This comic from Toothpaste for Dinner straddles the amazing/disturbing divide. Meanivore? Freegan? Cashivore? Where do you fall on the eating spectrum?

12/10/07

The boots had been sitting in a bag for weeks. They’d been moved from front hall to bathroom to tub and outside as needed, and I didnt know what to do with them. I’d worn my galoshes when I’d gone to help slaughter 3 turkeys the Thursday before Thanksgiving at a farm in upstate NY. That powerful first for me went very calmly and cleanly and my boots remained unmarked. I was surprised, but pleasantly – I had worn the boots and my raincoat with the expectation that they would get covered in blood – ruined.  I wore them again that Monday when I went to help slaughter the 24 turkeys we (my ethical kosher meat venture, Kosher Conscience) would need for the holiday. I was out of my mind with details and satisfaction and fear, but also relieved that I’d had the warm up the week before so I knew what the process would look like, feel like. That day went very differently from everything I expected and my boots by days end had quite a bit of blood on them, as did my  clothes and my skin. My skin and my clothes needed to be washed, no question. If only for sanitary purposes if not for comfort as well. But the boots became less clear, for reasons I didn’t see coming.

Read “Planning the schecting at the Food Conference – part 1″ here.

Having laid all the burecratic ground work for the shechting, I now needed to actually get my hands on a goat! I didn’t know it, but Hazon was planning to use a goat belonging to ADVA Dairy, run by Aitan Mizrahi, who lives and works at Isabella with the Adamah program. I touched base with Aitan, who told me he has some goats that could be slaughtered, but he was planning on slaughtering them in October. He was fine waiting until December, as long as Hazon covered the extra food the critter would need for those 2 months. Seemed more than fair. We would need a few goats, partly to feed all the people at the Conference at least a taste of goat, but more importantly because there was no guarantee that every goat would be kosher.

Despite everything being done properly, after an animal is shechted, it’s lungs are inspected for sirchot, adhesions, which can render the animal unkosher. In order to try and ensure we’d have at least one usable animal, we arranged to shecht 3.  Our friend at the OU told me we’d have an excellent chance of most if not all being kosher due to their young age. Apparently, animals over a year old are more likely to develop these lung blemishes and the younger they are, the less likely we’d find a disqualifying sircha. Since these goats will be all of 8 months old, much younger than the market usually deals with, we could be confident that we’d have meat to eat.

Animals, check.

For all of the back and forth here about whether to shecht a goat at the upcoming Food Conference (which is certainly a noble and lively debate), very little space has been given to the what of shechting. Or the how, I suppose. While certainly secondary, the technical aspects of what goes/would go into slaughtering a goat at a Jewish retreat center in rural Connecticut with no facility set up for such a thing, and kosher are by no means simple. I was given the debatably enviable task (I loved it) of figuring out the answers to all the whats should we move ahead. Given that I’ve spent the better part of 18 months (2 years if you count my initial pangs of conscience) trying to get my ethical, kosher meat co-op off the ground, I figured I’d know all the pieces by heart and would just smooth them into place- heck, 1 little goat vs. dozens of cows? Piece of cake. Turns out that’s only half true.