Oh my god, I totally missed that comment of Bill's!
As one of a family of 10, we lived on a small farm where we raised one steer per year and slaughtered it in the fall, which we all observed, and along with a deer or two, kept the meat in a butcher's freezer all year and sufficed on it. My dad would get off work and go fishing every day in the Skykomish River and catch Steelhead salmon, bring it home & serve that for dinner, though I, too, hate fish, and especially salmon! But chicken was a mainstay and one night every week we'd gather in the backyard while my dad slaughtered a few, either with an ax or a twist of the neck, resulting in the horrible death dance Bill is talking about. It was just something we accepted as the way we got enough food to feed us all. I could never watch it or do it now, and have had occasional periods of vegetarianism that lasted for years at a time because of my revulsion for killiing animals. I still have a hard time eating any kind of meat if I think about how it's done. But on that night of chicken slaughtering, it was a family event, and we'd all grab a chicken after and pluck the feathers off and remove the liver, heart and gizzard, and we'd eat every bit. Very strange considering the fact that these birds also became pets, and I even had a mallard duck named Wild Bill who went everywhere with me and was never made into a meal. I guess Mom didn't know how to cook duck.
I'm always on the verge of becoming a vegetarian again, sometimes having nightmares about people killing animals. But when I was a kid, it was normal for me and my family because if we didn't do it, we didn't eat. No way Dad could support us on his $400 a month salary.
I do have a rule that I won't eat any animal I'm not willing to kill. It's an existential posture I think about way too often. I think, in the main, people in America who don't live on farms or produce animals for KFC or McDonald's just live in denial about how they get that food. But I actually draw the line there. I haven't eaten KFC for about 20 years, since I learned about their animal cruelty, nor do I eat anything from McDonald's, and a lot of other fast food places. But grocery shopping is always an agonizing set of choices, and a lot of my diet is based on legumes and local dairy, since I live in a state that is known for its farms and is regulated more than most places, and inspected constantly.
Still, I am with you, brother, though I feel constrained by finances to participate in the culture of meat.
