Plants Have Been Manipulating You All Day

I ordered five books for this winter a week or so ago, and the first to arrive was Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World. I bought it as lighter reading I could do between textbook stuff, and it proved to be just that in a very good way. I ate it up, and I'm going to try to make this as little like a book review as possible. You can find a copy here.

John Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, left,
is a much wilder, more "Dionysian" character
than your 4th-grade teacher wanted you to know 

Pollan divides the book into four chapters, each exploring how one plant has used humans as tools to propagate itself in nature. He opens the book by presenting evolution backward (from the plants' point of view) to get the reader used to thinking about plants as subjects, not just objects of our will. He points out that instead of locomotion, plants have focused on evolving very complex chemical processes, aside from photosynthesis, that help move their genes around the earth. A very basic example, and the subject of chapter number one, is the apple. Like many fruiting plants, it has learned how to turn water, sunlight, and minerals into sugar, pack that sugar around its seeds, and then protect the seeds with bitter-tasting cyanide of its own making, all so that mammals like us will eat the fruit, but drop the seeds somewhere else, thus spreading its genes.

Semper Augustus - Unknown, pre-1640.
Tulips of this kind, caused by a rare viral
infection, sparked economic insanity in
17th century Holland

I would argue that Pollan uses the first three chapters to get the reader used to this idea that plants are subjective creatures, each with its own needs and desires, that manipulate the world around them to spread their genes. Then, in the fourth chapter, he tackles Monsanto and genetically modified foods, once the reader is ready to be critical, but thoughtful at the same time. The rest of the book is fascinating in its histories of Johnny Appleseed, the tulip craze of 17th century Holland, and the complicated relationship between humans and cannabis, and I would highly recommend it just for them. The chapter on potatoes, though, is the real meat of the book, and the one I think is important to discuss with you all, whether you read the book or not.

Potatoes have evolved to satisfy the human desire of control, in Pollan's opinion, and he demonstrates that with the history of potatoes in Europe. When the potato arrived there, it was highly unpopular—as a member of the poisonous solanacea family (along with the tomato), as a food of the 'conquered savage', and as a tuber, which most Europeans had never eaten before. However, the Irish poor welcomed it with open arms for its ability to grow vast quantities of food in the near-barren soil they had, its high nutritional value¹, and its help in freeing them from the British Economy, which followed the price of bread and kept them poor. Alas, they experienced a 266% population boom depending on one potato variety (hilariously called "The Lumper"), which fell victim to Phytophthora infestans, a.k.a. Late Blight, which all but wiped out the crop. Pollan says, "one in every eight Irishmen—a million people—died of starvation in three years..."² Many more went blind or suffered other illnesses from lack of nutrition. Pollan calls the Irish example, "...the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly."³ It is not mere chance, then, that he tells this story along with its modern analog, set in Idaho.

A modern field of potatoes

You know how popular potatoes are. Why, you're probably eating one of McDonald's perfect, golden fries right now, you slob. Well, in order for McDonalds to get their fries so crispy and golden, every year they need millions of tons of one type of potato, the Russet Burbank this time, completely free from defects. Enter industrial potato farming. You'll want to check out the map in that link. If you zoom in, you'll see thousands of green circles, each a potato field 135 acres in size (or about 1/2 mile in diameter). At the center of each is a machine called a pivot (visible as lines here), a quarter-mile-long hose on a frame that stands high above the field and that stretches to the outside of the circle. The farmers use the pivot to spray water, fertilizer, and more poisons than you can imagine throughout the season.

A pivot irrigating a field of organic potatoes in Jordan.

Many of these fields are completely sterilized every season through the application of herbicides and pesticides. With no bacterial or insect life in it, the soil cannot produce any minerals for plants to use, so farmers must buy in all the nutrients necessary for their plants, as well as poisons to use throughout the growing season, many of them targeting the delightful fellow at left: the Colorado Potato Beetle. This pest lives virtually anywhere you 

can grow a potato, and just a few can strip a plant of leaves in a matter of days or hours (they're bright green inside when you squish them, by the way). Aside from them, worms and grubs love to burrow into potatoes under the soil, and diseases can wipe out whole fields. Woe are we, then, that we insist on demanding perfection in our vegetables; monoculture far worse than that of Ireland's potato experiment requires powerful toxins to sustain it.

Enter Monsanto, a genetic engineering company with a nasty reputation among organic farmers, in a move that, surprisingly, seems less evil than one might expect of them, in light of the plight of Idaho potato farmers. Back in the 90's, they engineered a potato variety they called New Leaf, by adding a gene from a bacterium commonly used to kill farm pests like the potato beetle, called Bacillus thuringiensus (BT). This gene allowed the plants to produce their own BT toxin in every cell, which would kill any pest that took even the slightest nibble. In Idaho, some farmers are lucky to see a $50 profit per acre of land in a good year, so eliminating a few sprays of the ol' beetle buster could potentially save them a lot of money, and reduce exposure to toxic chemicals for them and the American Consumer, so why did New Leaf fail to catch on?

Well, it seemed all but established in the food industry when McDonalds started buying New Leaf potatoes for its fries. When consumers found out, though, they got scared, understandably. GMOs still rile people up, so it's no surprise that back in the 90's, anti-New Leaf sentiments among McDonalds' customer base could climb high enough to prompt the company to stop buying them, sounding their death knell. If I were to make the choice between GMOs and poisons, I, like Pollan, would probably choose GMOs, but I'd rather not eat either. Pollan makes the point that we have no way to know how GM foods will affect our health, but we do know that shitloads of poison (I'm paraphrasing) are bad for us.

He also makes the point, however, that every genetically modified organism is different, and bound to affect us in different ways. A flounder gene in corn might do no harm, but a platypus gene in wheat might turn on the cancer switch. It's also hard to know if the genes we're not used to eating might cause a buildup of chemicals in us that intensifies and causes harm over generations. In the interest of bashing pesticides and GMOs equally, I'd like to share a story from Pollan's visit to Monsanto's lab, where he helped a scientist plant some baby New Leafs.

First, Pollan learned that there are two ways to modify the genes of a plant. The more science-y method involves inserting the desired genes into a bacterium with an enzyme, then soaking a slip from the desired plant in a culture of the bacteria before planting and growing it. This works best with broad-leafed plants, like the potato. More on that in a minute. The other method is a lot more awesome than that. It involves soaking steel balls in DNA, loading them in a 22mm cartridge, and shooting them at a leaf. If you're lucky, the DNA ends up in the right spot, and the plant expresses the genes in the qualities you were going for.

I'D REALLY LIKE WINGS AND A TAIL!

Anyway, back to the potato. So the process of developing a hearty variety of potato with bacteria genes is not as linear as the phrase "genetic engineering" would suggest. They plant thousands of slips impregnated with the new DNA at once and wait for the plants to come up. Because the gene-embedding is so inaccurate, almost every new plant is different. So what do the scientists do? Select the ones that display the right qualities and breed them! Just like farmers have been doing for thousands of years. They simply give nature a cheat code to unlocking a combination of genes that the species would have taken millennia to develop on its own, if ever.

As a final thought I'll leave you with this one Pollan left me with: The species of Earth have been developing over billions of years by exerting pressures on one another and reacting to those pressures. Plants developed complex chemical processes, like the synthesis and storage of sugars, because their end products enticed animals to spread their genes all over the planet. Even in the instances of 'artificial' selection, in which humans have encouraged plants to grow bigger or more robustly, the plants are only improving upon traits they already had in order to spread their genes more efficiently through humans. Genetic engineering is the first technology in the history of this planet that allows humans to exert their will entirely over other species. Humans don't select and encourage the best specimen, they select the trait and force it into the species solely for their benefit. The GM plant is no longer a subject with a will of its own, but truly the object humans have always thought of it as.

All told, The Botany of Desire is an excellent book that is worth much more than the three days it will take you to devour it. It is fascinating and informative, and entertaining to boot. Let me know if you want to borrow my copy.

Dreaming of Cider Orchards,
The Regular Farmer

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1. It lacks only vitamin A, which milk provides, so mashed potatoes alone can keep a person healthy.
2. Pollan, Michael. Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World. New York City: Random House Inc. 2001 p. 230
3. Ibid. p. 230-231

Educating Myself

Well, the collards and tomatoes of View South Farm have flourished and wilted out of existence in the tide of life and death that all nature undergoes every year, and in all these months I haven't found the time to write about it. Hopefully soon I will be able to share some photos and stories of my harrowing battle with cabbage moths and the delicious produce I got out of my verandagarten this year, but I have other things to discuss first.

I've been thinking lately that it's time I got serious. I'm long done with school, have decided that the stuffy life of Arabic study is not for me, and am well established in my own place. I cannot whine, like many of my cohort have done, that the economy and higher education has left me a jobless sap living at my parents house (even if Tom Ashbrook thinks I should!). Of course, I haven't found work in Islamic Studies, but I think if that was my passion, I would have had no trouble cultivating the relationships and applying to internships that I needed, not to mention it would have been easier to buckle down and learn more Arabic than my professors expected of me. No, my field lays outdoors, in the soil with the plants that will feed me, my family, and my neighbors til we all go the way of my collard greens. It just took me a while to admit that to myself, and I still feel bad that I didn't discover it earlier.*

 I've had enough of the fooling around, though, and am taking my first steps on the long road to sustaining myself as a farmer. I have the foresight now to think that this road itself is my destination. I just hope I can keep that perspective when I feel the pressure to veer off, plant myself, and decide that I can go no further.

Anyhow, my first step was to get back to working outside. As it turns out, there are quite a few farms outside of Boston, but I decided not to go to work for them, at least right away. Instead, I work for a certified organic landscaping company. I won't learn about crops in my time there, but I will learn about planting, feeding, and treating plants, pruning trees, and fostering healthy soil. I'm also working a lot harder and longer in a day than I ever did on a farm (and that will change), so feel that when I do get back to food production, I will be much more prepared to meet the demands on my body. Also, I earning more as a landscaper, which will allow me to save for when Etta and I go on our grand WWOOFing adventures, and for buying land of my own someday.

This brings me to my next step, and the reason I'm posting this: my education. A lot of organic farmers nowadays have the advantage of a college education in soil sciences, botany, and animal husbandry. I can't afford to shell out for another degree, and fully intend to educate myself with classes, and online and print resources. Experience is much more valuable than a degree on a farm, so I'm going to read all I can before I dive into my real education actually growing the crops and taking care of animals.

Etta pointed out that without homework, it will be harder for me to internalize the knowledge I get from my books, so I'm turning Regular Farmer into my homework. From here on out, I'm going to be writing up the facts I've learned, and even doing the occasional research paper, right here for all of you to read. That might sound boring now, but think about how much you loved my post on chicken slaughter! I won't be killing any animals this winter, but I will have some good stories from Michael Pollan,  the beardy orchardist Michael Phillips, and a straight-up, 800-page texbook that I'll spice up just for you.
I hope you'll read on, there's a lot for both of us to learn!

The Regular Farmer

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*I have no regrets, though. I found a loving and supportive partner at college, and great friends I wouldn't trade for the world. Without my education, I wouldn't have been exposed to the philosophies that allow me to drop my regrets like a hot potato the moment they crop up, to boot.

Desert Times

Well, we've had our first challenge on the Verandagarten. Everything was coming up beautifully so far. Take a look:

Columns from Left to Right: Tomatoes, basil, and lettuce mix. The 4th row from the right has 2 parsley (not germinated yet),

2 dill, and 2 oregano. The last row has cilantro, collards, and kale.

We've been very careful about keeping them watered, well lit, and warm. the heating pad and light stay on most of the time, and at night we cover the box to keep the heat in. They get watered at least once a day, and have been progressing steadily. Last night, however, we went to a seder for Passover, and I couldn't get home to water them. So when I got home this afternoon, they had gone more than 24 hours without water under a lamp the whole time.

Seedlings need a lot of water in general. Some, like tomatoes and basil, need less than others, but they suck it up pretty quickly for all the growing they do (some of these guys have doubled in size in a day!). You can imagine, then, that all my plants had shriveled up and fallen right over since yesterday.

 Looks like it's been a hard day.

Plants are very resilient, though. They looked terrible, but if a little drought could kill a plant, Earth wouldn't have any. It's amazing what a little water can do. Less than an hour after I watered them, they were already starting to stand right up.

Of course, this isn't something I want to happen to my crops. I'm trying very hard to pamper them, at least until they're old enough to transplant into a larger container. This early in their lives, every little problem can have drastic effects on their future size. That said, they're not china dolls. They cling to life like every other living thing on the planet. If you think growing food isn't for you, take heart. Your little seedlings will fight for their lives more than you might think!

Wishing you all the greenest of thumbs,

The Regular Farmer

View South Farm

Well folks, it's a long about time I got around to writing a new post for Regular Farmer. Since I last chronicled my adventures, I have seen an organic farm in the Jordanian desert, stepped on my first nail while wwoofing on Lake Champlain, and spent another glorious season at Mighty Food. Perhaps I'll expound upon those experiences someday, but for now, I look to the future forests of collard greens that currently exist only in my dreams.

And soon enough, in my stomach.

You see, I now live in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston with an population as eclectic as it gets. Not so many years ago the hipsters had not yet moved in and raised the number of moustaches per capita to somewhere around .40. With so little facial hair, property values were low and the law meant nothing. Many landlords found that burning their houses down for the insurance money was more lucrative than renting them out. All the paint on said houses ended up in the soil, and thus, growing food in the community garden on my street means eating lead.

My girlfriend, Etta, and I decided to persevere in the face of such hardship, and grow our vegetable garden in pots on the porch. This was the beginning of View South Farm, which will hopefully be feeding us and anyone who's nice to us this summer and fall (we need a red kitchenaid mixer, if you need some ideas).

We started with an order to Johnny's Selected Seeds for a variety of veggies, including Big Beef Tomatoes, collards and kale, cilantro, parsley, dill, and a lettuce mix. For soil, we turned to Boston Gardener up near Dudley Station in Roxbury, an excellent resource for your basic urban-gardening needs. At our kickoff seeding party, which featured the musical stylings of Alex Trott, we filled each cell in a 5x6 egg carton with our soil, planted each seed according to its needs, and snuggled them into their germination station.

Sowing some kale

The germination station, though not as sophisticated as others I've seen, is working beautifully so far. The frame is a cheese box (Thanks to Scott at Singing Cedars!), and inside I've placed a seed-tray heating mat to keep the soil warm for my future dinner. Many seeds need warmth in addition to soil and water to get started. Some, like tomatoes and basil, even like the soil to be 70 or 80 degrees! During the day, I throw open the curtains to give them a little sunlight, but I've been leaving the whole setup under a fluorescent lamp most of the day to make sure the seedlings get as much light as possible.

Complex, I know.

That's it, so far! As you can see from the pictures above and below, we seem to have done something right. Our kale and collards are doing swimmingly, and all the basil has started to come up. I've seen hints of others peeking out from under the soil, but I don't want to count my chickens, so to speak. More updates will follow as our verandagarten, as the Germans might say, springs to life.

The babiest of basils

Until then, I bid you adieu,

The Regular Farmer

Hard Work Transcends Language

With the end of November came the end of the season at Mighty Food Farm. We'd gathered and stored all the squash, onions, and taters, bagged all the carrots and kohlrabi, and planted the spinach in its comfy new greenhouse for the winter. And so, without work, I returned to my Arabic. I'm currently in Amman, Jordan brushing up on my vocab and seeing the sights for a few months, but I'll be back on the Farm in June. Hopefully I'll have an update soon; I'm planning to visit an organic fava farm down near the Saudi Arabian Border. Until then, I'd like to share a bit of wisdom that a new friend put into words for me.

During my time at Mighty Food, I was exhausted almost all the time. At one point, my family thought I was seriously sick because I'd fall asleep at 10:00 on Friday nights (certainly not typical of most 22-year-olds)! Sometimes, I could barely move when I got home from work, but I always felt a very strong sense of satisfaction. To this day, I consider my work on the farm the best thing I've ever done, in every sense of the word. When people asked me how I liked farming, I didn't know how to express this feeling, except to say it was "amazing." I didn't know, that is, until I met these men:

'Isa (عيسى in Arabic, meaning 'Jesus') left, and FaraH Dhib (فرح ذيب)

'Isa and FaraH, two farmers who live in the village of Ajloon, Jordan, met my friend Noah and I on their way back to the town from the fields. We were looking for a shrine to St. George, and couldn't find it, so they showed us the way. After we arrived, they invited us to walk back to the city with them, which was a good 3 kilometers (1.87 miles). Glad for the company, we accepted and had a nice stroll down the mountain. When I found out they were farmers, I said that it must be hard walking 6 km per day in addition to their work.

"No," Farah said, "Baraka fil Haraka." It took me a moment to understand the phrase, but when it hit me, it bowled me over. It means "There is blessing in movement."

In the Islamic tradition (and therefore in all of the Arabic-speaking world. Farah is actually a Christian), baraka, or blessing is a very valuable thing indeed. It's not just a blessing as said by a religious leader, to put in a good word with God, so to speak. In some places, it's almost a tangible thing. Throughout the Islamic world, people visit the shrines of saints, sometimes traveling great distances to do so, in hopes of 'obtaining' baraka. The idea is that the saints were so pious, they lived their lives very close to God, and therefore were vessels for baraka, God's blessing. Even after their deaths, they can pass this blessing on by inspiring people to live better. So people visit them, offer gifts to the caretakers of the shrines, and say prayers for the saint and for their families in the hope of getting some of this spiritual inspiration.

So Farah was really saying that good old-fashioned hard work may be rough on the body, but it's like a double-chocolate fudge sundae with cherries, whipped cream, and sprinkles for the soul. That muted feeling of warm happiness that wraps you up and tucks you in after a day in the sun, that's baraka in my book. It seems to me that the satisfaction that comes with sweat is common to anyone who's ever spent a day in the dirt. And so I leave you to dream of burning muscles, singing in the sun, watermelon in the shade, and sinking into your bed while listening to the crickets through an open window, all in these three words:

بركة في الحركة

Wishing you Baraka,
The Regular Farmer

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

Weird Fruit of the Undefined Period of Time

To help you get a better taste for all the different foods out there, I think I'm gonna start doing shorter posts on single fruits in between the long ones. It takes me a long time to sit down and write a post, hence the month+ gap since my last writing, so I'm going to try to shorten them up.

For my first order of business, I'd like to introduce you to the Physalis genus of plants, which falls under the Nightshade family, meaning it's related to tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tobacco.


Fruits from these plants are most commonly called groundcherries, because they fall to the ground when ripe, or a husk cherries, because they are enclosed in a really cool, papery husk. Although they are indigenous to South America, and are cultivated mostly in warm climates, we grow some at Mighty Food Farm, mostly as a novelty for our CSA members.

Once peeled, they look like small, tan-colored cherry tomatoes, but they sure don't taste like their commonly consumed cousins. Upon mastication, a consumer will taste an extreme sweetness, similar to that of the Butterscotch Sweetie No.6 melon, which is like eating refined sugar. Chewing more, however, will elicit a bitter, earthy flavor to balance the sweetness. I compare it to the savory sapidity of dandelion root tea, which has overtones of chocolate, coffee, and marshmallow. All in all, it's an interesting experience, but I would have to really get used to the flavor before I brought home a bushel to include them in a meal.


One species, Physalis philadelphica, gets a little bigger than most groundcherries. You may know it as the tomatillo, and it is the basis for many green sauces in Hispanic cuisine. I've never tasted one, have you?

Come on down and give a cherry a try!
The Regular Farmer