Feather to plate

Last weekend, researching an article about Charlottesville, Virginia, I got to visit Polyface Farm. Like so many other true believers in the locavore movement –those who believe that eating food that is grown and raised locally is better for the environment, better for the local economy, and better for your body (including taste buds!) -- I had read about Polyface in one of the seminal tomes of the concept, Michael Polan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” The book describes the sustainable methods of pig, cattle and chicken farming practiced at Polyface, which is about 50 miles from Charlottesville, detailing how farmer Joel Salatin rotates his animals on pasture land, re-uses manure to nurture the soil, and follows the animals’ natural habits in order to keep them healthy, to maintain some semblance of natural balance, and for eventual harvest. This, the premise goes, makes for a better planet as well as a better drumstick (or pork chop) on your plate.

The book also portrays Salatin as a sort of radical folk hero, a forget-about-the-rules-and-do-what-you-know-is-right kind of guy.

So going to Polyface was a bit like a pilgrimage.

To get there, I followed windy, country roads past other farms (I wonder what Salatin’s neighbors think of all the hoopla) and on to a picturesque site dotted with plastic hoop-house greenhouses, barns and sheds, plus a market building where Polyface sells its wares (besides the meat, also produce and eggs). There was one other car in the small parking area. This is a working farm, not a showcase. And, when I went in to see if there might be a map in the market building (there was) the woman behind the counter told me they were slaughtering out back if I wanted to watch.

Um, yes. If you can get a first-hand look at where your food comes from, I think you should. Even when it involves slaughter.

Out back, a sort of mechanical humming was the only sound – it was the spinner that de-feathers the birds, sort of like a clothes-washing machine set on “spin,” but without the water. Just birds.

Besides the water spraying from the spinner (and the water on the floor and everywhere else in this open-air shed, keeping thing clean throughout the process), slaughtering at Polyface is a surprisingly neat operation, everything moving efficiently down an assembly line of family members, starting with 6-year-old Andrew, who minds the crates of fluffy white, live birds and then stacks the crates once they’re empty.

His dad, Daniel, grabs the birds one by one, and tucks them head first into metal cones arranged in a circle on a contraption hanging from the ceiling.

Then he slits their throats, an action so quick you hardly know it’s happened. There is no squawking, no protest, the chickens simply wait their turn in their crates (from which they could fly, if they had a notion, but they don’t), then succumb.

It doesn’t feel like death, in a bad way. It feels like dressing them, somehow – adding some necessary accoutrement, a necklace of thick blood, and they never blink, they just take it in stride and then they are no longer the kind of bird you interact with, maybe talk to, or shoo away from the lettuce, they are the kind of bird you find in your frig, the kind of bird you will eat.

Yes, there are slicks of dark blood under the cones with chickens hanging upside down. There are spatters of blood on Daniel’s cheeks, and on the yellow slicker aprons and overalls some of the other processors wear. But it is all part and parcel of the process. Part of the circle of life – as corny as that sounds, it is actually what I am witnessing. We nurture the animal. The animal nurtures us. Life goes on. And then there’s death. We get a much longer stay on earth, it is true – these birds got a total of eight weeks. They are small, Daniel explained, because they are spring chickens, not yet enjoying the more bountiful feast of insects and grasses available to later flocks.

The birds go from the slaughtering machine into a bin that flips them into boiling water, to loosen their feathers. Then, into the washing machine contraption, which spits out bits of water, as if the birds are being wrung out. Everything smells faintly of boiled chicken, and I wonder if my jeans, which I’m sure have been spattered by this spinning machine (I’m that close!), will stink by the end of the day. They don’t.

From there, the chicken gets passed down the line, with unwanted bits cut away or gathered into buckets – feet, gizzards, livers, hearts, I’m not sure what all the farmers are doing but by the end these birds are ready for the oven.

I take all this in from inches away, being careful to stay out of the way. Daniel answers my questions, and talks about the buying clubs that make up 45 percent of the business. He listens as his son carefully spells out his name for me, A-N-D-R-E-W. The boy tells me that’s his brother over there, helping cut up the chickens – Travis. He’s eight.

Then his dad helps spell out the last name,: S-A-L-A-T-I-N and I realize this is family. Daniel tells me Joel, Andrew’s grandfather, is standing in the assembly line, along with Andrew’s grandmother and great-grandmother. There are four generations here today, the first day of chicken harvesting. They are all friendly, listening politely and grinning slightly as I blather about how really pleased I am to meet them, I’ve never seen anything like this, it’s a wonderful place, etc.

My pilgrimage is complete.

And later, when I order a curried chicken salad at Revolutionary Soup in Charlottesville, I appreciate chicken in a whole new way.
Though I must say, the eggs I brought home from Polyface and ate hard-boiled today for lunch were even better. Brilliant orange yolks, rich but not heavy flavor. And, no slaughter required.

Sailing on staples

I ran out of milk today, so I went to the cupboard for my back-up box of powdered, instant milk. I keep this on hand for when I really want to make macaroni and cheese, or quiche, or muffins, and I have all the ingredients but milk. Who wants to run out to the store? Mix up some dried milk and throw it in, you can't really taste the difference.

Today, I put it in my iced coffee (actually this morning’s leftover coffee with a few ice cubes thrown in, but it really can be dolled up to taste like a coffeehouse treat). This was an entirely different proposition than substituting it in baked dishes, where it is masked by a variety of other ingredients. This time with just the milk, and the coffee, that clinging flavor of dried milk came right through.

It immediately made me think of The Boat. When I was eight years old, my family took off from Long Island, New York on a 40-foot sailboat, which we lived aboard for a year: me, my three older sisters and my parents. Yes, it was tight quarters. And there are many things I remember about it – but food, memory trigger that it is, calls forth the culinary details.

There wasn’t a lot of storage room on the boat, and the icebox, as I recall it, was an on-again-off-again hole in the galley counter with a hatch-type lid that lifted up. You had to reach into its depths and re-arrange everything in order to find whatever it was you were looking for. It was also dependent on The Generator which seemed to be a subject of conversation pretty frequently -- I think it must have been broken a lot. At eight years old that sort of thing was not my concern. I only knew that our “frig” was pretty limited. And we often bought ice, in blocks, at the marinas where we stayed. Maybe it wasn’t an electric refrigerator at all, maybe it really was just an ice box? At any rate, we didn’t get fresh milk, but we drank a lot of the dried variety, along with Tang (remember that orange-flavored powder touted to be the drink of astronauts?), and occasionally those tin cans of orange juice with Donald Duck smiling on the front, trying to conceal the fact that the juice tastes like metal. On special occasions, like birthdays, we would have cans of Coke, which we cooled by placing in a net and hanging in the water.

We had a few staples that we made over and over: the ones I remember were molasses sugar cookies, which were my specialty (except the one time I added a cup instead of a teaspoon of salt, and we had to throw the entire batch overboard); and “bathroom cookies,” which were a variation on the recipe from the Bran Flakes box. I’m sure there were other stand-bys my mother used to feed us all, but I only remember that she stowed cans of – what? – tuna? meats? – under the floorboards in the bilge, and we all had to clear out when she was retrieving them to make dinner. I also remember her trying to cook rice in seawater, to conserve our limited water supply – that, too, went overboard.

Along with the staples – which we tried to replenish when we were in port, a good trick when half the dry goods stores in the Caribbean circa 1970 featured bloated, dusty cans and nothing remotely like an expiration dates – we sometimes tried out the produce from the docks. I remember sampling knobby-looking breadfruit, and little tiny bananas called finger bananas, super sweet and delicious. We must have had pineapple and citrus as well, as they’d have been more familiar to my pretty conventional-cook mother.

And we ate the fish we caught, trolling a couple of lines at the stern whenver we were underway. The favorite was dolphin, a rainbow-colored beauty when it’s swimming in its iridescent school, but which fades the minute you pull up your line and expose it to the air. We also caught a lot of Spanish mackerel, a severe, torpedoe-shaped fish that looks like an angry character from a Roald Dahl book, all sharp fins and pointy tail; and albacore tuna, a sweetly round-shaped fish with metallically shiny skin that we once pulled up after it had been attacked by a shark. We got the head of the fish, the rest had already been devoured.

If I lived on a boat again, I think I’d rely most on the fresh fish and the fruits and veggies available in the markets, sampling the tropical fare that any native would make their own staples. Except, of course, for the dried milk I’d have on hand for my afternoon coffee. The photo is of the sort of boat we lived on, a 40-foot Newporter ketch. Ours was called "Glad Tidings." I wonder where she is now.