Going to school is a very different experience now than it was when I was an undergraduate. I was an English major in the late 1980s, and I mostly sat in cozy seminar rooms with other bookish nerds and paged through English Critical Texts and nodded along to Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Now that I’m back in school, as an age-inappropriate graduate student earning a master’s in divinity, I have had to make some adjustments.
At Princeton Theological Seminary, for instance, there’s a farm, what we call the “Farminary,” and it serves as a place to think about how we treat and interact with God’s providence. And a few weeks ago, I went there with my Ethics of Food class and killed a chicken. Then I killed another one. By the end of the morning, I had killed four. “Harvested” is the euphemistic way to put it, but “harvest” is a thing you do with autumn vegetables. When you’re talking about a living, breathing, clucking thing, it’s a little more complicated.
Anyone who grew up on a farm is now rolling their eyes. Farm people know what’s what: You raise things to eat, you raise things to sell, and nobody needs to theologize how you get from the chicken coop to the dinner table. But I’m new to theology and Christian ethics. I’ve been a Hollywood screenwriter for 36 years. The closest I’d come to the food chain was sitting at the sushi bar at the Nobu in Malibu, California. And I assure you that people in show business don’t spend a lot of time thinking about ethics, Christian or otherwise.
I won’t go into too much detail here — people often read while eating, and for all I know you could be eating a chicken sandwich at this very moment — but I will say that at the Farminary, they treat the animals with as much compassion and dignity as you can and still kill them.
Here’s what I learned: The first chicken is hard. The animal is warm and alive, and in a minute it won’t be, and I’m the reason. You hold it, you say a prayer of gratitude, you feel its heart going, and you are fully, uncomfortably present for every second.
The fourth chicken is not so hard. That’s the part that surprised me. I was the same person at the fourth chicken as at the first. The only difference was that somewhere around the second or third, I had decided not to be completely aware. My hands were there, and they were getting better at the job. But the rest of me had stepped out of the room. Somewhere between the inverted cone and the feather-removing machine, the bird stopped being a creature of God and became product.
The moral, according to pretty much everyone at the farm, is that we should all try to live at the Chicken No. 1 level: aware, awake, connected to the world around us at all times. Which is a wonderful thought, but nobody can do it. Chicken No. 1 is the first date, when every word is fascinating and you notice the color of their eyes. It’s the first morning in Paris, when the bread is a revelation and the light on the river makes you want to sing in French. It’s the first day of school: new pencils, new books, everything possible.
TAKE JOY IN CELEBRATING HALLOWEEN, THIS AND EVERY YEAR
Civilization, when you think about it, is an enormous machine for turning Chicken No. 1 into Chicken No. 4, just so we can all get through the day. Chicken No. 1 is an unreasonable amount of emotional intensity, and that isn’t always a good place to live. Every relationship that lasts, for example, is a Chicken No. 400 situation, and thank God for it.
The trick is to be willing to live at Chicken No. 1 at least some of the time. But in any case, it’s important to know which chicken you’re on. Chicken No. 4 is fine for lunch, especially if it’s a spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A. But it’s less fine for the person on the sidewalk you’ve stopped seeing, or people you’ve decided are a category instead of real people. Also: Chick-fil-A, famously, is closed on Sundays. Good. That’s the day for Chicken No. 1.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.