I'm not taking anything other than poultry...specifically, chickens (and perhaps the odd duck or turkey). Having visited a local sustainable farm, Hemlock Hills in Croton Manor, NY, and having discovered that there are precious few trained in shchita who are concerned enough about the source of food to actually be able to successfully get someone else to do it, I think the best way to deal with this is to acquire the skill myself.
Today at kiddush I spoke with Andy Kastner (for readers of the New York Times magazine, you may recall an article about him a few months ago: it was one that featured a full-page pic of him in a kippah and a lab coat holding a dead chicken), who happens to be a friend and rabbinic intern at our shul (Hebrew Institute of White Plains). Andy, for those who don't know him, as a rabbinic student at YCT decided that he needed to learn shchita to be able to bring sustainably raised poultry to his table (that was the subject of the article). I told him of my plan, and he pointed me to a sefer, Simla hadasha, which is a digest of hilchot shchita. As luck would have it, we had an impromptu Shabbat lunch with friends of ours, Avi and Adina Orlow-Friedman...and while browsing Avi's shelf, I discovered -- you guessed it -- Simla hadasha. He was kind enough to loan it to me.
So having begun the process of acquiring the requisite halakhic knowledge of shchita, my main concern at this point is the difficulty of the act itself. Is it possible to take enough control over one's consumption of meat to be able to bring it to the table personally? In the abstract, it seems do-able; after all, we are none of us that far from a time when picking out a living bird and bringing it to the shochet -- then plucking, salting and cooking it was part of the Thursday afternoon routine.
So, to that end, I've made tentative plans with Andy to observe the process itself. We'll see how it goes.
I hope you're stocked up on vegetable soup... you might not like what you see
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