Spit Chicken
When I was pregnant, the smell of chicken made me hurl at first sniff. I just couldn’t stomach even the idea of poultry. I got over it after about a year, but the icky raw chicken thing really stayed with me. I have a cutting board that’s just for raw chicken. When I cook with chicken I scald my hands cleaning off any remaining chicken guts. Even in culinary school chicken, I learned, was an icky, icky protein to work with. Somehow the clucks have come-a-calling again the past couple of weeks and I just simply can’t even look at chicken.
This latest round of fowl play came from an Ellen show (my remedy for insomnia is to plow through a week’s worth of Ellen looking for anyone interesting she’s interviewed) where she interviewed Johnathan Safran Foer about his new book, “Eating Animals” . The guy was freakishly convincing about the treatment of chickens — even free range chickens — that are grown for human consumption. I was so stunned by his findings that I got out of bed and looked up reviews of his book. I forced myself to not buy the book. I’m so close to the edge of heading back into being vegetarian that I don’t need that extra push. I’m fighting the urge to ditch all chicken products. As it is, I’ve begun cooking anything that isn’t chicken.
Sometimes I think the universe is talking to me, “bok-bok” it says, gently in my ear. I think the chickens are speaking to me. The very night I talked with La Gringa about my clucker issues, we cuddled up to watch TV and an episode of “Bones” was focused on chicken farming. And let me tell you, they let loose. The showed a plucking machine, a lady that rips the beaks off the baby chickens and the machines that actually kill the animals. They also show the vast farms of the chickens. It was done with passion, apparently, as executive producer and lead actress Emily Deschanel is a vegan. It worked. I tell you, the episode made me completely sick to my stomach. The chicks had spoken.
I’m still not sure where I’m going with all of this. I’m trying to not be rash with all of this. I both make and cook with chicken stock all the time (got veggie stock the past week), I feed a coopfull of chicken to my family and I’m not sure how I would alter that. And where do I draw the line between what I am feeling about eating chicken and what my children need for their diets? For now, I’m in a phase. We’ll see where it goes.
Side Gigs
