116: Poultry Slam 1998

Ira Glass

There's certain conversations that those of us who do not live on farms get into with people who do live on farms, where you know, you just know. As the city person, or the suburban homeowner, you know that the farm person you're talking to is just thinking the entire time you're talking to them, "You are so naive." A lot of these conversations have to do with animals and their deaths.

Take this example. The woman who runs the website for our radio show, Elizabeth Meister, was at the annual exhibition run by the American Poultry Association in Columbus, Ohio. And here she is. She's standing in a room with 12,000 chickens. And she gets into this conversation with an 11-year-old girl.

Ira Glass

This is Kamiko Overs from Bliss, New York, who was at the convention to show some of her own birds.

Ira Glass

Kamiko and Elizabeth talked for a while. And then Elizabeth tried, very, very gently, to ask a question that was on her mind.

Ira Glass

Kamiko is untroubled by this. If a bird has bad feathers or a lopsided comb, it might be a nice bird. But it's not going to win competitions. You eat it. That's life.

Those of us who do not live on farms, we divide animals off into those we love and those we eat. In Kamiko's world, there's not such a hard line separating the two. You can get to know a bird on an up-close and one-to-one basis and still eat it. An animal's transition from buddy to dinner is a great deal less problematic than it is for us city folks.

Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And every year, during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the highest poultry consumption time of the year in these United States, we bring you a program about poultry, our annual Poultry Slam, stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, birds of all kinds, and our relationships with them.

In past years, we have brought you an opera about the life of Chicken Little. We've brought you the story of a hand puppet duck that would not leave people's lives. And naturally, we've brought you real stories of actually growing up with turkeys, and chickens, and other birds. And in putting together this year's show, a very few particular ideas and questions kept coming up in story after story. Without us ever intending for it to happen this way, a lot of this year's show has turned into a kind of referendum about where you draw that line between friend and food.

Act One of today's program, Still Life with Chicken. Food writer Jonathan Gold tells what it's like to pan-fry a chicken with a live chicken watching you the entire time. Act Two, Last Meal. When Francois Mitterand knew he was about to die, he decided that the last food to cross his lips would be poultry, a tiny bird that is actually illegal to eat in France, a bird that, by tradition, is eaten with a napkin covering your head. Michael Paterniti set out for France to try the contraband capon himself. He has a full report.

Act Three, People who Love Chickens and Hate This American Life. Last year, a woman named Karen Davis started a national letter-writing campaign to try to get This American Life to stop the very program you're listening to at this very moment, the annual Poultry Slam. In this portion of our show, she explains what it is that we just do not understand about poultry, and why the whole idea of this poultry show was wrongheaded from the start. Act Four, The Meaning of a Bird. David Rakoff explains how his life was changed in a single evening in a room of 5,000 chickens. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Still Life with Chicken. It was an accident that Jonathan ended up living with the chicken. He was not living the kind of lifestyle that one usually associates with chicken.

Ira Glass

These days, Jonathan Gold is a food writer in Los Angeles. This all happened 15 years ago. He was putting together a performance. He had a PA system which could put out the requisite amount of annoying feedback sound at high decibels. He had the two full bottles of Glade American Beauty air freshener, which he would spray, in their entirety, in the performance space.

And he had a live chicken, which he bought the day before the performance in one of those Chinese poultry markets in Los Angeles. And it comes the day of the show. An audience gathers in a darkened warehouse in West LA.

Ira Glass

So Jonathan cleaned up. And when he was done, he had a chicken. And he didn't feel like he could kill the chicken. Destiny had brought them together. He felt like he could not turn his back.

He says it was the same as if a kitten shows up on your back door, scratching, and lonely, and needy. So he took the chicken home. And in doing that, he stumbled across that thin, thin line that separates food items on the one hand from pets on the other, that divides the animals we eat from the animals we love.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Gold writes his food column, "Counter Intelligence," for the LA Weekly. He's also the restaurant critic for Los Angeles magazine.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Last Meal. Consider, please, poultry consumers, the role of poultry in Francois Mitterrand's last meal. Mitterrand, you'll recall, was the president of France, died at the beginning of 1996. A contradictory and enigmatic man, the French press used to call him the Sphinx. He once actually staged his own assassination to help himself in the polls. Obsessed with history and his place in it.

Michael Paterniti wrote about Mitterrand's last meal for the magazine Esquire. Mitterrand found out that he was dying of cancer. Our story begins just weeks before his death.

Ira Glass

Michael Paterniti in Portland, Maine. Coming up, a woman who thinks that This American Life is bad for an entire species, and when a perfumed handkerchief does not do what you want it to do. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today, during the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the time of year when poultry consumption is at its greatest in this country, we bring you our annual Poultry Slam, stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, fowl of all kind, and our relationship with them. We have come to act three of our program, Act Three, People who Love Birds and Hate This American Life.

Well, I hold in my hand a stack of, I'd say that it's about 50 letters that I've received from around the country. Here is one from Yonkers, New York. It begins, "Dear Mr. Glass, I was profoundly shocked to learn that for two years in a row, during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season, you have produced a Poultry Slam program, in which cruel and demeaning jokes and anecdotes are told about chickens and turkeys." Here's another letter from Santa Monica. It begins, "Dear Mr. Glass, we were profoundly shocked to learn that for two years in a row, during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season, you have produced a Poultry Slam program--"

The wording is identical in these. In fact, the wording is identical in most of the letters. The first wave of mail was organized by a woman named Karen Davis, head and founder of a group called United Poultry Concerns. We invited her onto the program to correct whatever misinformation she thought we were spreading. She, in turn, invited me out to her home, out in poultry country in eastern Virginia.

Ira Glass

Every morning, Karen lets 55 birds out of the converted garage behind her house. They stay in there overnight as protection against predators.

Ira Glass

It's a lovely, friendly chaos, like a scene from Dr. Doolittle.

[ROOSTER CROWING]

Ira Glass

Nearly all of these birds are refugees from the commercial poultry industry. Karen started taking care of birds that had fallen out of trucks, or had been left behind, or escaped. She let animal shelters know that she would care for chickens. People started bringing her birds. She gets birds from school hatching projects. And now, she's got a big, fenced-in back yard full of them.

Ira Glass

In nature, it takes a chicken six months to grow to full maturity. But with selective breeding and specially formulated feed, the poultry industry now raises a bird to full size in just six weeks. Then they're butchered.

What Karen Davis is doing is keeping birds alive that are not designed to live very long. Putting on all this extra weight so fast, so young, strains the heart and lungs, she says. And typically, their bodies give out when they're just two years old. That's versus traditional breeds, which can live 10, 15 years.

And what she finds when she cares for these birds in a loving way, outside the crowded chicken houses they were born into, is that they defy the stereotypes that most people have about chickens. They're not stupid, or dirty, or cold-hearted. Take Henry, one of the first birds Karen brought home.

Ira Glass

Here's one area where Karen Davis is completely in the right, and I and my radio staff have been absolutely wrong. In our earlier Poultry Slams, three or four times, people referred to chickens as stupid, as having no personality. In last year's show, at one point, I myself declared that if chickens had a personality, that personality seemed to be that they're a pain in the ass. And while this may be true for the chickens I observed, which were raised in the crowded gulag of commercial production, chickens raised properly, well, they can be kind of sweet.

Ira Glass

Karen showed me Ella, who likes her neck stroked. And Elise, who jumps over the fence every morning and jumps back in every night. And Lois and Lambrusco, a pair who stick together all the time. And Dolores, who's sort of shy. She says meat-eaters like me usually don't like to think that chickens have personalities, because then it would be too hard to eat them.

Ira Glass

We hung around the yard for half an hour and then went inside. She made a pot of coffee. And when we got to discussing This American Life, I have to say the mood got a good bit chillier. Karen Davis sees our annual Poultry Slam as one long piece of insensitive, anti-chicken propaganda.

Ira Glass

If you've heard much of today's program at all, if you didn't just turn on your radio a moment or two ago, then you got a pretty good sense of the tone of our previous Poultry Slams. And even stories that actually tried to document cruelty to poultry, for instance one woman's rather grim memoir of growing up on a turkey farm, even this, Karen found offensive in tone and in spirit.

I pointed out that half the stories in previous years had not even been about real chickens. One was about a duck hand puppet. One was about a radio superhero called Chicken Man. One was an opera about Chicken Little, staged entirely with finger puppets.

[MUSIC PLAYING FROM "LA PULCINA PICCOLA"]

But Karen would have none of it.

Ira Glass

But that was just one moment in a story that, in a certain way, had less to do with chickens and much more to do with what it means to create something emotional and grand out of something so small as finger puppets. Karen Davis and I argued for a long time about whether there was anything in our program at all, besides slander against chickens. And in the end, we simply do not agree. I asked her why, if there's this genocide of millions of chickens a day, with ads on television encouraging people to tear at chickens' flesh with their teeth, ads that reach many more people than we do on our radio show, why go after us?

Ira Glass

Act Four, Meaning of a Chicken. For most of us who have little to no contact with living, breathing chickens, the fact is that chickens mean what we decide that they mean. We have this story from David Rakoff, which begins far, far away from any chicken house.

David Rakoff

Friday nights of my childhood and early adolescence were spent at weekly meetings of a socialist, Zionist, youth movement. My brother, sister, and I were members. The meetings took a variety of forms. There were the earnest discussions of Marx and the great labor Zionist thinkers like Theodore Herzl and A. D. Gordon, bull sessions about who in the group had hurt whose feelings, and playing air guitar to "Come Sail Away" by Styx. All activities that formed us into pretty deeply committed young socialists, ready at the age of 15 for the ultimate prize the movement could bestow, a summer living and working on a kibbutz, one of the collective farms that were a central part of settling the Jewish state.

There, we would meet other members of the movement from all over the world and spend many a happy hour engaged in honest labor, laughingly baling sheaves of wheat, picking olives, oranges, peaches, grapes, the sweat on our brows a shining reminder of the nobility of collective farming. In the evenings, we would gather together and dance around the fire, sing Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young songs and, if one's older siblings were any indication, lose our virginity. Years later, we would renounce our bourgeois upbringings and return to Israel, making lives of simple, agrarian bliss. This would all change for me in one single evening, in a shed of 5,000 chickens.

The kibbutz I was assigned to was one of the oldest in Israel, settled in 1928 by Jews from Russia, Poland, and Germany. For the most part, our arrival was met with little to no notice. We were just another group of volunteers, no different from the countless other Europeans and Australians just passing through, taking time out to pick fruit, work on their tans, and contract cystitis from their rampant and unchecked coitus. But we were different. We were members of the movement.

I thought that our political ardor would be immediately apparent. I had visions of our bus being greeted by garlanded, folk-dancing youth, so happy to have us there to share in their dream. I had been raised on a fairly steady diet of just such socialist, utopian Ziegfeld numbers, songs, film strips, and oral histories that all attested to just this scenario.

Trees weren't simply trees. They were jungle gyms of plenty, with smiling children clambering over their branches. A field was somewhere you brought your guitar, so that your comrades could dance down the rows after the day's work was over.

I was assigned to pick pears. Work would begin at 4:00 AM and finish sometime mid-morning, before the heat had set in. How filled with fervor I was that first morning, the light barely dawning as I headed out in the back of the truck, wearing my simple work shirt, a pair of shorts, and the traditional sun hat worn by so many pioneers who had come before me to make the desert bloom. I should pause here to point out that we actually said things like "make the desert bloom," all the time. So off I headed to the orchard.

I know I sound like the Central Casting New Yorker I've turned myself into with single-minded determination when I say this, but the main problem with working in the fields is that the sun is just always shining. Dyed-in-the-wool Northerner that I am, it became apparent after about two days that I was completely unsuited to working outside. And I was moved around among the kibbutz's various interior jobs, the furniture factory, the metal irrigation parts factory, and the kitchen, assured all the while by the group leader that there was nothing emasculating or ersatz socialist in being moved inside. After all, each according to his needs, each according to his abilities. My abilities seemed to lie in passing out from heat stroke after a scant two hours in an orchard.

This continued for weeks. It was a somewhat idyllic, if not a mite monotonous existence, that is, until the long night of the chickens. The boys of our group were gathered together one day and told in the hushed tones reserved for trying to avert impending disaster that we would forgo our regular work details and spend the night from midnight until dawn packing truckloads of poultry.

Why this needed to be done with such urgent secrecy under cover of night and why the girls were excused was never explained to us. And we didn't ask. We greeted the news with the respectful Hemingway silence of the Y chromosome, no dopey girls allowed. It was all imbued with nocturnal, testicular melodrama, like some summer stock production of Das Boot.

We slept that evening from 9:00 to 11:00, what I would come to know later, in a far different context, as a disco nap. We rose, drank some tea. The girls sprayed perfume into some handkerchiefs for us to wear around our noses and mouths. And we were off in trucks to do battle with the insurgent chickens. The scene had everything but the diner waitress standing in the road watching us go, worriedly wiping her hands on her gingham apron.

The chicken coop of the kibbutz was a one-storied structure of corrugated iron, about half the size of a football field. It emitted a low rumbling, a vague buzz that you could hear from far away. And of course from even farther away, there was the smell, a smell of such head-kicking intensity as to make a perfume-sprayed handkerchief almost adorable in its valiant naivete, Wile E. Coyote warding off a falling boulder with his paper parasol. And the combination of floral scent and dung merely increased the vileness.

Chicken [BLEEP] is horrible stuff. Unlike cow manure, which according to David Foster Wallace, smells "warm and herbal and blameless," chicken [BLEEP] is an olfactory insult, a snarling, saw-toothed, ammoniac, cheesy smell, needlessly, gratuitously disgusting, a stench of such assaultive tenacity that it burns your eyes. Rather than making you never want to eat a chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You'll eat chicken again, by god, and you'll chew really, really hard.

One of the barrel-chested Israelis shows us what to do. Pick up four chickens in each hand. This is done by grabbing hold of the birds by one leg. "If the leg snaps," he says, "it doesn't matter, just to get four in each hand. B'seder?" he says. OK?

He faces us, holding the requisite eight, four in each hand, living masses of writhing feathers. He looks like some German expressionist cheerleader, his pom-poms alive, convulsing, filthy. "Who will see their dreams fall away into the abyss and eventually succumb to the crushing sadness and meaninglessness of it all? We will. And what does that spell? Madness. Louder. I can't hear you."

He crams the chickens roughly into a blue plastic crate smeared with wet guano. "And you close the lid, and tchick tchack," he tells us, clapping his hands with "that's that" finality. Before I even try, I know that I will not be able to do this. It is midnight, and we will be here until dawn, or until the truck is piled to capacity with crated birds.

I walk out into the sea of chickens. I reach down and grab one, its leg a slightly thicker, segmented chopstick. I recoil and stand up. I take a fetid breath, regroup, and bend down with new resolve, grab the chicken by its body with both hands, thinking somehow that might be preferable. Although how I think I'm going to get eight of them this way, I'm not sure. Its ribs expand and contract under my fingers, a dirty, warm, live umbrella. I drop the bird as if it were boiling hot.

I leave the coop and go out to the trucks. Hoisting myself up onto the flatbed, I start to help with the stacking of the full crates. I know that my unilateral decision to change my task is met with displeasure on the part of the men who run the coop, but I do not care. Their muttered comments are predicated on a direct poultry-penile relationship. I might as well have spurned the stag party whore or gone to the woodshop and fashioned myself a sign that said "fag." "Ma ito? What's the matter with him," the head of the work detail asks when he sees me on the truck.

[SPEAKING HEBREW], he is answered, using the female pronoun when referring to me. "The lady doesn't like the chickens."

It would be years before I was referred to as "she" again, and then very rarely and only as a joke by friends. I turn around to look at the man, making it quite clear to him that I understand what they are saying. The man who called me "she" avoids my eyes and busies himself with straightening a pile of crates and tightening the tarpaulin on the side of the truck. "You're right," I tell him in Hebrew. "She doesn't like the chickens."

Have you ever had one of those moments when you know that you are being visited by your own future? They come so rarely and with so little fanfare, those moments. They're not particularly photogenic. There's no breach in the clouds to reveal the shining city on a hill, no folk-dancing children outside your bus, no production values to speak of, just a glimpse of such quotidian, incontrovertible truth that after the initial shock at the supreme weirdness of it all, a kind of calm sets in. So this is to be my life.

At that very moment, I saw that I would never live on a kibbutz. I would not lose my virginity that summer to any of the girls from the group. Indeed, I would not care to do so. I am grateful to that macho blowhard. He made me consciously realize what I had always known but been somehow unable to say to myself. He's right. I don't like chickens. I like men.

Now, I live in Manhattan, the un-kibbutz, where nobody would dream of touching a live chicken, where whatever spirit of collectivist altruism people might have had dried up long ago. At camp, when I was young, I and the other children of affluent professionals would gather under the trees every day to sing before going into lunch. One of the songs was always "The Internationale," the hymn of the proletariat. One summer, we were even taught to sing it with our left fists raised.

We were, none of us, by any stretch of the imagination, what could be described as prisoners of starvation, wretched of the earth, or enthralled slaves. Admittedly, they are all catchier metaphors and easier to scan than, "Arise, ye children of psychiatrists," but they had little to nothing to do with us personally. And yet, for those few moments when we were singing, those words seemed so true. How can I describe to you that 11-year-old's sense of purpose, that thrill of belonging to something larger, something outside of my own body, the sheer heart-stopping beauty of a world of justice and perfection rising on new foundations. And that one line, "We have been naught. We shall be all."

Naught. It spoke as much about my wish to be delivered from this pre-adolescent self-loathing as it did to any consciousness of liberating the masses. But it held such promise of what I might hope for that even now, as I write this, I can still call up that old fervor. It still makes my breath catch in my throat.

Ira Glass

David Rakoff's a writer in New York.

Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder, contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from [? Emmie Takehara, ?] Sylvia Lemus, and [? Leah Pogatchnik. ?]

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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