Live Poultry!
If you’ve ever lived in Cambridge, Mass, you’ve probably seen the sign. I recognized it instantly, seven years after I left Boston. It’s on Cambridge St, in East Cambridge. Boston’s Weekly Dig dug in:
It’s one of the more puzzling quirks of the local cultural consciousness that Gould’s shop is almost universally known, yet few know what actually happens inside or what “Live Poultry Fresh Killed” even means.
What it means is this: Mayflower Poultry kills chickens on-site. They kill lots of them. They do this because fresh poultry—meat that, a few hours before, was live poultry—tastes a whole lot better than the shrink-wrapped garbage you buy at the grocery store.
But Mayflower Poultry’s famous sign doesn’t just alert pedestrians to the fact that several hundred animals a week are getting slaughtered in the middle of a dense residential neighborhood—a modern zoning curiosity if there ever was one. In many ways, Mayflower is a throwback to a commercial model that’s 30, 40 or 50 years in the past—when modestly appointed specialty stores formed the backbone of the consumer economy.
Now I’m sad I never went in. Back then, the idea of fresh killed made me slightly queasy. Now? It makes me hungry. The article is a very interesting look at a practical way in which markets have re-shaped the way we eat.
Via Samablog.
I live just a short distance from this store now, but I’m down on that part of Cambridge Street so infrequently that I had to think hard to remember that it was there.
But I know where I’m getting my next chicken! The relative disappearance of local butchers is something I mourn with some considerable frequency.
Next time you’re in town, I’ll pan roast you some. I might also put in a suggestion for the air-dried chicken at Savenors. It’s just plain tastier.
You should also visit the Automatic Cone Company, which is just down the street. http://www.tyloon.com/business_profile/CID-7176240/automatic_cone_company.html
If you like I can get some and post it to you.
There’s a local farm out here that does heritage breed air-dried barred rock chickens. I’ve now been completely spoiled for life…