Does chicken come from an animal?

Two months ago I helped a friend finish her roof. At the end of the project we made a trip to the dump, and her 5 year old son accompanied us on the trip. As we drove home T.J. struck up a conversation with his mom:

T.J. Hey mom, does chicken come from an animal?
(Laughter)
Mom Yep, sure does.
T.J. Oh. What animal?
Mom (looking quizzically in the rear view mirror) A chicken.

This brief exchanged reinforced my beliefs that people are becoming very disconnected with the origins of what they eat. No longer do children realize that their dinner came from an animal. Meat doesn't come from a farm, it comes shrink-wrapped from the grocery store! How sad, I thought, that this child doesn't even know that his chicken comes from a chicken. I viewed this as a call to return to the farm!

Last night I had to eat my words. Literally.

Bryant, being the manly provider that he is, came back from Rexburg with a dead bird in a cooler. A pheasant to be exact. He and his Dad had gone hunting (for the first time since we have been married) and he was quite proud of his accomplishment. He pointed out that you can't get much more free range than an animal killed in the wild. He had a point. Thankfully his Dad taught him from the time he was young that if you are the one to kill it, you are also the one to clean it, so I didn't have to see any feathers or heads. Bryant asked me if I would prepare it for dinner, so last night I set out looking for 'how to prepare a pheasant' since this is one of the areas in cooking in which I have no expertise. I found a great recipe for Pan Roasted Pheasant with Shitake Mushrooms and Figs. Bryant went to get a movie, I went to get the dead bird out of the fridge. It is at this point that my city-slicker upbringing really kicked in. I had no idea where this bird had been! What had it been eating? Is it really safe to eat a bird that has been running around in the wild? Suddenly, shrink-wrapped meat didn't seem so bad. The kicker proved to be when I removed what looked like a 3 inch long piece of beef jerky from the bird. Bryant said it was most likely scar tissue from an old wound. I felt ill. About this time I began to realize my own hypocrisy. I sing the virtues of sustainable agriculture, tell the world of the horrors of factory farms, and freak out about eating a bird that qualifies as the most free range of them all.

Pheasant, as it turns out, is surprisingly tasty. I'm still working on the sauce recipe. It calls for Chamboucin wine and since I don't use alcohol I made a substitution. It was a bit too sweet so I am going to tweak it before I post the recipe. In the meantime, I will work on my hypocrisy.