Blood. Guts. I spent Sunday up in New Hampshire, but I wasn’t watching football, or even a gory b-rated horror flick. Instead, I found myself in rubber boots, a brown apron, plucking feathers from a turkey with a pair of pliers, facing the inevitable question “what are you doing here?”

Everyone else comes to turkey killing day as part of a family obligation to help out Uncle Charlie as he gets this year flock of turkeys ready in a hurry for the Thanksgiving season. I had come out of sheer curiosity to see how exactly the turkey running around in the backyard came to rest on my plate.

**Warning to the squeamish and weak of stomach: I am now going to describe the process between the live turkey in the pen and the Thanksgiving turkey on your plate.**

It started at 7 AM – right when I arrived I could hear the turkeys as they were herded into a pen on one side of the barn. When we were suited up and everyone had their positions, I got to see the whole process. Alex showed me how to catch a turkey – you grab for a thigh and try to keep your head up high so they don’t flap their wings in your face. With both legs in one hand, you rest the breast on the ground as if they are doing a swan dive. When Charlie is ready, he flips up a cone. You slide the turkey head first into the cone until Charlie has a hold of its neck on the other side. Then he flips the cone down to slaughter them. Heads go into a bucket, bodies go into the next room, where I was taught where to cut the feet off. Feet go into a bucket and birds are scalded, then put into a plucker, a spinning machine with rubber knobs pointing inward. It roars to a start and feathers go flying, and it slow and the door comes open and naked turkeys come out. They’re distributed among a team of pluckers, armed with pliers who go after the pin feathers that are left behind. The wet turkeys slide across the stainless steel tables as you might slide a beer down the bar, but with absolutely no friction, leading to several close calls where you have to be quick to catch them. “Cody!” hollers a woman. An 11-year-old with curly hair appears, picks up the bird (from behind, under the wings, his uncle instructs him) and puts it next to a window. He bangs the window and another boy appears outside to carry the bird into one of the tanks of cold water outside.

Charlie comes back in after he finishes to a round of applause. Mallory helps him out of a very dirty wheelchair and boots into a cleaner one. Today we’re doing 142 birds. It’s a short day – yesterday they did 277 birds, a record no one is anxious to break. “we didn’t get out of here last night until 11pm”, Leanne tells me as we scrub the table with bleach and wash out the floor before heading in. Relieved, we head in for lunch and a quick break before coming back out for round two.

After lunch, boys bring birds back in. A team of men take out the necks and our inside runner, a 10-year-old named Silas, brings birds to the next table, a team who eviscerates, handing organs to Kalita, who separates the hearts, livers and gizzards. I start out by taking the pericardium off the hearts and slicing off the extra fat. Fat into one bucket, hearts into another with the livers which Mallory is slicing next to me. When I get ahead, I tackle a gizzard, trying to get my fingers just under the layer of fat to pull it away in one effort. It rarely works, which is why there are 2 women working on gizzards alone. About 45 minutes in, I take over washing the empty birds. The eviscerating team calls Silas to carry them to the sink, where I wash the inside until the water runs clean. Silas helps me hold each bird up to wash the outside before putting them next to the window and banging to get someone outside to pick it up. My back aches and my arms hurt from holding the birds to wash them, but by 3:45 we are done and moving on to packaging. Necks go into bags (sorted into big and small – they will be placed back into the birds so you want to know what will fit). Another bag gets a liver, a heart, and a gizzard. I leave at 5:30, when they are bringing the clean birds back in and loading them into what is already a very full walk in freezer. “Loading it is an art” Jamie explains. After doing it for 4 years, she’s the resident expert at fitting the most birds in. This year, Kalita is learning how to organize and load the last batch, since she will be here after school this week to sell them.

I get a chance at the end to talk with Charlie. The whole operation is amazing – fine tuned and always under revision as Kalita suggested a new set-up for separating hearts today. Charlie has raised turkeys for 25 years, starting with just a dozen, he’s now up to 750. He can’t go any bigger – everyone who helps out here is family, volunteering their weekend, and their training comes only from their experience helping out here before. I tell Charlie that I leave with a new appreciation for Thanksgiving, and for how much work goes into the food that comes to your table.