As fresh as it gets: Chicken from local hobby farms

I was planning to kill at least one chicken.

Getting closer to where your food comes from is what eating locally and sustainably is all about, I thought, when my friend Laura McCrae invited me to attend the butchering of 100 chickens on her hobby farm.

I didn’t know, when I arranged to buy four of her homegrown birds, that one of the benefits would be helping in their slaughter.

Though my attendance on butchering day was completely optional, I decided it was time: After 35 years of consuming meat, I needed to face up to the fact that animals must die for me to eat them.

I also wanted to see, firsthand, local meat at its most pure, like Michael Pollan with his feral pig hunt in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

Though I trusted McCrae, the 32-year-old founder of the Dark Days eat-local challenge and the Urban Hennery blog, I was still nervous. I even had nightmares about committing murder the previous evening.

With great trepidation, I showed up at McCrae’s little farm, a beautiful 31/2-acre property northwest of Smokey Point, along with a dozen of her other friends.

It was nothing like what I was expecting.

While we waited for a keg of water to reach 160 degrees — to scald the dead birds to make plucking easier — I paid a visit to the soon-to-be-deceased flock of Slow Cornish birds, specifically bred for meat production.

Despite my best efforts, I honestly didn’t feel much of a connection with them. I tried to sort of look into their eyes, but they just ran around wildly and senselessly, like chickens do.

Though McCrae had cared for the birds ever since they were cute, fluffy chicks, she didn’t seem emotionally attached to them either.

When it was time for the first two birds to die, I quickly saw I was not cut out for either the catching or killing of chickens.

First off, the chickens were surprisingly fast runners, extremely difficult to snare.

McCrae’s 45-year-old husband, Mike, a hunter, an angler, an old pro, caught the first two birds for slaughter, stirring up the flock amid a flurry of squawks.

With the birds’ feet tightly in hand, he lowered their heads into two upside-down neon-orange traffic cones, mounted tightly on a board. Below each makeshift killing cone was a bucket to catch blood.

Immediately, the birds calmed down. With their heads poking curiously out of the cones, they seemed oddly relaxed.

McCrae took a sharp knife in one hand and one bird’s head in the other. In a single movement, he cut off its head.

It kicked hard and violently. Then the blood — not nearly as much as I had expected, perhaps less than a half cup, all told — began to trickle into the bucket.

Within 30 seconds, the chicken was motionless.

Feeling a sense of obligation, I wished immediately that I could step up to the plate, to do my duty. But, lacking strength and knife skills, I sincerely worried I’d torture, rather than kill, the poor things. I opted out of kill duty, along with almost everyone else there.

McCrae carried the beheaded birds about 100 feet to a processing area. There they were immediately dipped in the hot water.

Next the birds went into the careful hands of Laura McCrae’s brother, Sam Lemke, who was operating a mechanical plucker.

He had saved the day by transporting the antique contraption 1,700 miles in three days from the family farm in Wayzata, Minn., where he and McCrae, as kids, used to help butcher chickens every summer.

Though Laura McCrae tried to buy a plucker locally, they’ve been in short supply for years. No one wants to pluck chickens by hand.

“Some families pass down China and silver as heirlooms; in our family it seems to be farm equipment,” Laura McCrae, said later on her blog, urban hennery.com.

The old Pickwick Poultry Picker — basically a big, wide, spinning wheel covered with little rubber fingers — grabbed the feathers from the recently scalded, headless birds and spat them out on the ground below.

I tried the machine on one bird, lightly touching its flesh to the fast-spinning fingers. It was a wet, splattery, smelly process. I borrowed Lemke’s rain slicker and wore my sunglasses to stay dry.

Though I found watching the bird bounce on top of the plucker a bit grisly, its presence was a joy to everyone who had attended butchering days the two previous springs when everyone hand plucked birds for hours.

Next, the mostly plucked birds went to another table, where I helped remove, by hand, any stubborn feathers the plucker couldn’t grab.

Right away, I was struck by how much the birds looked and smelled like meat. Though their necks, guts and yellow prehistoric-looking feet were still intact, I knew that flesh.

And yet, these animals had been running around — warm — minutes ago.

Once plucked, the birds were rinsed thoroughly with a garden hose and sent to the gutting station, where Laura McCrae gave detailed chicken anatomy lessons and eviscerating instructions.

I took a turn — and dramatically slowed down the operation. You have to be careful not to break open the intestines or a neon-green sack of bile, which could contaminate the meat.

You have to remove the esophagus, a wily little strawlike pipe near the neck, and the lungs, attached to the bird’s rib cage.

After another rinse, the birds went to the neck-and-feet-removal station, where we cracked the leg joints, just so, to make the feet easily removable with a kitchen knife. We used kitchen shears to take off the necks. The feet and necks went into a cooler for those of us planning to make stock.

Soon, there they were — a growing pile of completely processed, organic, free range, local chickens — ready to be weighed, placed in a cold-water bath and bagged for the freezer.

Once I got over my squeamishness, I settled into the work quite easily. We chatted and joked like we were peeling apples for pie.

It was cool outside, but we were in the sun, getting things done on the farm.

It was so different from the disturbing images I saw in “Food, Inc.”

The 2008 documentary about factory farming featured the commonly used commercial chicken coops, dark and crammed with tens of thousands of birds.

Yes, I know those chickens are ultimately killed, too. But their lives and living conditions look terrible.

All I can say is that I’ve made my peace with eating animals — at least chickens.

The birds we butchered were alive for only 131/2 weeks.

When I think of the chickens in those terms, it’s hard not to think of them as an agricultural crop.

I have tomato plants that will have longer lives this summer.

And yet, I still want chickens to be treated in a reasonable manner from birth to death, with respect.

In Tara Austen Weaver’s new book, “The Butcher and the Vegetarian,” someone argues that animals raised for meat should have only one bad day.

I agree. I admit it might be harder to stomach the slaughter of a larger animal, a mammal, such as a pig or steer.

But my chicken-butchering experience is a start to understanding food. And, unlike the many corporations who declined to talk about their chicken operations for “Food, Inc.,” nobody on our local butchering day had any shame or anything to hide.

If I’m going to eat animals, I want more of them to come from places like this, where they are raised and killed in a way I don’t have to block out of my mind to take a guilt-free bite.

I recently bought a second-hand freezer to make that happen. Three of the McCraes’ chickens are resting in it now, waiting for some night’s dinner. I hope to add some beef and pork from Western Washington.

Little by little, I’m eating more locally.

Sarah Jackson: 425-339-3037, sjackson@heraldnet.com.

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To find out where to buy your own locally raised chickens and to see how one of Laura McCrae’s organic, free range chickens stood up to a conventionally raised bird in a side-by-side tasting, see Sarah Jackson’s Eco Geek blog at www.heraldnet.com/ecogeek.