In mid-April, a family friend brought over a 22 pound gobbler that had been shot while he was out hunting. Larry brought it to us as a gift, and wanted to show Charlton how to de-feather and de-skin it. It was strange to hold a 22 pound dead thing. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to eating fresh turkey for the first time in my life. I liked the fact that it was an older bird who had lived a natural life. It was wild meat, and I knew the guy who had been out hunting for it. I wanted to watch them clean it up and prepare it as one of the main reasons I moved out to Pennsylvania was to get closer to my food source. At first I was okay watching it. It was bloody, but interesting. And then I smelled it, and it made me so incredibly nauseous. It was death, and it was fresh. I certainly was getting close to my food source. Is there such as thing as getting too close?
While consciously trying to make the "right" choices in my life as an eater, I've only been concerned with CAFOs versus free-range animals. Antibiotic grain-fed animals versus grass-fed. Organic versus non-organic. Wild meat versus caged meat. I forgot about the very obvious notion that when you eat meat, you are eating something that was once alive and warm on its own. I was so close to the death of that turkey. There it was, sitting on my front lawn. There it was, losing it feathers. If there was one turkey in the world I should have eaten, it would have been that one. No death should be in vain. I felt unworthy of it though. My desire for protein and tasty sage flavored meat surely was not worth something's life. Who am I to take something's life? I'm not that important. I'm not starving. I took a walk and went up to the horses. They were more alive than I'd ever noticed. Their skin was warm, their breath moist.
Later that night at dinner, I had one bite of the turkey. It made me sad to chew. Picking out the buckshot added another level of closeness to the death. I thought about becoming a vegetarian. I thought about how often some people eat meat (> 3x / day). I'm still not a vegetarian. I don't eat meat everyday, or every week, but I do eat it and I do enjoy it. Ever since I met that turkey though, I notice I'm more thankful for the food I eat, and not just the meat. This is not to say that being thankful for something means one is more deserving of it. Far from that, I feel less deserving of it than ever before. Yet here I am, very much a part of this system that I did not create. I'm not religious, but maybe we should all say grace?