My head and my hands don’t agree. Even after washing them with soap, I cannot rid my hands of this smell, which is a cross between damp, wet sand and dander. I had just slaughtered a chicken and used its flesh to prepare lunch. The meal was delightful and especially memorable because it was my first time actively taking away the life of another for the sake of my own. Psychology has a term for this—cognitive dissonance—but this feeling of unrest runs deeper into my primal sense of being, and I’m still coming to terms with what I’ve just done. While I’m washing the dishes, the chicken bones are still simmering on the stove. I stop to compare the acrid smell of my hands to that of the bubbling stock.
No, these are two separate smells. One belongs to chicken, the other to poultry.
I am working on a family farm in Shizuoka, Japan, tucked away in the mountainous region close to Mount Fuji. This area is known for tea cultivation and tangerines but with the nearest supermarket 45 minutes away, the family is mostly self-sufficient. The family prides itself on a 40-year legacy of organic production, growing rice for the year as well as soybeans, fruits, and vegetables. Scraps and peels from the kitchen are fed to the dozen-or-so chickens that provide the family with eggs. In this ecology, what is grown for the humans to consume is used secondarily to feed the chickens, which, in turn, feeds the family once more. Nutrients recycled, everyone is happy.
During my stay at this family farm, I had developed an interest in tasting meat that wasn’t “grown” conventionally or pumped with a cocktail of antibiotics and hormones. So, to celebrate the end of my stay, the family decided to cook a true oyako-don, or rice bowl with chicken and egg.
“But first,” my host chuckled, “you’ll have to catch one by hand."
photo credit: Hiroyuki Washino
I was ushered into the coop, which was about the size of my bedroom, and scanned for a likely target. When I lunged for one of the hens, I pissed off the rooster who hopped on top of a stoop and ruffle his neck feathers. I suppose I would be protective too if some giant came and snatched a member of my flock. Keeping one eye on the rooster, I aimed for a squatting hen instead. She was probably about to lay an egg as I came at her from behind. She kicked and fussed.
“If you hold her at the base of her wings, she’ll calm down,” assured my host.
And, she did. She blinked and let her legs dangle. With one hand around both wings, I could feel the warmth of her body. No wonder eggs incubate in this heat. We made our way back to the house.
“I wonder what she’s thinking right now,” I mused aloud.
“Probably, uh-oh. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh…"
“Do you think she knows?"
“No, but it can’t be a good thing to leave the flock."
True. And, perhaps the one thing for which I will eternally apologize is that I wish I had a sharper knife; I know I put the creature through more misery than was necessary. I had taken too long to locate the aorta and the cut that I made was too shallow for her to quickly release. Her neck strained and her blood congealed before letting properly. I frantically repeated, “sorry; sorry” while I tried to keep her body still. One hand held her neck and the other her abdomen; in both, I could feel a rapid flutter underneath her feathers. It wasn’t until later, after her eyes had closed, that two questions crossed my mind: To whom was I apologizing? And, for what, exactly? I sat speechless, staring at the body, freshly slaughtered, steaming in the winter sun.
“Still no emotion, but I felt wide-eyed and humbled, for this same knife could kill me in one fell swoop. And, even at the top of the “chain,” I would drip the same blood.”
I was reminded of adrenaline’s finicky way of kicking in and short-circuiting emotions. Sure, my tactile senses were heightened but my emotional base was numb. I tried reflecting on what had just taken place: was the fluttering the hen’s or mine? Was it my rush of hormones or the hen’s rush of spirit? Whatever it was, it was the quickest beat I’d felt to date, one that my hands will never forget. Yet I couldn’t feel remorse, even with blood on my hands. As I watched the chicken hanging upside down, I noticed that there wasn’t as much blood as I had expected. The occasional drop punctuated the cool morning with a soft thup.
“You doing okay?” my host checked in.
“Yeah...” I blinked.
According to the oft touted rationale for humans being on top of the so-called food pyramid, I should have been feeling dominant and masterful. If anything, I was feeling clumsy and dumbfounded. How quickly, I sighed, life teeters on the fringes of death when tools are involved. Still no emotion, but I felt wide-eyed and humbled, for this same knife could kill me in one fell swoop. And, even at the top of the “chain,” I would drip the same blood. Tons more. At that point I couldn’t tell if the goosebumps that I had were because of the cold or the snapping realization of what I’d just done. I thought of the term itself: goosebumps. Chicken bumps. In Japanese, we say tori-hada which literally translates to “bird skin.” It wasn’t until midway through plucking feathers that I had realized what I was doing.
What was before me was no longer a chicken, but poultry.
photo credit: Maya Hey
I had purchased whole vacuum-packed chickens at the supermarket before, but seeing feet, neck, head, and tail still attached made me second guess my eyes. Sitting before me was something edible yet, contextualized, it didn’t register in my mind as such. For one, the innards reminded me of the liveliness it once had. Whereas the supermarket chicken had a cavity that I was used to seeing as a negative space to fill—with lemons, garlic, herbs—that same cavity was now crammed with fat and internal organs and gizzards so much so that my hand could not fit when I tried to remove them. In the process, I’d accidentally punctured a premature egg and its yolk bled onto the wooden cutting board in a viscous, brilliant orange.
“These would have been eggs,” my host points out.
“They look like kumquats,” I observed, noting the size and shape.
“Funny that you say that. That’s what we call them in Japanese: kumquats.”
As I removed the intestines, several more eggs sat loosely amidst the liver, intestines, and gallbladder. The would-be eggs varied in size, indicating the cyclical nature of reproduction. Afterwards, I spotted the heart. It sat loose, like a pendant, because I’d snipped the arteries above and veins below when removing the head and organs respectively. It sat there, so slight, that to think this muscle was fluttering just half an hour ago was an idea I could not grasp.
I could smell the dead now. It was the gallbladder. The bile must have been putrefying inside.
I washed my hands, this time with a nail brush, hoping to scrub myself clean but I’m called over for lunch. To start, we ate the tender part of the underwing, a rare delicacy made possible only when the meat is freshly processed, before it is exposed to ambient microbes. We ate the tenders raw, with soy sauce and wasabi like sashimi, and we collectively sighed in its ephemeral bliss. My hosts had prepared a rice bowl topped with thigh meat simmered together with a sauce of scallions, onions, and eggs. The flavors were steeped in umami—from the meat, the soy sauce, and dashi— and a subtle sweetness came from the caramelizing onions.
This rice bowl captured the cumulative events of the day, and it epitomized how difficult “deliciousness” can be to attain. Delicious takes time and requires that we tinker with our ingredients until the right combination culminates in that ding-ding-ding moment in mind, gut, and tastebud. It requires that we transform chicken into poultry, swine into pork, and cattle into beef, sometimes by our own hands but more often at the hands of industrial slaughterhouses. Omnivore or not, it may be that the pursuit of deliciousness is one in which our collective hands will “ne’er be clean” in a Macbethian sense. That said, I will be the first to admit how quickly we forget how we—collectively, as humans—got to the top of the food chain, until the smell reminds us of what we’ve done and how we’re going about it.
Maya received a B.S. in dietetics and recently completed her masters degree in Food Culture and Communications from the University of Gastronomic Sciences. She really digs the way fermentation lets us peek into the relationship between humans and microbes, and is currently interning at the Nordic Food Lab.