Jamie Collins has been hanging out with her Thanksgiving meal since May. Owner of Serendipity Farms, Collins is based in Aromas and pays the bills with produce, but approaching her chicken coop sparks the unhinged gobbling of six full-grown turkeys. It would be nine, except her dog killed one and two died in infancy, and she’s about to knock off three of the remainders for gravy and stuffing.
It’s an experiment that will culminate in substituting over-the-counter Thanksgiving turkeys with her own farm-fresh organic birds, tended carefully along every step of their maturation, slaughter and baking.
Collins walks around the chicken yard in flip flops and asks an overly gregarious dog to stop bothering the birds. “They’re a lot dirtier than the chickens,” she muses, watching her step.
“I feel like if I eat meat I should be learning how to do it myself and feeling the feelings,” Collins says. “I feel empowered by it, to be able to do that.”
What started out as $3 Broad-breasted Bronze chicks ate their way into 40-pound beats, and behind malignant eyes and psychedelic dinosaur heads fans plumage big as Dolly Parton’s hair.
The Bronze-breasted is a commercial variety bred to fulfill demands for white meat, so although they are fed completely on organic grains, bugs and veggies , feathers aren’t the only things resembling Dolly.
“Their breasts are huge,” Collins says. “Want to feel them?”
A Trader Joe’s 30-pound thanksgiving hen costs about $40, but Collins shelled out $100 per bird and seven months of labor. The small flock was fed on $30 of feed a week in addition to leftover vegetables, and over the course of their lives cost a total of around $700—big eaters for big spenders.
“If I were to sell one of the big guys it would probably be between $175 and $200, and that’s probably making barely $50 on them just because of the cost of it all,” Collins calculates. “It’s crazy that it’s gone to that point where everybody thinks everything is so expensive when it’s done right and actually priced correctly. People ask me, ‘Can I get a really good organic turkey for around $50?’ No.”
Or at least not one that died among friends.
It’s cloudy and rainy on their final day, and Collins’ boyfriend Avtonom Ordjonikidze strings the birds by their claws and slits their throats over a barrel, letting them bleed out before readying them to be plucked.
“There was more apprehension when I’d feed them days before,” Ordjonikidze says afterward. “Actually, doing it was all right after the first one, because the knife cut it so quick it didn’t look like it was really suffering.”
After gently scalding each body in a metal basin, a team of Collins’ friends remove the down from the puckered skin.
“The difference in taste is actually really trippy,” says neighboring farmer Cyrus Morse, up to his elbows in turkey innards. “The store-bought ones, even the organic ones, are sort of mealy. I mean, it’s good, but when you eat your own chicken it doesn’t even taste like a store-bought chicken, it’s totally different flavor. It has a lot of flavor, to the point where if you were used to the taste of store-bought chicken it might taste gross.”
The chorus insists it’s the way meat is supposed to taste.
Butcher hour is over in 30 minutes, and the naked, empty birds are hosed off and put on ice. Collins has provided for herself and a gaggle of friends, although she admits a trip to the supermarket would have been much faster. But what fun is that?
