Well folks,

Here's Part II of Meeting the Meat. Last time, we were going to our friendly farmer to procure some of his beefalo.

For Thanksgiving, we had black-skinned chickens (very medicinal), grown by Chang, our friendly farmer. She grow veggies organically and sells them at the Brown Farmers' Market, and the chickens also run around her farm and get to eat old and expired veggies as well as whatever bugs and grubs they find. Apparently, it's the bugs and worms that give the chicken a nice Omega-3 profile, a huge advantage over non free range chickens (even if fed organic feed). Her chickens also make a broth that yields a lot of gelatin, which contains a lot of micronutrients that we often miss in our diets. Koreans love bone broths, even add hooves and things for extra gelatin. But when's that last time you saw someone (your grandma, maybe?) make chicken broth that didn't come out of a can or an aseptic-pack? You need your gel. (n.b. if you cook up a cheapo factory-farm chicken for stew and you won't get too much gel, either.)

Her chickens are very happy (until she starts chasing them with a net) at least as much as my anthropomorphizing mind thinks they are. I couldn't help her kill them (former vegetarian) but I did help her clean them (see photographic evidence). Watching the bird die also makes one so much more grateful. I made sure not to waste a thing. She even cleaned out the stomach so we could throw it in the soup, along with feet, head, etc.

Some of my inlaws complained that my participating in the killing of the chicken was mean, while they were okay with the prophylactic ingestion of an industrially raised turkey they'd cooked the night before. I think if we all participated in more in where our food comes from, meet our meat, we'd demand better treatment for the animals, and we'd get better, safer, more nutritious food. While we were there, we also got a dozen unwashed eggs gfresh from the chicken's butts--they look poopy and smeary and horrify people when they see them. But they are actually cleaner than the bleached and salmonella-y eggs you get at the supermarket (you just don't see the debeaked chickens sitting in s*** and so sick they need tons of antibiotics), and the yolks are an unbelievable color--the pathogens grow when you have dirty factorylike cages. Chang's chickens get plenty of light and air and they get to run around in the daytime like chickens are meant to. We can leave these eggs out unrefrigerated for week and they stay fresh, and we eat them raw, all the time. Of course, it took me a while to get here; I used to be a "sanitation" nut before...

Hm, maybe that's why my inlaws came into the house bearing McDonald's bags. We each have distinctly different ideas on which food is "safer" and "clean." Comments?

Here's an article from the WashPost on how while we subsidize the hell out of industrial farms for icky crops like GMO corn, the government makes regulations so onerous that organic farmers are having a hard time: Bitter Harvest for Small Farms