Live Brown Chicken at Civic Center Farmers Market

Last Sunday I was at the Civic Center Farmers Market in San Francisco and decided to get some shots of this long line of people at the back of a flatbed truck filled with yellow plastic crates. What were they waiting for? Live chicken. Talk about fresh meat at the market!

I've noticed that this truck selling live chicken have been at the market in the last few months, and there's always a line of people, mostly Chinese people looking for a live chicken or two. The chicken seller (what do they call them?) would basically grab a live chicken from the yellow crate and stuff it into a brown paper bag and then into a plastic bag before handing it over to the customer.

I never got close enough to figure out how much the chicken cost (believe me, it smells so bad with all the chicken poop you don't want to get too close to that truck) but the chicken seem to sell out by noon.

Now, some of you might cringe at the idea of buying a live chicken, mostly because that undoubtedly means you have to butcher the chicken when you get home. But I grew up with my parents buying live chicken and then cooking it for us for dinner. My dad did the butchering and my mom did the cooking. I had the unfortunate job of plucking off the feathers after my dad butchers it. (He would plop the dead chicken into a pot of hot boiling water and that makes it easier to pluck off the feathers, but I still remember the awful smell of wet feathers.)

Despite the bad memories of plucking wet chicken feathers, the fresh chicken my mom made for dinner was always really tasteful with a nice texture to the meat. I've never really eaten anything like that again as an adult. So even though I'll probably never buy a live chicken because I could never butcher it, I do see the benefit of eating a fresh chicken -- both for the taste and your health because you know how it was prepared.

OK, so did I turn you into a vegetarian yet? ;-)

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