Giant metal chutes spat a flurry of white into a caged truck, like laundry, like garbage dumped from the window of an upper-level apartment. The sounds were deafening, a thousand birds tweeting, layered on top and on top of each other, the random bangs of a swinging metal door, the flutter of a thousand pairs of wings.
A suspended black rubber belt orbited a silver tank slowly, white masses dangling, swinging gently. At first, the rotating conveyor belt looked like it was at any other factory. An assembly line.
But then, I realized they were bodies. The white hanging masses. They were chickens, stunned into unconsciousness; they were my frozen, prepackaged, breaded chicken nuggets. And the swinging metal arm that gently brushed up against each body as it passed, so slowly, was actually slitting their throats.
A dancing circle of swinging, dead chickens, wings splayed, spun under its own weight, with gravity, like ten feather dusters gathered at the handle. Over a two-ton vat of purple blood, they hung, swaying in a postmortem ballet.
I watched the images, fading in and out, seeing only flashes: A disembodied hand, from the wrist up, gripped a struggling hen and lifted her to a blue metal gate, a miniature guillotine. A little trap door wrapped itself around the hen’s beak, a small movement, like a long slow pinch. It didn’t look painful. It didn’t look like anything. But the hen tensed, beady black eyes pinched shut, wings flapping frantically, useless yellow-clawed feet scratching at the empty air. When the hen emerged, her once-white beak was pink and bent, half the size and curved downward, drooping towards her chin.
A twitching cow, pushed with a forklift.
A piglet’s skull bashed against the concrete floor.
When Professor Bob flipped on the lights at the end of the film, he asked us to comment on the rhetorical strategies at play in the video. I blinked in the harsh light, chewed my lower lip, listened silently.
Professor Bob, my professor and a new mentor, was a vegan, skinny and funny, with a long gaunt face. His typical teaching outfit was khakis and a plaid button-down shirt, and he was perpetually a day behind on shaving, like a slightly polished lumberjack. He’d spent a year digging trenches with the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, before quitting to return home and marry his wife. They were both volunteers at the local animal shelter, and in addition to full-time teaching jobs, they taught creative writing workshops at a nearby penitentiary. He was a nerd and a smart one, making Star Wars reference alongside Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, and I thought he and his wife were exactly the kind of adults I hoped to become in college: worldly and opinionated, rife with stories, and able to hold up their end of a political debate at a cocktail party.
In his classroom, I saw something for the first time, and so did many of my classmates. When I tuned back in to the conversation, they were scrambling to come to terms with the violence of the film, to justify their diets, their family farms, their love of bacon.
It’s not like that everywhere.
and
My family raises dairy cows.
and
Can they even feel pain?
and
Whatever, steak is good.
and
Protein is good for you.
and
So we should just set the animals free?
and
What about hunting?
and
What about medical testing? That’s necessary.
and
What, so we should just all become vegetarian?
Since starting college, I’d been working hard to expand my perspectives: I had recently declared a minor in sociology, and I took classes like Sex and Gender in the Third World, seminars on media and politics. I was a member of the Young Democratic Socialists, the environmental club, the feminist organization, born shiny and new into radical idealism.
But I was starting to come to the uncomfortable realization that I’d never spent any significant amount of time thinking about the fact that food grew somewhere. Food, as far as I was concerned, came from the grocery store. I was used to fluorescent-lit aisles and shrink-wrapped meat, miles of shelves stocked with dozens of brands of chips, and cheese sliced off a massive block by a woman wearing a hairnet.
I thought back to a week in February, when I was seven or eight, that my family spent on a farm in Vermont, the childhood home of my mother’s best friend, which was still in operation and run by her parents, Red and Judy. Every morning there, I rose early, peeling back the handmade quilt on the twin-sized bed in the attic, slipping my tiny cold feet into heavy brown boots, and clomping down the stairs, shivering and grinning, to help with chores.
Although at my own house we had a big backyard, thick with rows of spindly pine trees, I was a suburban girl. Our block had fenced-in pools and power lines and a school bus stop in my front yard and a sign that read Slow Children (no comma). We played outside often, building tree forts and raking pine needles into houses, and I may have worn red flannel button-downs, but I was not a farm girl. My week on the farm was a vacation from suburbia, at a magical place where a little girl could carry metal buckets heavy with sap through the snow into the warm sugaring shack to make maple syrup, where she could throw bread to geese that roamed the front yard, where she could pat the warm haunch of a cow on her way to the river.
One morning that week, Judy asked me to help her gather eggs for breakfast. We crunched outside over shorn, frosted grass into a hay-stuffed laying barn, the early-morning geese caws outside muffled by the padded plywood walls. The barn felt warm, insulated, as if I could fall down anywhere and not get hurt, just bounce softly, and giggle. The hens slept hunkered down in laying boxes, feathers puffed, invisible beaks tucked beneath one wing. I watched them inhale and exhale, quivering with slight snores. Judy called them her “little mamas.”
“Mama,” I whispered into the morning air, the gray smoke of the word drifting slowly away from me in the cold.
Judy handed me a woven wooden basket with a metal handle. “Go ahead,” she said.
When I imagine myself in that moment, I laugh a little at the pathetic look on my suburban face, small blonde eyebrows gathered in confusion, static-charged bangs floating over my thick glasses. I had no idea how to gather eggs. Judy showed me, smiling, using the back of her left hand to lift the sleeping hen and her right to reach beneath the body, pulling out a warm, brown-flecked egg. I trembled when I reached beneath my first hen, terrified of the horror I was sure would befall me if I woke the mama hen. But then I held a perfect, smooth egg in my hand and felt the impossible heat emanating from within. We went row by row, filling two buckets with the eggs from just one wall of the laying barn. When I crossed to the other side, Judy shook her head and whispered a gentle no.
“No,” she said, “those mamas are hatching.”
I only spent a handful of days at the farm as a kid. I barely knew Judy before that day, and I haven’t seen her in decades. But when I conjure this memory, I feel an immense gratitude towards her, a childlike sense of protected warmth. Because she let me in on a secret. In that private moment we shared in the laying barn, she pulled back the curtain and took my hand and showed me how something sacred happened.
Red and Judy’s farm, it took me fifteen more years to learn, was not what a farm really looks like anymore. Our food was as suburban as my neighborhood, and the result was that I was twenty years old and in college before I saw the kind of farm that raised the meat I ate five nights a week.
IN PROFESSOR BOB’S classroom, one of my classmates raised his hand to speak. He, a skinny vegetarian, was the editor for Buzzsaw Haircut, the independent campus