Meeting your meal
When I accompanied Nancy Weingartner, the managing editor of Franchise Times, our sister publication, to Marshall Farms in Hastings (see her story on page 1), I didn’t know what to expect. I had nothing in mind on which to hinge an idea about how a rabbit farm might work. The tour, led by owners Scott Marshall and his wife, Bonnie, was to take us from the birthing area to slaughter. I’ve been to a slaughterhouse, but I’ve never actually met my dinner, which is what occurred at Marshall Farms. Scott showed Nancy and me the two bright-white rabbits, happily sitting in their cage, that we would be taking home in a different form.
The “processing” took place in a neatly-kept pole barn, in the center of the room was a table, on which was a hand-made wooden box, the depth and size looked the perfect size for holding, say, a five-pound rabbit. Scott washed his hands repeatedly like a surgeon at a large basin sink. “There are different ways to do it,” he said, regarding the humane killing of the rabbit. He’s come up with his own method, and invented a small captive bolt gun to dispatch the animal quickly.
He wheeled what looked like a metal clothes rack fitted with two sharpened hooks on lightweight chains. He then donned a heavy black apron, lifted a rabbit from the cage, placed it in the shallow wooden box on the table. He lifted the “bolt-gun” and, fitting a bracket on the device strategically across the rabbits head, pulled the trigger.
He then quickly pressed the hooks through the rabbits tendons on what would be the heels on our human schematic. The rabbit twitched from the hooks. Using a knife, he cut through the back of the rabbits neck, quickly severing its head. Blood drained into a garbage bin. The rabbit’s body continued to twitch. He cut the front paws off; the body, amazingly, jolting at each severance. Then still.
With a T-handle knife, he began work on the hide, carefully cutting around the hind legs, pulling downward, and intricately pulled the hide with the tail away. Once that delicate area was cleared, then the rest of the hide was like removing a shirt. Scott pulled firmly downward and it slipped neatly off the rest of the carcass. The evisceration was even quicker. Scott described what he was doing, carefully and quickly opening the rabbit from the anus, cracked the pelvis, and pulled free from the carcass the bowels and intestines without rupturing them. “We save the liver, chefs like to use them, but remove the gallbladder,” he said, setting the liver aside in a clean stainless steel tin. The lungs and diaphragm are also removed. Then he cut the tendons that supported the carcass on the hooks and removed the feet. He carried the carcass to the sink and washed it in cold water, bagged it and Bonnie placed it in a freezer.
Scott picked up the second rabbit, which had sat in its cage, not showing any understanding of what happened to its recent companion. “Whump” went the gun, and up on the hooks it went. I started the stopwatch on my wristwatch. At the 3 minute, 50 second mark, he had the rabbit off the hooks and was washing it in the sink. I told him the time. “Yeah, that’s about right,” he said. “From the last hop to the freezer in about five minutes.”
On the drive home, I thought about what I witnessed and what was sitting in a cooler behind me. I also thought about my visit to that slaughterhouse and processing plant, Lorentz Meats in Cannon Falls, earlier that month. I was there as part of a monthly tour offered by Thousand Hills Cattle Company, which gives an inside peek at their business, and includes a stop at Lorentz, which does their processing.
When our tour group climbed the stairs to the Lorentz employee break room, we were met by a loud “boom.” Nothing piercing, but as if something heavy were dropped on the floor of a warehouse. Todd Churchill, the founder and CEO of Thousand Hills Cattle Company, spoke about bringing his cattle to the plant. The room has two opposite windows, one overlooking the processing area, the other the kill floor. Another “boom.” A small crowd from the group of about 20 people on the tour gathered against that south window. None turned away, although one person was momentarily skittish.
Churchill’s decision to use Lorentz wasn’t entirely idealistic. Yes, he wanted his animals treated well on their final journey, but there was the convenience factor (Thousand Hills is also located in Cannon Falls, literally just down the road through downtown), and the logistical: Lorentz is a full-service processor. Churchill can have his other products made in the same building. Then it’s just loading the meat on the truck and driving it down the road to the Thousand Hills cooler.
Boom. I looked out into the processing area, a massive carcass hung upside down, its deep-red musculature looked powerful, even from a hook. A worker began cutting it in half with a sawsall. I watched other workers break down a carcass at various stations, one with a band saw, others by hand, one doing the meticulous knife work of prepping tenderloins.
I wandered over to the other window, just in time to see a worker reach behind a six-foot steel wall, an action followed by another “boom.” when that “wall” was automatically lifted away, a bison rolled out. The “boom” was a .410 shotgun blast. A chain was fastened around the rear legs of that bison, quite dead, and the carcass hoisted via winch high enough for a large basin to be wheeled underneath. A worker cut deeply into the bison’s neck, and blood drained out in a torrent. I looked around the other areas of the kill floor; about four workers carved efficiently on other carcasses, removing hides, hooves and internal organs, then washing the carcass thoroughly before its rest in a cooler prior to butchering. Outside, the plant, the group passed the remaining bisons, waiting in a pen to be steered one at a time into the plant.
These experiences didn’t change my mind about eating meat—not even for dinner on both days. It did motivate me to cook better, though, and not to waste. Something died, after all. When I arrived home with the rabbit, I bagged it up tightly and placed it in the freezer. I began searching for recipes and crowdsourced via Facebook for suggestions from area chefs, settling on braising it in white wine and tomato and serving it over polenta. It was a simple, rich, delicious meal, and all leftovers were gratefully consumed in the coming days. It was the least my wife and I could do.
