I had an activity where we would go around the room asking students, “What did you do on Sunday?” We were practicing the past tense. Standard answers included:
“I was watching the Beijing Olympics on Sunday.”
“I was sleeping late on Sunday.”
“I was playing computer games on Sunday.”
Then, once I got around to one particular girl. She said, “I went to my grandmother’s house on Sunday. I went to the hen house. I broke a chicken’s neck, fed the blood to my dog, and plucked out it’s feathers with my grandmother’s help. We ate samgaetang (chicken stuffed with rice, ginseng, and other herbs boiled whole). It was delicious.”
That pretty much derailed the class for about ten minutes while we went over the various parts of her story. She talked unflinchingly about snapping the bird’s neck and cutting off it’s head. Then she talked about removing the feathers. By this time, I had a serious D= face going. She said the food was great.
Now, I eat chicken, and I’m aware that someone along the line needs to do what this girl did. I can only eat after some terrible violence against chickens has been committed. As long as it is humane and out of sight, I tend to block that out of my mind. However, to have a 10 year old kid describe the process of killing the chicken in the same terms you’d use to describe any other somewhat undesirable, but necessary chore that wields positive results was weird to me. I might have grown up in rural Ohio, but all the meat still came from the store, sans an occasional fish.
One of the students asked if she ate “ttak gochi” which is “chicken anus”. This is something some Koreans like to eat. The girl said she gave that to her dog, and the rest of the chicken, sans feathers and head, were in her soup. The boy said he liked the ttak gochi because it was chewy. That derailed us even further, as people said it was good enough for dogs, but not people.
It was one of the more interesting conversations I’ve had for a while.
