A new vegetarian?

I never buy chicken, could probably count the number of times I've bought it not under direct instruction from Mary ("Skinless, boneless thighs -- organic") on a hand or two. So yesterday when I had to pick up chicken for dinner and couldn't get just cuts we wanted but they had whole chickens (lets not even mention the fact that I went to the wrong store), I called up Mary. "Should I just get a whole chicken?" "Sure," she says, so I got a whole chicken, tender, young, organic.

Problem was, it wasn't cut up. I had noticed that as I bought it, I just assumed that Mary, cook that she was, would know how to cut it up. I assumed wrong. Not only did she not know how, she flat out refused.

So who gets to cut the chicken? Not surprisingly, butchery being a masculine art, the man of the house does. Me. So I did it, and it was disgusting. Following the instructions layed down in the Joy of Cooking but with suboptimal knives, I cut through raw flesh and bone and fat, pushing and pulling and muttering and cursing and, after one accident, bleeding. Never again.

Marxism has a term for all this: reification. The process of forgetting how things are made. God bless reification. Now I know why we pay Mexicans down in the Siler City and Smithfield and whatnot all of $6 an hour to process poultry. It's nasty nasty work.