Fresh and Direct: Live-Poultry Markets Multiply in New York

As a pair of Mexican workers, one with a fleck of chicken flesh on his cap, rolled plastic trash cans brimming with fresh intestines across the wet, feather littered floor, customers waiting for their orders at Delancey Live Poultry barely took a second look. Instead, they remained patiently in line, content to pay a little more to get their meat freshly killed rather than neatly packaged at a supermarket.Live-poultry markets are booming in New York, thanks to influxes of immigrants accustomed to buying meat from such establishments in their native countries. It’s a sea change from 25 years ago, when such markets had all but disappeared. In 1980, the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, the agency that regulates them, counted just six. Today, 80 exist in the five boroughs, concentrated in immigrant neighborhoods.Much of the jump has occurred in the past decade – the city had only 20 shops in 1996. Today, Brooklyn alone has 28, the same number as Los Angeles, the American city with the second largest number of live-poultry markets.When she moved to New York from Bangladesh 13 years ago, Wahida Khair recalled, a live-poultry shop was one of the first services she looked for. She ended up trekking from her home in Queens to downtown Manhattan. Nearer to home, she could purchase chicken from a halal butcher, but fresh is always tastier, Ms.Khair, an observant Muslim, said. These days, near her home in Sunnyside, she has a choice of stores where she can pick out a chicken while it’s still squawking, or an occasional goat.At RD’s Live Poultry Market in Ozone Park, Queens – which sells chickens, ducks, lamb, and goats – the butcher said that in its 11 years of existence, the business has kept growing and diversifying from its Indian Guyanese roots to serve other immigrant groups. West Indians, “Hispanic customers, a couple of white people, Africans, some Russians, and Jewish people” all shop there now, the butcher, Dhanpaul Ramanand, said.Across ethnic lines, chicken is the top product, but almost daily Mr. Ramanand sells a goat. He said that “$180 to $200 buys you a nice goat,” and within a half-hour, he’ll prepare it to the customer’s tastes.“Some people just need the whole thing to be cut up in pieces, some people might need a lamb chop,” he said. “We prepare it for the customer how they need it by hand.”The Delancey Street market, which, after 20 years in business, started to make deliveries a few months ago, is particularly adept at catering to its multi-cultural clientele.On a steamy day last week, the market’s pungent smell poured out into the block under the Williamsburg Bridge in Manhattan. Inside, a bearded Yemeni manager was negotiating in Spanish with a regular customer as she picked out hens.After the customer prodded various hens to check if they were still lively and searched for the reddest beaks – a trick she said she learned from her mother, who raised poultry in her native Dominican Republic – she chose four.The manager then deftly placed them in an oversize supermarket cart and rolled them over to a Chinese butcher wearing a blood-spattered apron. Standing next to a Spanish-language sign listing prices for delicacies such as chicken feet, with practiced efficiency he tied the claws of two hens with a piece of string to weigh the animals upside down. The hens disappeared rapidly to the back of the store, where the sound of knives being sharpened competed with the chatter of hens, ducks, and chicks in the metal cages.Working behind the scenes was a Moroccan butcher in rubber work boots. Like most of the city’s live-poultry markets, the market offers halal slaughters, where the animal is killed with a special prayer in accordance with Islamic law. In addition, at the Delancey Street market, when needed a rabbi is called in to kill within kosher law, and the Chinese butcher can perform Buddhist ritual slaughters.For the hens, the next stop was the Mexican workers, who, with the help of a machine, cleaned and plucked them. This, they said, was the only difference from the process in their native Puebla, where the plucking is done slowly by hand.Within minutes, the hens reappeared through a small window. Now with pimply pink flesh exposed, the birds were wrapped in a plastic bag and ready for dinner.Uptown, at La Granja, a poultry market at 126th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Morningside Heights, the walls are similarly lined with rabbits, ducks, and types of chicken that never make it to the supermarket shelf. The mostly Dominican customers there gave similar reasons as those at Delancey Street: Picking dinner out alive provides a better-tasting, healthier meal.“I don’t mind seeing them alive before I eat them – in fact, I prefer it,” Norma Garcia, 40, said in Spanish as she waited for three chickens to be slaughtered and plucked. “I can see that they’re healthy birds and their meat is much more fresh and tasty, which are both concerns for me because I have children.”A customer waiting next to her, Ramon Silva, said: “The supermarket tells you their chicken is killed no more than two days ago, but, well, that’s what they tell you. You don’t know. Here you can see it with your eyes.”The spokesman for the trade association for the chicken companies, the National Chicken Council, dismissed any allegations that live is better.Indeed, Richard Lobb said live chicken shops could pose dangers. The spread of avian flu, he said, is attributed to the transport of mixed birds to and from farms and markets. He noted that the disease, a variation of which devastated the industry in Southeast Asia, broke out last year at farms in Maryland and Pennsylvania. New York has the strictest regulations in the country, and both Mr. Lobb and a spokeswoman for the state, Jessica Chittenden, said the agency is doing an effective job of monitoring the disease, which is pathogenic in birds not humans. Inspectors check stores for cleanliness, conditions of birds, and slaughtering materials on a regular basis.With no real safety risk to the consumer, Mr. Lobb said personal taste was the only reason he could see to shop for a chicken while it’s still alive.“If you prefer to look your dinner in the eye before you buy it, that’s your business, but there is nothing in a chicken that is going to fade off because it’s been dead for a few days,” he said.One group that appears reluctant to embrace live markets is the children of their immigrant clients.A Bangladeshi immigrant, Nasima Begum, who was shopping at the Delancey Street market said her children love her curry chicken, except if they see it live first at the market.“They don’t want to come here,” she said. “They said it stinks.”Yet Ms. Begum would never choose a supermarket over a live market. The Moroccan butcher at the Delancey Street shop, Redonan El Gani, said that while the customers choose their purchases along ethnic lines – Chinese customers prefer the rabbits and ducks, while the Hispanic customers go for the big hens – they all shop there for the same reason: “People like to see it fresh.”

Fresh and Direct: Live-Poultry Markets Multiply in New York

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