Make the Bread, Buy the Butter

The Tipsy Baker ^ | October 1st, 2011 | Jennifer Reese

[Razzz42]

...This farm was strewn with rusted car parts, overturned boxes of trash, empty soda bottles, crushed cans and downed trees, and through this WALL-E wasteland wandered dozens of chickens, cats, dogs, and three bloated broad-breasted white turkeys. The bearded proprietor ambled through the debris and grabbed up a fat, hiccuping bird that he placed in a laundry bin in the back of our car. "You gonna ... ?" he made a throat slashing motion and grinned. I gave him cash. The turkey may well have ingested STP, Mountain Dew, and crystal meth, but I remain confident that she was never polluted by an antibiotic.

We loved her instantly, in part because she was such a tragic figure. If a turkey could get a bad boob job, smoke a pack a day, and drink three martinis with every lunch, she would resemble this wheezing creature. From supporting the weigh of an oversize breast, her scrawny legs were bowed, and she staggered and lurched around the yard. She seemed lonely, so a few days later I tracked down a companion for her -- a handsome Narragansett tom -- and the two wandered about our garden, hiccuping and vocalizing. Come Thanksgiving, I wasn't ready to part with them. I sighed and bought a turkey at Whole Foods...

...You'll sometimes hear the argument that if you eat meat, you should be prepared to kill the animal. Here's Pollan in "The Omnivore's Dilemma": "It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat eating depends." No, it isn't too much to ask. I did it. I won't do it again.

[Razzz42]

...But a month later, we were all good and tired of the noisy turkeys. One afternoon, my father came over and while I held the birds, with a pair of giant hedge trimmers, he took off their heads. It occurred to me standing there with those two unwieldy birds dead at my feet that I could just put them in the trash. But no, I couldn't. I set up an old propane burner in the driveway, boiled a 10-gallon pot of water and dipped those heavy turkeys, one at a time, grasping them by their scaly feet. Then in the wintry dusk, I crouched in the gravel and plucked them bare; the feathers came off in wet fistfuls.

Gutting those monumental birds took close to an hour, an unpleasant, squishy hour, and left behind an Everest of gore on the kitchen counter. Nothing was less appetizing than the idea of popping those turkeys in the oven, so I put them in black garbage bags, rubber-banded them shut, and stuffed them into the freezer. It felt more like cleaning up a crime scene than putting aside stores for the winter... click here

[AnAmericanMother]

Oh, for pete's sake, what a whiner.

Jenny, next time I field dress a deer you can come help hold the garbage bag for the gut pile. Then complain about a couple of turkeys. Or you can help me clean half a dozen pheasants. Quail are too easy . . . .

Freezing without airtight sealing will dry out meat horribly. You could have brined them and that would have helped. It would have been better to eat them straight away. It also would have been better if you had specially fed them with an eye to the table rather than letting them hang around for ages eating whatever.

[A_perfect_lady]

If I had to kill my own food, I’d be a vegetarian. I just can’t do it. Not to something that hasn’t done anything to me.

[Antonello]

Things I have killed and eaten:

Cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, squirrels, deer, elk, trout, bass, crawfish, ducks, geese, and the occasional rattlesnake. Maybe more that I can’t recall off the top of my head.

Most I would (and will) do again. Squirrels, not so much. Too much work for not a lot of meat.