What Kind of Animal Does a Parsnip Come From?

My departure from a decade of vegetarianism has been, depending on your point of view, either a reformation or a fall off the vegetable wagon. I'm not sure where I stand on the matter, myself. Call me a conflicted carnivore, I guess. So I try to assuage my conscience with what I think of as deliberate food choices: I don't eat conventionally-raised meat or eggs or factory-farmed anything or environmentally irresponsible aquaculture products or overfished seafood or, well, you get the point.

If I were single, I'd just forego all the decisions and be a vegetarian, which is probably how I ended up there in the first place. But my husband is a carnivore. To wit, his commentary after viewing our first installment of this year's all-produce CSA:

"Oh yeah. I remember the CSA from last year. I didn't shit solid all summer."

My husband is also frugal with all aspects of the budget not directly related to automobiles, so paying premium prices for premium food ("Food is Fuel," he intones) plays strongly against type.

Which is what inspired my Genius Idea #486: Grow Your Own. Except that he hates animals (except as dinner fare) and I am not handy. Fortunately, my friend Chris has a small farm (which seems to receive a lot of press in this blog).

Me: Hey. Would you grow me a turkey?
Her: Sure. In fact, let's make it twenty. How hard can it be?

Harder than chickens, it turns out. Chris has a lot of chickens, and other than losses to the occasional marauding fox or my ill-conceived Slug Eradication Program, the chickens mostly peck about in the yard and eat and shit and lay eggs. The turkey poults, it turned out, mostly ate and shit and pecked each other to death.

I learned this first-hand, as I was starting several of the poults in a cage in my basement. I’d done it with chicks, quite successfully. So successfully, in fact, that my daughter developed an attachment a Golden Laced Wyandotte she had picked out herself and named “Monarch” based on the theory that he looked like a monarch butterfly. Awwwww.

Monarch did just fine until he was released into the relative wilds of Chris’s poultry pen, where he promptly became fox fodder.

Which is why we had the poults in our basement. To ease my daughter’s distress over losing Monarch. Unfortunately, our grief abatement plan looked something like this:

Me: Here, Honey. Which poult do you like best?
Her: OOOH. The white one. Can she be mine?
Me: Yes. (mentally: As long as you don’t mind the fact that we will eventually kill and eat her.)

(the next morning)

Me: Ummm…Honey? Which poult did you like second-best?
Her: Why?
Me: Oh, no reason.

And so on until eventually my daughter pleaded, These turkeys need to go back to Miss Chris’s house because they keep dying and this is just too sad for me.

Done.

Anyway. So we were down to 13 turkeys by the time they had reached poultry adolescence, marked unofficially by our sudden ability to distinguish toms from hens. An eighth turkey died of suspected suicide (it was early November, perhaps he had noticed the telltale Pilgrim-and-Indian themed artwork coming home from school). We found him dangling by his neck from a hay-feeding-thingy (ask Chris for the specific term).

Twelve turkeys out of twenty. Not so good. And I cared about this because a.) If the experiment didn’t work, Chris would be unlikely to support any future turkey raising endeavors and b.) I had become a sort of poultry venture capitalist, having fronted Chris half the cost of the poults and feed.

Also, they were not quite sizing up as we had hoped, so our marketing slogan became: Buy a farm-fresh, locally-raised turkey! Sized to leave enough room in the oven for side dishes! All of them!

And then there was the business end of the turkey business: somewhere along the line, they had to go from being live turkeys to being, well, turkey. And I was hoping to be far away when that happened. Specifically, in Baltimore. Visiting a friend.

But then my parents’ plans to visit and watch the children coincided with my husband’s business trip cancellation, meaning that the three of them would have been spending time together in my house while I was in Baltimore and frankly, I’m not that high up on Santa’s Good List. So I stayed home. Which meant I had no excuse not to attend The Turkey Kill.

The Turkey Kill was hosted by a large and very extended family who also (I later learned) conducts Pig Kills and Deer Kills and Steer Kills and Chicken Kills. Theoretically, I really admire this. Somewhere deep down, I believe you shouldn’t eat it if you can’t kill it, which is why – really – I should be a vegetarian.

The Turkey Kill is presided over by a man named Uncle Tim. Uncle Tim has been doing this for twenty years, he told me, and it shows. He was by far the most knowledgeable – and least drunk – person at the event. After the requisite ribbing about why we had hauled a trailer full of CHICKENS to A TURKEY KILL, Tim got down to business.

“We’ll do your birds first,” he said. Yee-haw. We had twelve, they had 80. At this rate, we’d do our turkeys and be gone before lunch. They were charging us $5/head (so to speak) which was, as near as I could tell, a screaming bargain. Tim grabbed the first turkey and carried it over to the “kill team.” The kill team consisted of two of the largest men. One stuck the turkey head-down (Warning: if you are faint of heart and/or prefer not to know what goes on in even the most humane (yes I get the irony) Turkey Kill, skip ahead.) into a large bucket with a hole in the bottom. The turkey’s head stuck through the hole, whereupon Big Guy #2 ran a very sharp knife through its open beak directly into its brain, killing the bird instantly.

I covered my mouth and tried not to retch, making a series of urrrrping noises, which was rather kind of me, actually, because it was the most fun the kill team had all day. Then came the bleeding and the thrashing and more urping noises, then Big Guy #1 carried the bird over to the Scalding Kettle where - well, you can do the math – while Big Guy #2 took a swig from a suspiciously unmarked and blood-spattered bottle positioned strategically beneath his chair.

From the Scalding Kettle it was off to the Plucking Table, which was presided over by a woman barking orders in a New England accent thicker than the Marlboro Light cloud that encircled her head.

After plucking, the bird went into Ice Bath 1, followed by Ice Bath 2, followed by the Gutting Room, then Ice Baths 3 and 4 (“Bringing the body temp down quick is key,” explained Tim. “I don’t want anybody getting sick off my birds.” before finally being Stuffed, Bagged, And Tagged.

Sounds like a date I once had.

Anyway. It was in the Gutting Room (that’s “gutten” here in New England, home of the “good idee-er”) that I eventually found my niche after unwittingly demonstrating a propensity for skinning gizzards. There’s another date joke in there somewhere, I am certain. Skinning gizzards is a tortuous job which involves being elbow-deep in buckets of ice water every second that you’re not actively trying to strip the inner membrane out of a spherical and extremely slippery innard with a deadly sharp and even slipperier knife.

It is a walk in the park, though, compared to actual gutting, which involves slippery turkeys and bilious gall bladders and weird little tail glands and strangely elusive crops and miles and miles of intestines.

Fortunately, gutting also takes place indoors with a propane space heater and a bottle of homemade applejack. Thus it is the relative lap of Turkey Kill Luxury.

As an aside, each station secretly believes it has the best job while outwardly bemoaning its horrors. “Don’t see anyone volunteering for this job,” the Kill Team says. “Sure, everyone says they want to be on the Kill Team cuz we have the easy job. But they’re not lining up over here to hold this motherfucker while it trashes around and sprays blood all over me.” No, they’re not. Likewise with the pluckers. All women, for some reason, descending onto the scalded carcass like, well, hens on a cricket and plucking by the fistful. Wet feathers are so naturally adhesive you wonder why the colonists ever bothered with tar, and by the second bird of the day the Pluckers are feathered up to the elbows and beyond, standing around like a flock of weird bird-women, all cackling, “Sure, everyone says plucking’s so easy. Then why the hell don’t we see anyone else doing it?”) This was no less true in the Gutten Room. In fact, the only exception to this rule seemed to be Joe. Joe obviously felt that every aspect of Turkey Kill was designed for him personally so long as it afforded him the opportunity to make sexual innuendo about dead turkeys.

“Look at me!” Joe shouted as he held a limp, plucked turkey carcass in front of his crotch. With the legs spread eagled around him, he thrust animatedly at the body cavity. Demonstrating a singular lack of self-awareness he chortled, “Somebody take a picture of me!”

Joe tended to avoid the Gutten Room, givens its relatively small audience of 3 or 4, which was yet another plus. Skinning gizzards was child’s play compared to cutting a wide berth around Joe as he ran helter-skelter through the barnyard bearing a turkey head on a long stick. “Look! Look at me! I got a little head!”

By the time I had skinned thirty or forty gizzards, any hope I ever had of calling it an early day had evaporated. Of course, so had my original reservations about drinking out of the communal and entrail-coated bottle of applejack. (There is really only one word to describe the Gutten Room: Slippery. The birds are slippery, your hands are slippery, the knives and the soles of your shoes and the table top and the trash bins – all of it slippery. And the bottle of apple jack, being queen of the proverbial prom for the afternoon, was slipperiest of all.) And by the time the fifth or sixth box of pizza was opened, I somehow choked back my utter horror at eating FINGER FOOD in the middle of the TURKEY KILL. And it was the best damned pizza I ever tasted. Right up until I noticed that everyone else was throwing away the crusts, treating them as handles: the buffer zone between Turkey Kill Hands and Non-Vomitous Stomach.

Uncle Tim had made us an offer Chris couldn’t refuse: Help us kill our turkeys and we waive the slaughter fee. Chris was in her element even before the five-dollar-per-bird enticement. It was a barnyard full of rednecks, Marlboro Lights, and sketchy homemade liquor. Hell, she would’ve paid them just to let her stay.

I, on the other hand, am a very bad venture capitalist. Because even knowing the wild improbability of our first turkey attempt breaking even, I still thought $5/turkey was a deal.

So I stayed. There was an awful lot of camaraderie, and it was instructional in an odd sort of way.

“Ever get a pregnant one?” a young-woman wearing a UConn sweatshirt piped up in the Gutten Room.

“Well, sometimes we get one with eggs in it,” replied her father, a veteran gutter.

“Yeah, but do you ever get a pregnant one?”

Chris looked at me; I looked at her. We both suppressed giggles, undermined in our attempt by the applejack. “Remind me to cross UConn off my kid’s college list,” she stage-whispered.

How could I not stay? And at the end of the day, I got a free turkey from Uncle Tim. It was actually larger than single-serving size, so I considered it my lucky day.

And Chris got hers: Standing around the plucking table, she noticed Joe eyeing her up.

“Heyyyyyyyyyy. Don’t I know you from somewhere?” He asked suspiciously.

“No.” Chris has traveled incognito ever since her unfettered youth, given that she wasn’t as fortunate as I in my ability to never live within a 500 mile radius of my alma mater.

He squinted, and I’ll be dammed if the man with the taste for raw poultry didn’t have a discerning eye.

“Christine! We went to high school together!” There was no denying it, he had enough details to seal the positive identification. And to Chris’s horror, for the rest of the day the Gutten Room remained a-twitter with talk of “Joe’s new girlfriend.”

Five dollars per turkey? That’s a hell of a deal if you ask me. Grab a knife and pass the applejack.