The rolls are made, although they’re an unequivocal failure. I just couldn’t get them to rise. They’re hard, brown little things, and most of them will land in my compost pile, which frankly is ok by me.

The turkey is on the counter, covered in cling wrap. A friend assures me that non-factory-produced turkey can be left out overnight because it doesn’t have the bacteria that turkeys raised in stiflingly close quarters have. My turkey’s liver and heart and neck and gizzard have been boiled with aromatics and herbs to make a broth, and those organs (except perhaps for the gizzard, which has a surprising and to my mouth most unpleasant texture) will be incorporated into tomorrow’s gravy.

The herbs I’ll mix with butter and garlic to rub into the turkey tomorrow are painstakingly picked and chopped. I had to buy expensive oregano and thyme from the grocery store to get fresh (“fresh” — probably shipped cross-country three weeks ago). The rosemary I stepped barefoot out into my backyard at 10:00 p.m. to pick. Note to self: I’d like to grow some thyme. Plucking tablespoonsful of little leaves from these plants tonight (the thyme in particular) makes me really appreciate the herbs, which I’ve so often been content to sprinkle from a costly little glass jar. I spent nearly an hour tonight preparing the herbs for the herb butter.

Good food is an investment, and it should be. We comparison shop to find the cheapest food we can without regard to the fact that it’s not just some throwaway thing — it’s our sustenance, one of the very few things without which we cannot actually survive. You are what you eat. This is not to say that expense for its own sake is worthwhile. But to drink milk that separates into cream and not-cream (what is the name for the not-cream?), to eat an animal that was raised in a way that allows that animal to grow more or less as it would in nature — these things are increasingly important to me, and worth more money. If the body is a temple, you shouldn’t fill it with shit.

It’s hard to pay four or five bucks a pound for turkey when Kroger has it for $0.79 a pound. What do I gain from doing this? Well, there’s a sense of eating more ethically. I’m eating a bird that has lived roughly as a bird of its type should (compared to a bird crammed with a dozen others in a tiny cage). I’m also supporting a local economy. I have spoken face-to-face with the person who raised, killed, processed, and sold me this turkey. The people I bought this bird from appreciate my individual contribution. Butterball really could not care less whether I buy their bird or not.

I wish more of my Thanksgiving lunch was created from local food. Much of it is, but I’ll do better next year. I’ll have aromatics and more herbs from my own garden at least. I may not ever raise turkeys, but I’m thinking I might have some chickens in the not-too-distant future. And surely I can grow my own potatoes (we’ve already got some started). In the mean time, I’m thankful to have local farmers to fill in the substantial gaps.

It’s interesting to be a meat-eater when your children begin to have questions about meat. Especially when in general you’re a pacifist type who tries to gently persuade flies to exit the door you’re holding open (all but wearing a jaunty bellhop cap) rather than swatting them, who will chase a spider or silverfish down with an index card to scoop up and gingerly deposit on a nice comfy looking blade of grass rather than getting a big fluffy ball of toilet paper to sort of anonymously swoop in with and squish with a little quiet gross crunch and then drop into the toilet.

So but then as you begin to think a little more about what you’re eating and to consider the animals themselves, not only for their own sakes but for the sake of your family’s very own health, and you look at pictures of cows being slaughtered with their baleful eyes cast skyward and bled and hung and butchered and cooked and yet you persist in eating meat, well, it makes for something of a conundrum.

One of the funniest hypocrisies I’ve seen parents commit is to spank or swat their children for hitting another person.

To be such a kind of wuss about hurting creatures who don’t have baleful eyes makes it seem all the more hypocritical to not only kill but to tear with your teeth and consume the very flesh of creatures who do have baleful eyes. It occurs to me that this is sort of like the conservative interpretation of the liberal worldview wherein (the interpretation seems to figure) you think it’s ok to murder innocent babies with rusty coat hangers but not ok to tenderly and with great concern for their comfort put hardened criminals to death. And when you look at either case in monochrome, I suppose the respective cases can be made. There’s nuance in both cases, of course.

The modern food industry makes it easy to distance yourself from the murder of meat because what we eat doesn’t in any way resemble the creatures it comes from. (Conservative right-to-life groups do the reverse by showcasing the gruesome physical realities of abortion in brochures, on posters, and I think even on vehicles.)

We have long shielded Lennie from unpleasant or over-complicated things, but I’ve recently tried to shelter her a little less, lest she grow up to be a complete Pollyanna. So I’m more open these days about the fact that the chicken substance we’re eating is an actual chicken that at some point said bock bock and scratched around in the dirt and maybe had what turned out not to be a legitimate concern about the sky falling. And she’s skeptical, saying things, even as I show her the naked pimply little broiler chicken I have seasoned and am about to put into a hot oven, like “we don’t eat a chicken, we eat chicken,” as if removal of so small a thing as the indefinite article somehow separates the food substance from the animal. If you let it remain an abstraction, maybe it’s not real!

Trying to figure out how to talk to your kids about what you’re eating really makes you think about what you’re eating. Trying to resolve the ethical conflict of not liking to kill things and yet being happy enough to kill not only sentient but in some cases beautiful, in some ways thoughtful, personality-endowed creatures, well, let’s just say it’s kind of an uncomfortable place to find yourself in. Trying to resolve this in an internally consistent way for yourself is hard enough, but trying to boil it down to the level of a 4-year-old is an even harder thing, and something I’ll have to continue to work at, both for Lennie’s sake and my own.

I had a dentist appointment yesterday with a cleaning and some fillings on the docket and a lunch break scheduled between the two procedures. While I considered trying to find some place nearby that had a really leafy, stinky salad to treat my dentist to the remnants of during my fillings, I could find no such place. There was a KFC around the corner, though, and I had recently had a hankering for that anyway.

What a huge disappointment it turned out to be. The biscuit tasted like buttery sweaty socks (I have tasted sweaty ones but not buttery ones, so I’m sort of projecting), the mac and cheese smelled vaguely vomity, and even the mashed potatoes and gravy failed to live up to my memory of them. But worst of all was the chicken. Oh, the breading was tasty enough, but if you got a bite of chicken without any breading, it was dry and basically tasteless.

For reading material, I had brought The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I had just begun the section on fast food. It’s possible that reading some of that prior to lunch colored my perceptions, though I think maybe not, as I’m really not all that suggestible. One thing I couldn’t help recalling was the statement by the author of my other big meat book I bought recently that when taking the life of a sentient being in order to eat it, you shouldn’t do so lightly. I can say confidently that the chicken I had for lunch yesterday was not worth taking the life of the animal I ate, pitiful though that life may have been.

This experience puts me one step closer to foregoing any meat but that which seems to have been raised well and fed properly, even if it’s more expensive. There are plenty of vegetarian options I’ll gladly eat to balance out some of the increased cost of meat.