The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  Having a local abattoir has helped engender a certain type of farm and small-holding in the Huon Valley. There used to be small abattoirs all over the country, though consolidation and amalgamation and economies of scale have changed all that. (Some might say egregious rules have killed small abattoirs too.) Farmers I’ve met in Queensland have to truck their animals at least four hours, often six, to be processed. Transport, for any animal (including me, quite often), is a stress. The more stress, the worse the quality of the meat. From an ethical perspective, the longer an animal travels, the worse their quality of life. Where possible, a short distance and time from the paddock to hanging from the butcher’s hook is a good thing.

  When Cradoc came up for sale, a ripple of fear ran through many local farmlets. What would we do to get our animals to market? Would anybody take single animals? With the concentration of killing in big abattoirs, many of which have a halal licence, who would want to do the processing of small numbers of pigs? The nearest cutting shop from us of any size is about four hours away. It may be the unseen side of the food industry, the unwatchable act of killing, but having an abattoir in a region means a great deal to landholders and consumers alike, even if they don’t always recognise it.

  I make no secret of the fact that I eat animals. And I know, nurture and sometimes name the animals I eat. I don’t pretend that meat doesn’t come from a soft-eyed cow, or a cute piglet, but from a plastic tray in a supermarket. Animals do die at our command. Even if you’re a vegetarian, even if you’re a vegan, animals will die for you to eat. We have no choice because our impact on the land will always be felt by other creatures. Crops are pollinated substantially by bees that are kept for honey. Bees die in the process of pollination (and in the art of beekeeping and honey collection). Netted cherries will kill birds (small birds sometimes die in my netted garden after flying in to eat the blueberries). Every paddock, every silo, every truck has an impact on animals.

  What matters to me is how an animal has lived and how it may die. If we had to truck our pigs five hours to the north of the state, would we still be living the dream? Thank goodness the local abattoir sold to a responsible new owner, and we didn’t have to make that call.

  One day Jack Frost came and painted the valley. Painted the trees, the cars, the water troughs. Spread his ice-cold breath over the land so the grass in the most shaded parts, the south-facing hills enclosed by trees, still had frost at three in afternoon. One day last winter, with ice melting in the farmyard and my breath steaming as I walked about doing my chores, we killed a pig at home.

  Frost makes for a slower morning. The milk was frozen when I tried to feed it to the pigs. The ice in the cows’ trough needed breaking. I simply didn’t want to get out of bed so early. But when I did it was to be met with incomparable beauty. The silence of frost. The sound of the ice cracking as the sun hits it. The bounce of light, usually culminating in a soft pink dawn. A clear day awaiting the gradual thaw, and light angling through the trees, across the valley, vainly struggling to add its warmth to my soul. The scent of wood smoke drifting from the cottages nearby as the cookers are fired up. All that and more for those who would brave the morning frost. Even if it was for the grimmest task of all.

  There was a wisp of smoke in the farmyard too, emanating from underneath the bath in which we’d soon be scraping our pig. She was an eight-month-old purebred Wessex Saddleback we were going to dispatch, butcher and cure at home. An Italian friend, Mic, brought his mortadella recipe and his mother and son to help make it. Another mate, Ivano, brought his experience from a family pig day or three in Italy. Ross brought a mincer, a sausage cannon, his knives.

  The bath was set up for the scalding. When you kill a pig, unlike most animals, you want to keep the skin and not the hair. To lose the skin is to lose crackling. So you have to dip the pig in hot water and scrape off the hairs.

  I had organised a cast iron fire bath. We’d made sure there was a sturdy enough tree branch in the yard to hang the girl. I had a lump in my throat when I thought about what must happen to turn a live pig into a saucisson sec, into cotechino, into treacle-marinated ham. Part of me wanted to cancel the day and send her to the abattoir as we always had. Part of me wanted to leave the somewhat dubious business of draining the blood, of cleaning the pig, of disposing of the guts, to someone else. But this was our animal, nurtured from birth to the cutting room, and it was my responsibility to at least understand what the process in between involves. I like to think of myself as a conscious omnivore. I’ve chosen to eat meat after once flirting with being a vegetarian. If I send a pig to an abattoir then someone else does these things in my name. I knew I must experience the process from birth, to death, to the sausage skin at least once. To respect the life of the pig we were about to kill.

  With me was a trained slaughterman to make sure things went well. There were eight people to help with the cutting and curing. And, as is usual with these highly tense, strangely emotional events that we have on our farm, there was a film crew watching the whole thing.

  It may sound odd, but when I die, I hope I die as peacefully as that girl. She was stunned: immediately unconscious, immune to pain, her life was good and her end quick.

  We slit her throat, collected the blood and made a sweetened blood sausage. We minced up lots of the forequarter for salami. For truffle sausages. For Mic’s mortadella and Ross’s cotechino. I made prosciutto and ham. We cured the middles, using one belly for pancetta and the loin for lomo, while the other middle we kept whole and used for bacon.

  For me, the experience was physically and, perhaps more importantly, emotionally exhausting. I’d stayed awake most of the night before we killed the pig with a strange, heavy dread in my heart. What if it all went wrong? What if she suffered? What if we didn’t honour the pig’s life in the manner in which we intended by utilising as much as we could and making the best products we could?

  In the end, I found the experience both shocking and profound. This was the way of our ancestors. Not that long ago in Wales, the country of my birth, if as a five-year-old you saw your swing disappear into the shed, it meant the pig slaughter was nigh. The swing would be used to hang the pig and eventually the sausages that were made with it. They still practise this same pig-killing day in cultures around the world—an autumn or winter act of some gruesomeness that furnishes the family with cured meats for the coming year.

  We did well out of one pig. Not much was wasted, except perhaps for the bones, though Cari enjoyed most of those, some tossed to her as she watched us break the animal apart under the trees. There was brawn from the head. And a little cacciatore salami that I smoked and preserved. A year after the killing and my prosciutto is now about ready to slice, and the last of the pancetta is sitting in the fridge. A few slivers are all it takes to transform a humble pasta into a noble meal.

  In the paddock at Fat Pig Farm there’s a new girl gobbling up milk and barley and malt from the local brewer. In a month I will bring her home and turn her into new season salami. We’ve restarted a tradition lost to my family some time ago, embellished by the various cultures of those around us. I will still approach the day with trepidation. And that’s a good thing. Without that heightened awareness, that sensitivity, something would be wrong. I know that if ever killing a pig becomes mundane or routine, I’ll have lost my reverence for the life we have given, and the life we will take.

  Coq au vin

  After my first experience of raising chicks in the mudroom, satisfying as it was, I was pretty keen on letting a hen do the work. Even after a single day, when you’re cleaning out the cage, the smell of chicken poo from ten chicks is enough to catch in the back of the throat, and you really don’t want to have chicks in the house for any length of time.

  I’ve read a fair bit about chickens. Not just heritage breeds like the ones I started with but also the commercial meat breed too; the kind of chicken you get when you go to the supermarket or butcher and buy one. They’re very closely related
to every single other bird available commercially in the country—regardless of brand—being all slight variations on the same genetic stock. And they are the thoroughbreds of meat birds: they fatten quickly; they have fat breasts, short legs, and they really don’t have a great deal of instinct left in them (though there’s more instinct than you’d expect, once you get them outside).

  Even more interestingly, they have to be fed a super-high protein diet in their first few days and weeks or they will simply cark it. Curl up their tiny yellow toes and keel over. These birds are fed, as one breeder calls it, rocket fuel, and they have hardly any of the resistance you’d expect of a normal chicken. They also go from the egg to the pot in about 35 days.

  According to www.chicken.org.au, the website of the Australian Chicken Meat Federation (ACMF), a shed 150 metres long and 15 metres wide can house 40 000 birds. That’s right, 40 000 chickens in an area less than a quarter hectare in size. When they talk about intensive farming, this is what they mean. The stocking rates seem astronomical and it takes some breaking down to really get the gist of what that many birds in a certain space would look like. My old pig paddocks and farmyard could house about 30 000 birds; I had eighteen. Admittedly my chooks didn’t bother with much of the space, so commercially it would be considered wasted, but the numbers are staggering. Imagine, sixteen birds living in an area that’s a metre in size. That’s 28–40 kilograms of bird per square metre, the actual rate determined by the quality of the commercial shed’s ventilation. I’ve tried, but I simply couldn’t get my head around these numbers. I presumed I’d made a mistake with my calculations, but sadly I hadn’t. The ACMF’s website quotes the 28–40 kilograms of bird per square metre, and sixteen birds that dress out to be no. 18s in the freezer section of Woolies would easily weigh less than 40 kg.

  Each year about 520 million chickens are bred, mostly in systems like this, to die and be eaten by Australians. According to one report I read, the aim is to breed meat that is bland and tender. Animal tofu, really. A group of chicken tasters reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 November 2010 that chicken meat shouldn’t taste of anything: ‘The panel eventually agreed the appeal of chicken is its subtleness and that it carries other flavours well. A good chicken should be “moist and tender with a clean flavour that doesn’t really taste of anything”.’

  Oh dear. So it’s official. Chicken is really just a sponge for other flavours. Millions of animals die each year (and the vast majority live an abysmal life) for no other reason than to act as a piece of tender stuff that holds sauce. We intensively farm a meat simply to be a vehicle for dressings or marinades, not because it has any inherent quality of its own. How far down the industrial food chain have we gone?

  You wouldn’t think that chicken was the meat equivalent of cottonwool if you had one of my chickens. Robust in flavour, moist but not soggy, the brown meat isn’t slimy, the wife reckons, compared to the leg meat she despises on mass-produced birds. There’s complexity in the aroma, colour in the fat. Each breed has its own nuances, though the Barnevelder’s off-white meat and fine texture is rather attractive on the palate. My Buff Orpingtons are magnificent eating too.

  But this idea that chicken has no inherent flavour of its own is a furphy. Why, if it’s just a moist, tender piece of meat with no taste, do we make chicken stock? Yes, we’ve bred them to be bland and moist and so short-legged they can’t breed naturally, but they can grow really fast. A former owner of Inghams, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald article from 2010, reckons they marinate 60 per cent of their birds to make them even more tender. Yet there must be some residual flavour there, somewhere. You’d hope.

  I wrote about this on my blog on SBS, and it may’ve ruffled some, ahem, feathers. The Australian Chicken Meat Federation then invited me to visit one of their intensive farms to ‘dispel some modern misconceptions’ about chicken farming. But, once I said I had a film crew in tow, they sent me an email saying there was no ‘capacity to bring them along in this instance’.

  We took a different tack. Through Gourmet Farmer, our researcher tried to get access to a meat-chicken farm in Tasmania. That’s my home state, so it made sense to visit a farm where we could get some day-old chicks as well as check out their farming system. Like many of our stories, it would’ve been good to visit a producer who could help with my own attempts to rear animals. But not a single intensive-farming operation we could find would let us film.

  Is there a story in being denied access? Not for telly, it would seem, because there’s no story without pictures. But there is definitely a story. The story is that we weren’t allowed to visit a commercial chicken farm. Not with a film crew. What does that say about the culture of commercial chicken farming in Australia? What does a closed door say to me, as someone who has some limited experience of farming and animal husbandry?

  It rang a warning bell. Was there something I wouldn’t like? That the viewers wouldn’t like? And if so, should we, as a society, be allowing it to happen at all?

  As I said, there’s very little to tell. No access means no story. I was keen to show on television the modern production methods of arguably Australia’s favourite meat. But instead you’ll just have to let your imagination tell the story for you. And what you’ll see probably depends on what you want to believe, rather than what is actually happening.

  In the end, we managed to get fifteen commercial-breed chicks to raise ourselves. I’m interested in not just ethical treatment, and fair and open access to information, but also flavour, and I was fascinated to find out if the commercial birds, genetically bred to grow at super-speed and be bland and tender, would taste different if we raised them our way. If they were given space to scratch, a more varied diet of mixed grain rather than rocket fuel, and grass (‘green pick’) to peck at, and were allowed to sleep at night so their growth rate would substantially slow down, would they taste like much?

  I learnt a few things. Did you know that the common breed of chicken that is used for meat in Australia can quadruple in weight in their first week? Well, they can, and the fat little beggars I had in the barn didn’t feel at all like the chicks we were used to rearing. They were round and heavy, sort of squishy and hot bodied. They grew too fast for their feathers, ample pink flesh bulging out through white fluff. Feathering up within days of being hatched. They also had to go on a special diet because they grew so fast they needed some kind of highly supplemented feed or their systems couldn’t cope. They can grow so fast they make pigs, an animal renowned for getting big quickly, look like slowpokes.

  We have the luxury of raising our own birds, and usually our meat is built up to a standard, not down to a price. Modern chicken is certainly a cheap commodity, which puts it within the everyday budget of most of the population. It also means it’s cheap enough to be thrown out once all the best bits have been picked off, rather than every bit used. And I do wonder about the way these birds are raised intensively. Are we seriously interested in animal welfare if we can have sixteen birds in one square metre of space? I give more room to my broccoli. I’m pleased that we managed to raise our fifteen successfully, out in the open (once their feathers caught up with their bodies), with no deaths, despite dire warnings from the commercial breeders, who routinely use antibiotics in the feed because the chickens have had so much of their resilience bred out of them.

  What was really quite interesting was the way the slower-raised, truly free-ranging birds tasted. At about the same time we had reared three heritage breeds: Australorps, a dual-purpose Australian breed known for being a bit firmer on the tooth; Indian Game, a dark-feathered precursor that is responsible for some of the genetics in the commercial breeds because it has large breasts and short legs; and Light Sussex, a meat bird popular prior to the 1950s. All the birds were simply roasted with salt, pepper and a little butter, and we were physically blindfolded for the tasting. Thrown into the mix was a supermarket bird, produced by a local commercial farm.

  The results were clear. The best
-tasting of all were the heritage breeds, in particular the texture and taste of the Indian Game bird. The fresh commercial chook came last for flavour and texture, and there was a marked difference between it and the same breed that we’d reared slower and with plenty of variety in its diet. Cynics will say that’s what we expected to find. And it’s true, we did hope the extra effort and expense that we put into our birds at Puggle Farm would have some pay-off. But the results were also a relief. The difference in quality helped to justify our philosophy of trying to let our animals express their instincts, and our efforts to rear them in a more natural setting. Ethically there’s a reason to allow animals to behave in the way they want to behave, but as a chef I was relieved there is a gastronomic justification too.

  For the next batch of hens that I raised to eat, I really didn’t want to have to use the heat lamp and rear them myself yet again. The plan was to use hens to raise hens. Like nature does, really. But nature has been bred out of the Barnevelder as far as mothering goes. And out of a lot of other breeds too, and some of them never become broody. So try as we might, and despite several of our chooks going broody every year, we rarely got more than a single chick out of a gaggle of eggs left under a broody hen.

  Having a hen raise chicks is a plus for many reasons, not least the smell. A mother hen will keep her chicks warm underneath her body. She’ll teach them to find food, how to peck and what to peck at. She’ll keep them close and warn of danger, including that posed by other chickens. And she’ll one day teach her young to roost.

  But to our dismay, and to our disadvantage as far as chicken meat went, our chooks weren’t good at looking after the eggs—often breaking them or soiling them. When a hen goes broody, she goes into a kind of trance-like state, eating and drinking rarely. Pooing only occasionally. And often needing to be roused from her nest to remind her to do all those things. Even doing that, we found our eggs soiled more often than not.