CHICKEN RUN A Widow Bit

You may have missed the news last week that industrial food giant Tyson is now producing diesel fuel from chicken fat and leftover food grease. I had to turn off the radio and stand still for a couple minutes, pondering our national disconnect when it comes to critters.

We have mastered the art of wolfing down (if you’ll excuse the expression) quarter-pounders and chicken nuggets without giving a moment’s thought to where it all came from. And now we’ll fuel our vehicles as well.

A musician friend who is a big game hunter (I mention the musician part only to demonstrate that big game hunters can be sensitive people) told me about a woman who was morally offended by his hunting. His music studio is filled with trophies that he’s collected in expeditions from Alaska to South Africa. In addition to mounting the heads, my friend eats the meat from the animals he shoots and finds uses for the pelts. That wasn’t good enough for his critic.

I have my own disconnects. There are certain meats I cannot/will not eat. Dog, for one. Dog meat is a delicacy in some cultures. I was a tourist in Seoul, Korea, when I spotted a bicycle bearing a large wire cage crammed with dogs. The dogs were obviously on their way to slaughter, and I will never be able to erase that sight from my memory.

I’ve seen plenty of stock trucks filled with cattle on their way to the feed lot. I don’t enjoy the sight nor my vision of their future, but I still manage to enjoy a slice of medium-rare prime rib from time to time. Still, the concept of fueling my car with fat from a once living creature feels like regression to a time when we burned whale blubber in our lamps.

On the other end of the spectrum is urban chicken farming – apparently all the rage these days. Move over, Fido. With our spending on household pets already heading toward $40 billion annually, folks are installing chicken coops in their backyards. And why not – when you can buy on the Internet a high-tech coop called an “Eglu,” complete with feeder and chicken run, $500 and up. The chickens are extra at $15 each. I envision people driving their chicken fat fueled SUVs to buy feed for their pet chickens.

There’s been some worry that urban chicken farming could lead to avian flu, which has not (yet) occurred in the United States. But the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production found that factory-farmed poultry poses a greater risk for the disease than home-grown chickens.

And that leads us back to Tyson. Last year Consumer Reports tested whole broiler chickens from grocery stores nationwide for salmonella and another pathogen called campylobacter, which also makes one very sick. Tyson scored at the bottom, with only 20 percent of its chickens free of the bacteria.

So what do I know? Maybe we are better off using certain food products to fuel our vehicles instead of our bodies.

This essay has prompted a number of interesting responses, especially memories of harder times. You can read a few of them below. If you'd like to respond to this or any of my essays, please e-mail me, marykoch@marykoch.com.

Oh, the dilemma! Where is justice to people and animals? When I was growing up my dad butchered an animal in the winter to provide food for our table and to barter with our dentist. We know full well in the animal kingdom, they all eat each other to survive. I despise feed lots. Free roaming to a certain extent is my wish ... I've been a member of [the] Heifer Project for many years. Their animals are all humanely raised, and somewhat free range, but they must have a corral. And their stalls are clean. And Heifer insists on gender equity. A new concept to much of the world. -- I.S.

When I was a boy we lived on the outskirts of Portland about 10 barefoot minutes from a slaughter house. It was on the bank of the Columbia slough, where we fished for crappie (pronounced crappie) and sunfish. We also spent many hours hanging over a fence watching the hundreds of doomed sheep, cows and horses wend their way up a ramp where a husky guy whacked them with sledgehammer. One day my big brother brought home a huge slab of red meat. This was in 1930 and meat was rare in one ways than one. He told us it was from a cow of sorts and my mom suspected the slab of beef had come from an animal that neighed instead of mooed. She refused to cook it. We made do with a can of Argentine beef she had stored on a shelf. It came from the welfare office and had a label which read "not to be sold". She had several cans and always kept the labels facing the pantry wall just in case some neighbor walking through our pantry spotted it. -- J.R.

My dad was a meat man since he was 12, trained by the old German butchers. He had his own meat market in North Seattle and later Everett and was very successful. He and his brother and father worked at Pike Place Market during the war. He spoke of Tyson buying up all the meat supplies in the U.S., and that was the worst thing for the meat trade ... We are lucky to be able to buy from local farmers and Washington state chickens. Dad always said buy the whole chicken and cut it up -- you never know the cancerous or whatever parts are chopped off with buying parts. It doesn't take much to cut up a chicken. I hack at it imperfectly and it still tastes the same. Dad was a sausage maker, too, so you can only imagine the meat we had growing up, three meals a day. Lots of steak the size of a dinner plate. Didn't everyone eat that way? His store was small, but he carried some other basics -- milk, bread and of course our favorite, the Hostess Twinkees, cupcakes and snowballs. Yum. M.L.