ABSTRACT

My grandmother managed to go most of her life without eating chicken. When she was about nine years old she had watched her father decapitate a chicken and prepare it for Sunday lunch in the yard of the family’s apple orchard near Harcourt, in central Victoria. The experience proved a repulsive one. The recollection of the axed head, the sound of feathers being plucked, the puckered skin, and the scaly claw-like feet, made the roast chicken lunch that resulted from the exercise wholly unappetizing. My grandmother ate it grimly, grudgingly, and only as a result of some force being applied. The experience put her, with a characteristic stubbornness, off chicken for life and for 80 years she pointedly avoided eating anything infested with chicken. Hospitalized for a stroke in her late ’80s, when the nurses had put chicken in her soup and she hadn’t complained, something was clearly wrong. She passed away shortly afterwards.