Working in a Chicken Slaughterhouse
Or how I became a vegetarian
At the age of sixteen, in 1971, I began a three-year course in French cuisine and hotel and restaurant management at Westminster College in Vincent Square, London. The college, now called Westminster Kingsway College, recently gained media attention because TV celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is also a graduate. During the summer vacations I was expected to work in the profession, and lecturers would help students get jobs through their contacts. The summer of 1972 found me employed in the pastry kitchen at Le Caprice, a haute-cuisine French restaurant near the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly in central London.
As the summer of 1973 approached, I decided against working in another restaurant. I assumed that I’d be doing this kind of work for the rest of my life, so I saw no compelling need to experience more of the same. Friends at other colleges and universities were taking jobs at a nearby chicken slaughterhouse, and since it paid well, would only last ten weeks, and I wanted to buy my first used car, it looked like an attractive option. I cooked and ate chickens without thinking about them, so why not work where they were slaughtered?
The abattoir was in Aldershot, Hampshire, a thirty-minute drive from my home town of Camberley, Surrey. Aldershot is a military town. Indeed, according to a sign you pass on entering, it’s the Home of the British Army. I recall from an early age when my parents would occasionally take my sister Wendy and me shopping at the town’s open-air market, that such boasting of military nationalism didn’t sit well with my emerging political feelings—all part of an inchoate sense in me that violence only reinforced inequities instead of solving them. Aldershot’s slaughterhouse was at the time one of the most advanced processing plants in the world. It employed eighty people and each week transformed 150,000 live chickens into pre-packed and frozen oven-ready birds. The slaughterhouse is now closed and the area is part of a small industrial site.
I worked on the post-slaughter section of the production line. The workers at the front end had to begin their jobs half an hour earlier than the rest of us because that’s how long it took to hang a live chicken on the conveyor belt, kill and eviscerate her, run her body through the scalding tank to remove the feathers, and ‘sanitise’ the carcass. (Note: I say her, but both male and female chickens are raised and slaughtered for their flesh.) The odour of thousands of live birds fresh from the factory farm and the smell of their death hung over the plant and its environs.
I stood at my station with dead chickens approaching me on a conveyor belt every minute. The birds were neatly folded in preparation for the freezing process. It was my task for eight hours each day to place each carcass in a plastic bag (keeping the weight label in position), squeeze out the air in the bag, and twist and seal it by running it through a sticky tape machine. I would then place the chicken on a large cart that was wheeled into a walk-in freezer.
I spent ten weeks that summer on the post-slaughter section of the production line, and I could never bring myself to watch the birds as they were killed. I also couldn’t buy the oven-ready chickens that were offered for sale at a reduced rate as an employee benefit every Friday afternoon. Nonetheless, I continued to eat chicken bought elsewhere—naively believing that, because my plant wasn’t where they were killed, I wasn’t directly responsible for their death.
As these self-justifications illustrate, I was clearly uncomfortable working at the slaughterhouse. Otherwise, I would have willingly bought the staff-discounted chickens and taken them home to cook and eat. Yet my compartmentalising and rationalising brain allowed me to justify my behaviour and pretend to myself that my ethics were consistent.
In September 1973, I returned to Westminster College for my last year. I was anxious to meet up with my friend Amanda, who was in the year below me and the only vegetarian I knew. She was funny and hippyish, and I couldn’t wait to be a macho man and try to upset her, even make her cry, at what I’d been doing. I was obviously so disturbed by the inherent contradictions in my consciousness that I was taking out on Amanda what I couldn’t deal with in myself—and behaving in a way that was almost diametrically opposite to my true disposition.
Instead of being upset at my posturing, however, Amanda didn’t bat an eyelid. Perhaps she saw my behaviour as the ‘acting out’ that it obviously was. For the rest of the year, Amanda and I argued back and forth about how or whether it was cruel to eat meat. I can’t recall the details of our conversations, but no doubt I came up with all the stupid and self-serving reasons for why I should continue to eat animals that I would spend the next four decades countering. Thankfully, Amanda was unassuming and patient and heard me out. Simply put, she won: Amanda convinced me that eating meat was wrong.
On January 1, 1974, my silly tough-guy nonsense stopped, and I became a vegetarian. Inconveniently, my course didn’t end for six more months. How was I to cook and taste meat if I was a vegetarian? ‘Fake it’, Amanda said. ‘Pretend you tasted it.’ Thankfully, I didn’t have to ‘fake it’ that often. I asked my friends to taste-test the meat I prepared, and I completed the course with my newfound moral stance intact.
Adapted from Growl: Life Lessons, Hard Truths, and Bold Strategies from an Animal Advocate by Kim Stallwood and published by Lantern Books in 2014 and from an oral history conducted by Emmy Ledgerwood for the National Life Stories at the British Library in 2023
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