Live Nude Chickens

This summer, while in the process of moving to New York, I regularly stopped in to visit my friend John in Alexandria. John was an amazingly helpful resource: he once lived in the Bronx, had several other friends who had also made their homes in the blighted borough, and generally had a good feeling for how things worked in the City. Also, his home lay roughly halfway between New York and Southwest Virginia, which made it the perfect stopover if I was feeling particularly exhausted. Best of all, John's local bar, Kitty O'Shea's, is the home of the infamous Three Mile Island shot, not to mention a pretty impressive selection of more generic tipples.

Anyway, one evening, as we were drinking beer in Kitty's, John and some of his friends started telling stories about the Bronx. John's big tale of the night began with a train stoppage. Apparently, John was on his way home from work when his subway train randomly halted in the middle of the Bronx. The conductor kicked everyone off, leaving them to find their way home. Anyway, John had to walk a mile or two through some pretty skeevy neighborhoods. On the way, he passed a store. Sitting out front were two Muslim boys who were crying inconsolably while their mother was inside with the proprietor. Looking closer, John realized that the store was a live butcher, and that the mother was dropping off a goat.

John paused to take a sip of his beer and light a cigarette. As I waited for the conclusion, one of John's other listeners looked up from his drink and said, with beery gravitas, "They named it."

John laughed and said "they named it." The rest of his listeners nodded their heads like a jury confirming a verdict. "They named the goat." We all paused to reflect on the cruelties of youth, the hard-won wisdom of age, and the fact that a half-pint beer glass is pretty insufficient for anything more taxing than a urinalysis.

Flash forward a couple of months, and I now realize that every third or fourth butcher in my area has a sign outside his store that says "Vivero" or "Pollo Vivero." When I initially saw these signs, I felt a little thrill. The idea of live animals struck me as quaint and amusing, a sort of nod to the past. I liked the link to a simpler time, when healthy animals were fed by humans, not feed tubes, and killed by butchers, not machines. This, I thought, was infinitely more attractive than the concept of said animals being slaughtered, plucked, chopped, shrinkwrapped, shipped hundreds of miles, and rearranged in a grocery store to hide the scrapes, freezer burns, and assorted rotted spots.


The reality, I must admit, can sometimes be a little disturbing. As John and I were walking back from the Hall of Fame of Great Americans, we came upon a Pollo Vivero store. I was immediately disarmed by one of their signs, which read "Nobody Beats Our Prices: We Kill Halal."

I'm not sure how I'd advertise a live butcher, but I have a feeling that cute little pictures of rabbits, turkeys, chicks, and roosters isn't quite the way to go. On the bright side, it probably weeds out the squeamish, but it also might drive away customers who don't want to imagine their dinner posing for a Keane painting. In the painting, the animals appear prosaic, filled with barnyard dignity. They don't look like food so much as characters from Babe or Charlotte's Web. I don't mind eating real, live animals--in my opinion, we have canines and incisors for a reason. For that matter, most of the vegans that I've known have been passionless, weedy-looking people who did not look even remotely healthy. That having been said, I have also read The Chronicles of Narnia, and try to avoid eating animals that look like they have souls. The chicken, in particular, gets to me, as I can easily imagine her singing "One Day More" from Les Miserables.

Moving on...

The next sign was equally disturbing, in its own special way. It featured the name of the company above a picture of the World Trade Center. I'm not sure about the juxtaposition of the words "New York Live Poultry" and the scene of New York's greatest tragedy. I wondered if the idea was that patriotic Americans eat live chicken, or if the owners are somehow hinting that live killing keeps the terrorists at bay. Regardless, it seemed a little exploitative.

I'm guessing that Thanksgiving is a big time in the "Pollo Vivero" biz. After all, with the family coming by, every cook wants to do his or her best. And what, after all, is better than a freshly-killed turkey?

That having been said, I really could have done without the irony of a picture of a turkey, over the words "Holiday Special," with its head missing.

While we were hanging around outside, I peeked through the door. It looked like a vet clinic or a pound, with row after row of cages. Overall, it seemed pretty clean.

A little story about the woman in this picture: while John and I were looking inside the store, a young Dominican woman came out clutching a bag. As she exited, she opened the bag, glanced at its contents, and dry-heaved. John and I agreed that she was probably a first-generation American doing errands for her mom, and was unprepared to face the bloody realities of where dinner comes from. I'm not sure that I can blame her.

As a side note, it isn't always easy to get pictures of things in the Bronx. Usually I can get away with taking things from oblique angles, using the close-up function on my camera, or pretending that I'm taking pictures of my kid. On the occasions when these options aren't open to me, I do my best to be quick and subtle. On this particular day, I was neither, and one of the Pollo Vivero guys came out to express his displeasure with my photojournalism:

 

John and I went quickly on our way.