As always, the approach of the holidays inspires me to talk about poultry!
Last Monday my day started as usual. I dropped off the kids at school, drank a coffee. Then got into a Communauto and drove North East to St-Luc de Vincennes, near Trois Rivières, to visit La Coopérative de solidarité Massicotte, a new abattoir where the chickens we carry at the shop are slaughtered. Not an every-Monday kind of activity.
In the fourteen years that I have been talking to farmers the complaint I have heard most often from those who raise animals is that slaughter in Québec is difficult. Maybe you don't want to think about it, and even less talk about it, but slaughter is an unignorable part of the process that brings food to our tables. Even in sustainable agriculture, where animal welfare is a priority, that day comes. When you have cared for your animals as these farmers do, you want them to travel the shortest distance possible, and to spend their last day in a place that is calm, and clean, where employees understand how to keep stress levels down and treat their clients (both animal and human) with respect.
For most Québec meat producers this part of the equation is a headache. Abattoirs are far from the farms, making abattage costly and more stressful for the animals. There are fewer of them than ever, especially smaller ones where farmers of the sort we work with can take their animals. The small abattoirs that do exist have to be provincially certified and regulated so that butcher shops can sell their products. Regulations are difficult, communication is difficult, quality is unreliable. Running an abattoir is extremely difficult and unglamorous work, and I have full sympathy for the many abattoir owners that have opted to leave the business, but the vacuum left behind is palpable.
For Jean-Pierre Clavet, who has been raising organic chickens at Ferme le Crepuscule since 1990, this has been a ongoing challenge, so in the last few years he joined forces with a number of other poultry producers in his area to reopen an old abattoir that had been languishing for a number of years. They refurbished, updated, added on and modified, and the resulting abattoir is clean, functional, and humane in its treatment of both animals and workers.
If you've ever seen any footage of what the inside of a mega-abattoir looks like, the speed at which things move, the noise and danger and intensity, you have a good starting point for imagining everything this place is NOT. At the beginning of the pandemic one of the highly publicized agro-industry disasters was the rate at which the virus was spreading at these high volume abattoirs, shutting them down and hobbling the meat industry. Farmers were stuck with thousands of animals that couldn't be slaughtered because abattoirs didn't have the staff to run the lines that process this unimaginable number of animals each day. In our small corner of the world, where abattoirs aren't mega, certainly not the ones we work with, things kept flowing as usual. It was a proud moment for small scale local agriculture!
So this abattoir - I did not take pictures because I didn't want to look like any more of a tourist than I already did, and I suspect that one of the two ministry of agriculture employees that are always on site on slaughter days would have objected - but this is what it looks like: poultry arrives in the morning in large crates. Jean-Pierre packs them light, six per crate, and they are sitting in there quite calmly. the first person on the line takes one bird at a time and slides it into an open-ended upside-down cone, its head poking out the bottom. The next person stuns the chicken's head with an air gun, and then immediately cuts its throat to bleed it out. It then gets dunked in a hot water tank that loosens its feathers, then goes into a spinning machine that removes all the feathers from the skin. The next person hangs the bird back on the line and removes the head and the feet. That whole process takes place in one room. From there the line passes into a room where the carcass is rinsed, and then the various organs are removed, extra feathers plucked, and each bird is inspected by the aforementioned ministry of agriculture representative. From there, into the chiller they go!
Watching an animal die is always existential. We avoid thinking about it as much as possible - I can count on one hand the number of times that a customer has asked me about that part, vs. the countless times I have been asked about grass and feed and farms and organic certifications. It's one day but it's an important one. Good abattoirs are important and it feels right that the farmers who's animals are going to slaughter should have a part in deciding how that happens. More co-ops like this one please.
