I, a writer, am on my way out to Greene County to see if I can kill a chicken.

Daniel Marsula, Post-Gazette illustration Click photo for larger image. Tell us what you think Could you kill a chicken for food? Have you? Or do you remember your parents or grandparents killing chickens? If you'd like to comment on this story, e-mail food@post-gazette.com or write Food at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 34 Boulevard of the Allies, Pittsburgh, PA 15222. Please include your name, the town where you live and your phone number. We'll publish some of the responses.

I'd hesitated over what to wear. How bloody would it be? Would I need a change of clothes?

Instructions were: bring a very sharp knife and rubber gloves. I'd forgotten both. I'm a mental mess -- but resolute.

Driving through rain on two-lane state Route 10, past tipples, steeples and barns, I am headed to Sandra Brown's So'Journey Farm outside Waynesburg near the pin-dot village of Holbrook.

Sandra raises grass-fed Scottish Highland beef cattle, pastured chickens and eggs. She may have a larger reputation for her world-class hooked rugs and rug-hooking classes.

So'Journey's white barn is on one side of the road next to a pond. On the other side of the country lane the property's unusual mansard-roofed farmhouse, painted cream with dollhouse gingerbread, vintage 1860, nestles into a hill.

"You will see chickens, probably looking wary," Sandra had said.

Chickens with vivid paint jobs look up as I pull in. I know what the steaming washtub in the driveway is for. Sandra leads the way into the house.

Inside are Barb Kline and Randa Shannon, owners of Mildred's Daughters urban organic farm in the city's Stanton Heights neighborhood, with their field manager, Kathryn Robinson. We are in our 50s and 60s except for Kathryn, a 20-something.

Prologue

It turns out it was Barb's predicament that got us into this.

Mildred's Daughters Farm has laying hens that produce eggs for its community-supported agriculture subscribers. Barb also had peeps for children to observe. The peeps matured, some into roosters.

Barb noted a few "barebacks" among her layers, a sign that they'd been mounted so enthusiastically they'd lost plumage. The roosters' hanky-panky with the hens caused problems with the eggs. Fertilized eggs have red blood spots in the yolk; this is the fetal chick, which people do not like to see. (Hens without roosters lay unfertilized eggs, the kind we normally eat.). Something drastic and permanent had to happen to the roosters.

Randa was off baby-sitting grandchildren in Maui, so Barb was on her own. A daughter of rural Pennsylvania, she reviewed her options. Ax? Hers was not sharp enough. Shoot them? "Not in the city, and I'm not that good an aim."

Wring their necks? Not easy to contemplate, harder to do. But she steeled herself, and after a strenuous effort she had one limp bird lying on the ground.

Then the rooster got back up. She finished the job with hammer blows to the head. The whole thing made her ill. She figured it was retribution.

She posted a request for "help with chicken processing" on a sustainable farming forum. She got no advice, only mockery for using the euphemistic word, "processing."

In February at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture conference in State College, she said to Sandra, "I really need to learn how to do this."

Thus "chicken killing day" got its name.

Our hostess proposed to teach us the way she'd learned -- actually, taught herself from poultry books. In her view, it's the quickest, least painful method for bird and executioner.

"Why don't you come, too," Sandra had said to me and Susan Barclay.

Susan and I were at the PASA conference representing Slow Food Pittsburgh, a sustainable food advocacy group that sponsors the Farmers@firehouse mostly organic farm market in the Strip. We recruit local meat and poultry producers for the market and for Slow Food's Laptop Butchershop, an e-mail-ordering program connecting people with producers of organic or carefully raised protein.

I didn't reflect. I knew I needed this experience. Susan signed on too but, when killing day came, was sidelined by flu.

There were jokes about Haitian voodoo rites. If this sounds like neopagan sisterhood, consider that four of the group are organic farmers. Two have day jobs working with life and death in hospitals.

We'd all read journalist Michael Pollan's best-seller "The Omnivore's Dilemma," the tale of food's journey to our plates. The author, who'd never hunted or killed anything before in his life, graphically details shooting and dressing a wild boar for a meal.

To have read this episode is to be struck by how distanced we are from the animals we eat, particularly from their deaths.

For me death was particularly remote. I've never watched a life ebb. Humans dear to me died alone in hospitals; dying pets were "euthanized," out of my sight.

The second part: I eat lots of meat (including chicken, but I try to buy local, or at least the kind that is hormone- and antibiotic-free). I work on projects encouraging others to eat meat. I therefore must support taking the lives of food animals. Mustn't I? I realized that I needed to be at the killing, needed to have taken the life, to know. Most important, I trusted these women ... and trusted our motives.

"When you think of the chickens, probably thousands, we've been associated with," Randa mused, "chicken every week, broth, soup..."

A view to a kill

The June issue of Gourmet's "A View to Kill" explores the life and death of "the industrial chicken." NPR's Daniel Zwerdling reports that Americans eat nine billion chickens a year, almost 10 times the number they consumed in 1950. Such numbers require megafarms and giant processing plants. Grisly reporting of the way the "industrial chicken" dies -- grabbed, crated, dumped, yanked upside down, shackled, rendered unconscious (not always) and decapitated (not always) by a whirling blade, before landing in a scalding bath -- raises the author's question: Is there a better way for the birds to meet their end?

The Norwegians think they have a solution. Birds, handled gently and still "nestled in their crates," are essentially killed in a gas chamber. The method is called Controlled Atmosphere Killing. Vets allege chickens thus dispatched die unconscious and without pain. Petitioned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, one restaurant giant, Burger King, has announced it will favor suppliers adopting the procedure. Leading animal researchers, including noted scientist Temple Grandin, say the gas system is the "most stress-free, humane method of killing poultry yet developed."

Chicken-killing garb

Randa -- who, like Barb, is a veteran University of Pittsburgh Medical Center nurse anesthetist -- wears a striped apron over blue scrubs, her pants tucked into Wellington boots. Katharine, whose resume lists agricultural internships in Italy, chooses a Romeo-like velvet jacket she'd found on a fence in Tuscany, and a tweed fedora with a curling rooster tail feather. Barb and I are Costco denim and flannel.

Sandra, in blond shag, black polo sweater and field boots, looks like her former incarnation in Mt. Lebanon, married 25 years to a physician. She has the composure of a French woman in a silk dress who cooks five-course dinners for company.

The rain has stopped. The air is filled with rooster calls and birds' twittering. Occasional squawks come from a tarp-shrouded wooden cage containing six fowl.

We won't eat these chickens, but someone will. They are bony laying hens, destined for soup, and will be returned, cleaned, to the neighbor who'd lent them to us. Sandra had intended to use her own meat birds, but an animal had made off with three and she doesn't have enough.

Taking turns, we are to complete the following cycle: reach into the cage, seize a bird, grasp it with one hand by its legs. Carry "our" hen, head down, across the lane to a grassy spot, use our "very sharp knife" to do the deed, bring it back, slosh its lifeless body three times in the hot water, pluck it, gut it, and put it in the bucket of ice water.

"You need a firm grip." Sandra dons yellow kitchen gloves.

"Find a nice place and kneel." She places the quiet hen on its stomach, securing it between her knees.

She explains as she works: "Stretch the neck tight, cut widely across the underside of the neck, across both arteries and deep enough to hit bone. I would never use an ax; they are brutal."

The bird gives a big shudder, a small flap, smaller shudders. The blood pours, rapidly disappearing into the ground. "See how the neck feathers are relaxing. I think she's gone." The dying has taken maybe 40 seconds.

The damp feathers come off readily in handfuls, smelling like your grandmother's old down pillow. They and the guts will be composted.

Surprises

This is a skinny hen. Naked, it looks like a rubber chicken. It is on its back with its absurdly large yellow feet in the air. The incision being made below the breastbone takes on the air of a macabre caesarian, especially when the first thing to emerge, after loops of gray intestine, is a large brown egg. "Talk about fresh," Sandra says.

Disturbing: lots of unborn eggs, marble-sized and larger, deep glowing orange, the larger ones traced with red veins. They are essentially yolks, having yet to form whites or shells. Immature eggs are today's toys for fancy chefs. But thrifty rustic chefs have used them to enrich their chicken soup since time immemorial.

Now, pulling hard -- these innards are fiercely moored -- she brings out a dark muscle, almost as large as an egg. This is the gizzard, a food-grinding chamber, and a rubbery delicacy the French adore. Sandra slices it in two to show us the contents, bits of grit and partially digested yellow grain, which she shakes out onto the ground.

"The chickens will eat this. It's poetic justice. The living get the last bite."

Barb and Randa have seen plenty of anatomy. "We're just meat, too," Barb says.

Sandra removes the liver, streaked with green bile, the heart, bits of fragile lung. To cut the intestines free -- she doesn't want to nick them and release poop -- she cuts carefully around the vent, the opening through which both eggs and feces exit. She cuts off the head and removes the crop -- another avian holding pen for food.

The feet come off and are set aside: "I wouldn't make chicken soup without them." The dogs will eat the organs and the unborn eggs. She gives the carcass a good rinse with the hose and puts it into the ice water.

Barb and Randa proceed to do their chickens smoothly.

Barb: "This is so much better than what I did, so much more respectful. I don't feel sick; I thought I would. I thought it would be gross, but doing it didn't feel so bad."

Randa: "I was surprised at the depth of connection, feeling the bird die in your hands. It was taking responsibility."

Kathryn has a brief setback when her muscular brown hen gives a huge flap and half escapes. She quietly perseveres.

I am last. Benumbed. Someone hands me a hen. It is a brown bird like Kathryn's. I had dreaded reaching in the cage for a victim. I borrow Barb's surgical gloves, Sandra's knife. The legs are warm, not clammy. The bird hangs quiet. I position us. Sandra reminds me these brown birds have thick neck feathers and to make sure I can see what I'm doing. Before I make my move, the bird flaps free of my knee embrace. Sandra assists. I try again. This is not knife through butter. Using all my strength I try to make the cut. The panicked bird makes another lunge. Life wants to live! We are both unstrung. I can't feel or see what my knife is doing, but here is the gushing blood. The struggle has nicked my finger; we join blood.

Sandra: "There's a Chinese saying: Every time you cut, your knife gets sharper."

Epilogue

This e-mail from Sandra:

"I wanted you to know what a great time I had Saturday butchering chickens with y'all! No, seriously, you were as respectful and honoring of these beautiful birds as anyone would hope for, and it was clear to me that, as I would expect, you all 'got' it. The rest is just practice.

"Truly, there were days last summer when I had the water boiling, the knife sharpened and would walk among them trying to decide which one was going to go first, and would then head back into the house realizing it wasn't a day for killing anything. Some days are going to be like that. I think we have to respect those feelings. But we made good progress on Saturday and I think it went really well, especially considering that for Kathryn and Virginia the birds were a bit sturdier than we'd expected."

I never lost my appetite, certainly nothing to brag about. I might have been queasy had "our" chickens been lunch.

Afterward, our hostess fed us curried beef from her own grass-fed herd. I'm ashamed to say, through the long butchering morning, I was thinking about how hungry I was for that beef stew.

So'Journey Farm grass-fed, hormone and antibiotic-free beef is sold ground and in various cuts. For ordering information: 724-499-5680 or sojourneyfarm@aol.com.