{The only picture I took this weekend}
This weekend we celebrated my 33rd birthday. It might have been one of the most pivotal birthdays in my life so far, second only to my 25th which I celebrated just days before Jorn's birth, becoming a mother for the first time. This year my birthday was marked by death. Everyone in my family is ok. Let out a deep breath and don't worry. But, for the first time, we processed our own chickens that we raised over the past few months for meat. We had raised a small batch of meat birds before but had sent them out to a butcher to be slaughtered. This time, through serendipitous alignment we were able to bring a few of our birds to a friends house who were culling some hens from their flock and were willing to walk us through the process of slaughtering, plucking and dressing the birds. Not your typical birthday celebration but one that I am perhaps the most grateful for. On Thursday we brought five birds along to our friends and worked side by side, learning step by step. On Sunday Greg and I processed the remaining 9 birds we had together.
Let me just say that you can't overvalue the ethical treatment of animals raised for food, both in their life and in their death. It may seem preposterous, contradictory and hypocritical to use the word ethical in the same sentence as death. And that is true. There is no way around that argument. But being able to handle animals respectfully at the time of their death, when they are raised for that purpose, is humbling, difficult, and draining. In the past I have been around much death. My family owns a funeral home, which I spent a great deal of time in as a child growing up. I have been involved in hunts and handled kills. And of course, I have been an omnivore my entire life so through the consumption of meat I have been responsible for many, many deaths. But this was the first time I had raised domesticated animals, nurtured them each day, tended to their needs, built a home for them and then, in the end, took their life. It is not easy.
Without being overly dramatic, I feel like a different person. In some ways I feel greatly empowered, not at all by the ability to kill but, by the one step further my family has taken away from mass production of food and dependency on corporate production of perhaps the most important products we can ever consume. What we put into our bodies, to the greatest of our economic abilities, should not be a compromise.
There is also no way or reason to romanticize this aspect of farming, there just isn't. The feeling that you get from filling a freezer with meat birds isn't even remotely close to the feeling of filling a pantry with jams, pickles and canned goods.
Raising animals for consumption is certainly not for everyone and there is so much debate about whether not animals should be raised for food at all. I can't say that I have any clarity on that after my experiences this weekend, perhaps I am even more conflicted than ever. I can say that should we chose to raise birds again, we will process them ourselves.
For my birthday on Saturday, Greg cooked a delicious curry using two of the chickens that we had processed on Thursday with our friends. It was probably the most fulfilling meal I had ever eaten. I was so thankful.
