I'm defusing a bomb, because the gallbladder has the potential to ruin the whole carcass, even though it's only the size of a lima bean. If you rupture it, it releases a puddle of blue-green enzymes that will start to digest the inside of the bird and prevent you from storing the meat for any period of time. Of course, you can rinse it out, but it is best to remove the gallbladder intact. Once that's done, you have to cut it off of the liver and throw it away, saving the liver and the heart, if you got them both out.

From there, you can get the ovaries if the chicken was a hen or the testicles if it was a rooster. The reproductive organs are located along the spine near the heart and liver. Along with the ovaries, you'll usually find some eggs-in-progress. These take the form of yolks, ranging from pea-sized on up to the normal size of an egg yolk, but they do not have a shell. Once in a while, you'll even find a whole egg inside, which can be saved and eaten, since the chicken was about to lay it anyway.

After that, I usually go for the crop, which you can pull out either from the neck or through the body cavity, which is harder, but more satisfying, to me, anyway. From there, I move on to the lungs, which are pressed against the chest wall on either side of the spine near the neck. It's pretty tough to get them out sometimes because it's hard to get your fingers under them, so if you're having trouble, you can use a tool like the one at right, which we call the lung scraper. Despite its resemblance to a medieval torture device, it works pretty well. Once the lungs are gone, and you give the body cavity a once over to make sure it's empty, you can move on to the last two parts.

First, I pull the trachea out of the neck, which means rooting around where the head used to be to find it. It's terrifyingly similar to a plastic silly straw you'd get with a kid's meal at Friendly's, only a little smaller, and it pulls fairly easily out of the neck. Finally, we cut off the chicken's oil gland, which looks like a little nub on top of its tail. My coworker Doug called it the 'stink gland,' but I can't find any reference to that. Since most references I found call it an 'oil gland,' I'm pretty sure it's a sebaceous gland, which means it produces the skin's oils to protect the bird from germs, and to coat the feathers during preening (which just means grooming).

Once all the organs were removed, we rinsed the inside and outside of each carcass and put it in a bath of ice water to store until we could bag and freeze it. In all, we slaughtered about 60 chickens over the course of three and a half hours, meaning Mighty Food now has about $1000 worth of chickens to sell.

Thank you for reading this far, my friend. It shows that you are unafraid of accepting that death is a necessary part of life, and of eating meat. Unfortunately, we have removed death from our perception of food in recent years. Meats come wrapped in plastic, breaded, and pre-sliced, and in no way resemble the animal from which they came. The butchers in our grocery stores hide behind thick, plastic sheets, where shoppers cannot see the blood or the knives they use. My point, as depicted by Bill Watterson (click to enlarge):

Courtesy of http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/

Most companies, like Tyson and Perdue, kill millions of animals per day in factories out in the midwest, process them, and distribute them thousands of miles to your door. The chickens they raise live most of their lives in cages smaller than the crates above. They've been bred to grow twice as big as normal chickens, twice as fast; some of them cannot even support themselves enough to walk. Many are even raised in complete darkness, and never see the light of day. When their farmers object to these practices, they're sued and ruined financially. All of this you can learn about in Food Inc., which I strongly encourage you to watch.

As I write this, I'm watching one of those Humane Society commercials with a Sarah McLaughlin song in the background, asking me to donate or else I'm a bad person. That's not what I'm trying to do to you, dear reader. Regardless of the meat you eat, I want you to know about how it gets made, and to feel good about eating it. Don't leave yourself in the dark. You've read this post, so you know that animals have to die for your food. Now, accept it, embrace it, and make peace with it. That's easiest for me to do when I'm eating a local burger or piece of chicken. I can go to the farms where my meat is raised, see the animals grazing and going about their lives, and learn how the farmers butcher them. Knowing the animals that provide my meat lived happy, healthy lives gives me peace of mind and helps me deal with their deaths.

Sincerely,
The Regular Farmer