The last word: Eating ‘Arlene’

Let others approach food ‘ethically.’ When writer Jennifer Reese had to kill the family rooster, she made soup.

I ADMIT, I kind of wanted to kill a chicken. Last spring, when I bought a dozen hatchlings, the cashier at the feed store told me that one of them might “accidentally” grow up to be a rooster. Because roosters are illegal in my Northern California suburb, I would have to get rid of it. To say that I hoped one of the fluffy chicks was male would be overstating the case, but it would be fair to say I was at peace with the prospect. Though I’ve never intentionally killed anything more evolved than a crab, I was pretty sure I could cull a rooster. But you never really know.

Slaughtering one’s own meat has become a rite of passage for Americans who are serious about food, almost an imperative. All the cool kids are doing it, you might say, and there’s something boastful in their accounts. Here’s novelist Barbara Kingsolver talking about dispatching turkeys (heritage, of course) in her recent memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: “You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened, or you can look it in the eye and know it.” And then there’s Michael Pollan. “The more I’d learned about the food chain, the more obligated I felt to take a good, hard look at all of its parts,” Pollan writes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as he prepares to annihilate some poultry: “It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, which I was then and still am, that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat eating depends.”

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