education

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, Part 4: Traditional butchery in Spain, and chickens

maki — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:34:01 +0100

In the fourth and final episode of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, they reviewed and summarized the previous 3 episodes, visited a small poultry ‘processing’ plant, and showed how a pig is butchered in the traditional way - no stun guns - in Spain.

(Warning: potentially disturbing details follow)

Chickens

The conventional-method poultry farm they showed was fairly small, but the chickens were still grown in what I thought were very crowded conditions. The chickens had a little room to move around, but not much. They said that it wasn’t nearly as crowded as at larger farms…which a disturbing thought. The farmer said that he preferred this enclosed method of rearing chickens to free range since he was afraid of the birds picking up unknown viruses if allowed outside.

Since the ‘red meat’ abattoir where the big animals were slaughtered doesn’t do poultry, the members of the public who participated in the show took a field trip to a small poultry processing plant. The killing process is similar to the bigger animals, but the whole process shown was more mechanized. The chickens are hung upside down on a conveyor-belt type contraption, then, according the the government expert vet/commentator, basically killed when their heads pass through an electrified water tank. Then the most disturbing part to view: the chickens are bled by slitting their throats. The birds are then passed through some hot water that loosens their feathers, passed through a contraption that sort of massages off most of those feathers, then the cleaning is finished by hand.

Personally I’m rather traumatized by chicken heads and feet, ever since an incident when I was about 12. My mother was buying vegetables and things directly from a farm cooperative, and once time they delivered some chickens to our house. She told me to cut them up since she was delayed at work. Little did I know (and she didn’t know either) that the birds would come with the heads and feet still intact. It still gives me shivers just thinking about those beady eyes looking at me.

Yet…I love to eat chicken, and we have it on average at least twice a week. I still can’t handle chicken feet at a dim sum though. (Max loves then however.)

In any case, I was glad they showed the chicken slaughtering process as well. But I can see why chicken is the cheapest kind of meat we can buy, since even at a small plant the ‘processing’ is quite automated. A lot of things can go wrong I think when they are processing so many chickens that you can barely tell one bird from another. (This page from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Structural change in U.S. Chicken and Turkey Slaughter, states as of the year 2000 that poultry plants are growing bigger and bigger. I’m sure that hasn’t changed much in 2007.)

(Sidetracking a bit - the standard size to which chickens are grown in Britain is 2.2 kilo, or about 5 pounds. I think they are even bigger in the U.S. though I can’t find any document online that specifies standard sizes. In Switzerland, the whole chickens we can buy at the supermarket usually around 1 kilo in size, at the most 1.5 kilo. Farm-grown chickens from the open markets are around that size too.)

Traditional butchery

In another segment, they showed how a family-reared pig in Spain is butchered. In rural parts of the country, many people still rear their own pigs. To cut to the chase, the pig is not stunned before the throat is slit - it’s bled alive while being held down by several people, and takes about 3 minutes to die. It’s not pretty to watch…but that’s the way it’s been done for hundreds of years. It’s possible that coming EU regulations will put a stop to such methods. I’m not sure if this is a shame, or a good thing. (Chef Antonio Carlucci, who was in the audience, mentioned that maybe 40-50% of the pork sold in Italy is still butchered in the traditional way. Something to think about when buying proscuitto or pancetta.)

The blood that is bled from the pig is turned into blood sausage, using the intestines from the same pig as the casing. Later on, the family was shown tucking into it with gusto. The kids cheerfully said that the killing of the pig didn’t bother them at all since they’ve seen it being done all their lives.

Summing up

I am really glad that this program was made, and I’m glad I watched it all too. It may have turned quite a few people towards vegetarianism. The one way it’s affected me, is to make me resolve to only buy meat and poultry from reputable sources, with the full realization that it’s going to cost more. No more stocking up on frozen chicken pieces from the Budget section for me. If we choose to continue to eat meat, and I think for now we will, we’ll do that and buy less quantity to compensate for the more expensive prices.

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, Part 3: Pigs

maki — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 08:52:02 +0100

Last night I finally watched the third episode of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It (BBC site), as it aired instead of recording it for later viewing, fast-forward button at the ready. (Links for the Part 1 review and Part 2 review.) In this episode, it was the turn of pigs to be slaughtered. (Warning: some gory details follow…warning put here since a reader complained about a previous entry. When animals get slaughtered, it is gory.)

Surprisingly, I didn’t find it as traumatic to watch as the cow and lamb episodes. Perhaps I’ve already gotten more used to it. The procedure for killing a pig is similar to that for kllling a lamb: the animal is stunned with an electric shock to the brain, rapidly hung upside down with hooks, and the throats are cut and the animal is bled. The blood wasn’t kept, though since the British do consume pig’s blood in the form of blood pudding, at least some pig’s blood must be reserved somewhere. (For a great account of a pig killing for the purpose of obtaining the blood to make boudin noir, French blood sausages, see Jeffrey Steingarten’s It Must’ve Been Something I Ate.) Also, instead of skinning the animal the whole pig was put in a sterilizing and boiling tank of sorts, which cleaned and softened the skin so that the bristles could be easily shaved off. Because there was no skinning the whole procedure from live animal to prepared carcass took a lot less time than with the other animals.

It’s quite clear that the small, family run abattoir being shown is about as good as it gets when it comes to conventional animal slaughtering. The farms where the animals are reared, while not organic and free range and so on, also seem to have very high standards. The government vet / expert commentator said that large slaughterhouses also have all the officials on hand to inspect things and so on, but when hundreds of animals rather than a handful are being killed at a time things must be different. They said that Britain has very high standards for anti-animal cruelty and good husbandry; I can’t imagine what takes places in many other countries. (I believe that Switzerland has fairly high standards too…but most farms here aren’t that large either. And Swiss meat is very expensive.)

What was repeated several times on the show is the simple fact that, if we want humanely produced meat, we have to pay more for it. I think it’s quite clear that if we want food that has been ethically produced, be it meat that’s slaughtered correctly or fair trade chocolate or organically grown produce, we have to wean ourselves off of going after the cheapest stuff. Not everyone can afford to do that though, or wants to do that. I may be a fairly serious food person but I go for what’s on sale and stuff a lot of the time too - I like saving money as much as anyone. It is a dilemma, with hard choices to make. After watching this program though, I’m leaning more than ever towards the paying more option.

Tonight is the wrapup show where we’ll see a little of what happens with chickens. I guess we won’t see live slaughtering of the birds, since the featured abattoir probably doesn’t do poultry. Again…if you can, please try to watch the show, especially if you are an omnivore.

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, Part 2: Lamb

maki — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:58:28 +0100

I’ve just watched the second episode of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It. If anything it was more intense than the first. I just couldn’t watch it live, just in case I needed to fast-forward some spots, so I recorded it on my DVR and watched it a bit later. As it happens I didn’t fast forward anything, though I was very tempted to at times. I made myself sit still and watch.

Some corrections: I stated previously that the show took place at a specially constructed abatoir, but it’s actually at a real working abattoir, with a specially constructed observation area plus dining room and restaurant, where the members of the public eat some of the meat they’ve just seen slaughtered. Amongst the members of the public in tonight’s show were some food and farming professionals, such as chefs, farmers and at least one food writer I recognized, Sophie Grigson. (I wonder if Clarissa Dickson-Wright will show up for one of these.)

Watching lambs being killed was, as I anticipated, tougher than seeing large cows being slaughtered. What made it even tougher for me is that while the cows are shot in the head with a pistol [correction: they are actually shot with an electric stun gun, which wasn’t explained until the final episode], the lambs are stunned with an electrical device to merely knock them out before they are hung up and their throats cut to bleed them. Grisly details aside though, the speed and skill of the slaughterhouse workers is something to behold. In a matter of minutes they turn a living woolly lamb into - well, a carcass that looks like food, with minimal mess or waste. This is truly a skilled yet thankless profession. One rather quaint touch was taking the thin net-like layer of fat around the intestines, and putting it around the hindquarters of the lamb carcass. It made the lamb look like it had on lacy pantaloons. I don’t know if that’s a particuarly British practice. The expert who was commentating said that the slaughter man did it to make the carcass look nice, so it doesn’t seem to have any practical purpose.

This particular abattoir obviously has very high standards, and the lambs they were slaughtering, while not organic, looked pretty happy on the farm they were reared on. So we were witnessing the higher end of the meat market here. It makes me shudder to think of how cheaper meat may be produced and butchered, and makes me resolve all the more to pay extra for meat that has been reared and handled responsibly whenever possible.

Watching the very different reactions from the people there, who had the much more intense experience of seeing the slaughtering in person, was interesting too. Some were quite upset, most seemed shaken but quite calm; a few seemed totally unphased by it all. Only a couple of people seemed to be unable to eat any of the meat served to them, including at least one die-hard vegetarian.

They also touched on the subject of offal, including the eating of sheep testicles. Ah…they actually looked rather good. (!) On a serious note, I’ve always thought that if you’re going to eat meat, being dainty about it and only eating the ‘pretty’ parts and turning your nose up at offal is waste, not to mention hypocritical. So I’m glad they did talk about offal. I hope they do the same with the pigs tomorrow.

So, tomorrow they will be doing the same to pigs. After the recent jocularity surrounding Pig Day, this may be the toughest one to watch.

I know some people from the Beeb do read this blog sometimes :) - please, make this series available online so the whole world has the opportunity to see this. I really think it’s worthwhile and will add considerably to the ‘where does our food come from’ debate.

Kill It, Cook it, Eat It: a BBC series that shows exactly how meat gets to our plates

maki — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:19:35 +0100

Last night the first episode of a TV series called Kill It, Cook It, Eat It aired on BBC Three. The premise of the program(me) is to show exactly how meat gets to our plates.

The first episode jumped right in, by showing, in an actual working abattoir, the slaughter and butchering of real live cows. This was witnessed by several members of the public through glass windows in a special observation area built around the abatoir. Later on, the same people ate meat cut from the cows they had just witnessed being slaughtered and prepared on the spot by a chef.

It may sound like shock TV, but it was quite educational. The killing and cutting up of the cow is quite horrifying, and I found it hard to watch…though on the other hand I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Nevertheless I came away with a feeling of great respect for the process. I’ve always thought that the more we know about how and where our food comes from, the better choices we can make about it. TV shows like this fill that need.

For what it’s worth, it didn’t make me an instant vegan.

I hope this series will show up eventually on Google Video/YouTube, as part of the BBC’s recent agreement with Google to put some of their content there. I think anyone who eats meat should see it. In the meantime, UK viewers and others around Europe with access to BBC Three can watch the next episode, where a lamb will be slaughtered (cute animal alert), tonight at 22:30 BST/23:30 CET.

Update: the promo for the series.

A Celebration of Life's Simple Pleasures at the 92nd Street Y

maki — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 08:57:15 +0200

This evening I went to a panel discussion about food writing at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of New York. The title of the program was "A Celebration of Life's Simple Pleasures: Good Food and Good Writing". The discussion was moderated by radio talk show host Leonard Lopate, and the panelists were the Editor in Chief of Gourmet, author of three food memoirs including Garlic and Sapphires, and former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl; novelist Ann Patchett; humorist David Rakoff; and the famed authors of several books on American road food Jane and Michael Stern - who have written a memoir about their adventures called Two For The Road.

The main objective of the evening was to talk about the food writing supplement to the August issue of Gourmet Magazine (everyone got a free copy of that issue in a goodie bag), but the conversation, skillfully guided by Leonard Lopate, ranged quite widely over the food spectrum. Some of the topics brought up included:

Ethical eating, organic eating, and industrially produced food. Michael Pollan and his book The Omnivore's Dilemma came up here, of course. Who hasn't heard of this book lately?
How we are so removed from our food sources compared to our ancestors, and how we might make better food choices if we knew how it was produced and where it came from. If we could see the animals we were going to consume alive before we ate them we might make better choices... and so on.
The outrageousness of expensive 'gourmet' foods, specifically the myriad of special salts (I touched on this subject briefly a couple of days ago).
Foods that you love even if it's not high-brow (Ann Patchett confessed to loving Spaghetti-Os), food that you just can't eat. (Ruth Reichl said she can't stand..honey! I think I understand Michael Stern's unwillingness to stomach chitlins in vinegar a bit better.)
Since David Rakoff's Gourmet supplement essay is about Pork and Jewish food rules, and also maybe because all but one of the panelists were Jewish, the discussion of "Pork and Jews" as Mr. Rakoff put it, went on for quite a bit. He mentioned a Rabbi X who he interviewed for his article, and said that this culinarically progressive (well, he eats pork sometimes, especially during Purim) rabbi told him that the eating of veal cannot be justified as being kosher, since the way veal is brought up is in no way 'clean' or ethical. I thought this was the most interesting statement of the evening.
Everyone seemed to agree that Americans are the most adventurous eaters in the world, most willing to accept all kinds of different cuisines. Ruth Reichl declared sushi to be an American food now. I guess I would have said, some Americans are very adventurous eaters...some other Americans are the least adventurous eaters I've ever encountered. Actually...Ann Patchett, who confessed that she was no foodie and that she didn't anything "with a hoof" since been given a pet pig when she was nine years old, is probably not a very adventurous eater. Not that I hold that against her - she was actually quite adorable.

If you follow food blogs most of the topics would have been familiar, but it was interesting to listen to them being discussed nevertheless. I really liked the Sterns, who both came across as being warm and funny. David Rakoff was hilarious, Ann Patchett was, as I said, adorable, and Leonard Lopate was also pretty funny as well as being an excellent discussion leader. I have to say the least entertaining person was unfortunately Ruth Reichl herself, but I think this is primarily due to her speaking style which is sort of slow and laid back. She's probably a writer that's much better in writing - I've enjoyed all of her memoirs.

I did rather disagree with her very last statement though. On the subject of ethical eating, she said that as consumers we can vote with our money by buying organically, but (paraphrasing here) we should avoid buying organically produced non-American food even if it was less expensive. Basically she touted the Buy American line, which sounded a lot like the similar lines uttered in earlier years by the American automobile industry. The subject of ethical/organic eating and food cost is a lot more involved than I can discuss here though, so I'll have to leave it for another time.

Although the content of a few of the articles in the Gourmet magazine supplement were discussed, one topic that wasn't talked about much at all was food writing itself. There was one audience question about 'how to get into food writing', which was answered a bit vaguely by Ruth Reichl with the answer 'you have to be very lucky' and by Ann Patchett with 'do a lot of writing you don't care about, and gradually work towards the kind you do care about'. Probably both statements are very true. The writers who were included in the food writing supplement had to be lucky to have caught the eye of the Gourmet editors, for example, with the exception of the famous ones like Calvin Trillin and the Sterns.

All in all, the 90+ minutes went by way too quickly. A panel discussion about food writing...this is the kind of thing that makes New York a great place. The 92nd Street Y has similar lectures and such on their program throughout the year, so if you're visiting be sure to look up their schedule for the time you'll be here. And to keep up with upcoming food-related events in New York, be sure to check out Josh Friedland's excellent The Food Section.

NB: Prior to this evening, I hadn't really looked at Gourmet magazine in years - if I buy a food magazine in the U.S. I graviatate towards Cooks Illustrated, Food and Wine, and sometimes Epicurious and Saveur. Gourmet just seemed so stodgy to me. Flipping through the free issue we were given, it doesn't seem as stodgy and old-fashioned as I thought...but I think they sure do need a design makeover. The food writing supplement is terrific though.

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