NEW YORK - When his turn came to pick a Thanksgiving turkey among the birds squawking and flapping in their Manhattan lair - some snow-white, others pitch-black - Onnie McIntyre chickened out.
"I can't do it," said the R&B guitarist. "It could be my pet." McIntyre made a face as he walked away from the line at the Manhattan Live Poultry market, which is selling about 500 live turkeys for this holiday (at least, they started out alive).
Hundreds of other New Yorkers have not been so skittish, turning to the city's many live bird markets this week for their Thanksgiving fare. They swear by the taste, saying a live turkey is far better than the frozen, store-bought variety.
"People say that once you eat a live turkey, you can never go back again," said Felix Nickpon, who had come to the live poultry butcher for the first time, as had McIntyre.
"I thought the smell would be worse, but it ain't that bad," joked Nickpon, a real estate professional and Manhattan native from the Upper West Side.
Thousands of turkey, chickens and other fowl are killed every day at hundreds of live poultry markets around the country, with roughly 90 such places in the New York City area alone. Most of the nation's live poultry markets are concentrated in large urban areas with big immigrant populations, such as Miami, Los Angeles and New York.
Once the turkeys are chosen by customers, the birds are snatched up by a butcher who binds their feet and hangs them upside down from a scale. Then comes the unmentionable (hint: it has to do with a blade). The bird then goes into a rotating machine that strips its feathers. And customers walk out with their Thanksgiving turkey in a plastic bag, fresh as fresh can be.
At this tiny market under a tin roof in Spanish Harlem, some of the clients buying Thanksgiving turkeys this week were well-heeled New Yorkers. Others were immigrants accustomed in the ways of live poultry markets in their homeland. Here and there, a turkey feather sailed slowly down on the boisterous crowd waiting just outside the small slaughter room.
For Jose Morocho, a 14-year-old native of Ecuador, slaughtering animals and eating them are natural, side-by-side activities foreign to most Americans. "The turkeys were made to eat," he said.
The market operates year-round, also offering live items like hens, ducks, pheasants, pigeons and rabbits. The market caters to many Latino and Middle Eastern customers, and is called "Halal Vivo" - a half-Arabic, half-Spanish phrase meaning "halal live."
They operate under strict Muslim "halal" laws of animal slaughter - similar to "kosher" - which requires that the animal's main artery be cleanly severed, with minimal suffering and all blood drained. "It's a sacrifice to Allah," said owner and ethnic Yemeni Kaleb Omar, 25, running around in a long white apron. "We say slaughter, not kill - murderers kill."
The turkey costs $1.89 a pound, compared with about $1 for a widely sold supermarket brand like Butterball. The white ones were raised on farms in Pennsylvania, the black, "wild" ones outdoors on upstate New York farms, said Omar, who got the turkeys through a middleman in Brooklyn.
One 35-pound bird breathing upside down from the scale was too much meat for Morocho's Thanksgiving family gathering of seven - his father, a construction worker, plus four brothers and two sisters. Their mother had died, so 20-year-old sister Rosa, a Hunter College business student, would take on most of the cooking, getting up at 3 a.m. to put the turkey in the oven, then completing the feast with some rice, beans and salad.
The family, on its sixth Thanksgiving trip to the live market, got a 27-pound black bird.
"We'll share it with family, we'll feed them, and we'll enjoy," said Rosa Morocho.
With the strong odor of the market and the flying feathers - some stuck to the humid tiles of the slaughter room - this was hardly an experience for the fainthearted.
But McIntyre - who initially got spooked by the bird slaughter - had a change of heart.
After walking away, McIntyre took the advice of "the guy in line behind me. He told me, 'You've gotta get the fresh one. The frozen ones are there for months.'"
McIntyre went back and chose the smallest turkey, a white 20-pounder. "I didn't look the animal in the eye. And I didn't look when they killed it."
No comments:
Post a Comment