Green chickens, blue eggs

On a hot summer evening in Austin, there is little I enjoy more than settling down in my backyard with a good book and a cold beer, and listening to the soft clucking of my chickens. Yes, chickens. The three hens strutting imperiously around my yard have quickly become one of the most satisfying aspects of my domestic life. I am not alone in this feeling; as my local newspaper, the Austin-American Statesman, recently pointed out, my roommates and I are in the vanguard of a growing group of urban chicken owners. At the general store where I bought my just-hatched chicks, sales have doubled in the last year. Nor is this just an Austin phenomenon: small flocks are sprouting up across the country, from Boston to San Francisco. Who are these urban chicken-owners? And why now?
Some just like fresh eggs, but others see owning chickens as a part of a larger movement to reconnect with food and its origins. A look into my backyard might help illustrate. Chicken-keeping done right is the garbage-to-goods philosophy in all its original simplicity. In the small eco-system of my urban flock, the hens spend their days contentedly clucking and scratching around in the dirt and weeds. The bucket of organic feed in their coop stretches for weeks, supplemented by all the things we would rather not have in our yard. The chickens tackle our wilting kitchen scraps, scarfing them down before they have a chance to mold. In their open-bottomed chicken “ark”, they unearth the strange bugs hiding in the grass and weeds, and neatly nibble the greens down to a crew-cut. When we move the ark after a few days, the spot is trimmed clean, looking like a large rectangular footprint in the grass. A few weeks later, it springs to life again, fertilized by a helping of their nitrogenous manure. And daily, we open up the roof of their coop to find they have transformed backyard refuse into three yolky jewels: a small, oblong brown egg from Cochin, a pristine white one from Speck, and a large turquoise gem from Big Baby.
And these eggs! These are the kind of eggs that Alice Waters, grande dame of the American Slow Food movement, wants you to buy. Since my chickens eat weeds, bugs and organic feed, they give us organic eggs. Because my chickens have time every day to roam and flutter around, they lay free-range eggs. And since my roommates and I are not clipping the hens’ beaks or confining them in tiny cages, they are cruelty-free eggs. I noticed on my last trip to San Francisco that the local Bi-Rite valued eggs with all these virtues at $7.50 a carton.
Owning chickens has also introduced several unexpected pleasures to my life. Instead of opening a carton of identical oversized commercial eggs, I choose my breakfast ingredients from a multicolored pastel jumble slowly accumulating in a bowl in the fridge. As I crack open a smooth blue-green shell and let the egg slide it into the pan, I can watch the white stand up tall and firm in the pan instead of flabbily spreading outwards. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan describes how upscale restaurants clamor for the tasty orange yolks from farmer Joel Salatins’s pasture-fed chickens. Foodies and chefs attest that eggs like these rate far above regular mass-produced eggs, tasting subtly different depending on the season and variations in the chickens’ food. An informal survey of my friends and neighbors seems to support this, as they have been patiently but eagerly queuing up for their share of the delicious bounty. As Barbara Kingsolver astutely observes in her most recent book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, “Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.” It’s hard to resist that argument.
For my roommates and I, raising chickens has been a small but radical act to reconnect with where our food comes form. At first, it seemed to border on miraculous: More eggs, every day? How do these huge eggs come from these weird little animals? We are often so detached from the source of our food that it can be hard to imagine that the boxed pancake mix or frozen pizza was once a plant or an animal. While I’m no longer shocked to find that the eggs keep coming, I still feel like every omelette or quiche is a special occasion. While making a commitment to finding local food can sometimes be difficult or intimidating (what do I do with the turnip in my CSA box?), keeping chickens remind me daily why it’s worthwhile.

Leah Duran tends her chickens in Austin, Texas. She is currently on leave from teaching while pursuing a master’s in education at Harvard.

 

Lose the sponsors, bad food and wasteful packaging: reimagining baseball

I am among the rare few who doesn’t love watching baseball.  Nor do I follow any sport.  It just doesn’t interest me and why would I watch when I can check the score at the end?  In any case, I found myself at the Giants – Pirates game last night in AT&T Park.  Since I wasn’t paying too much attention to the game, I was noticing other things.  Three observations in particular really stuck out:

1. America’s favorite pastime has sold out to America’s dominant corporations: I had a hard time concentrating on the game due to the hundreds of flashing and colorful ads in my face.  I saw distinct sponsorship messages from AT&T (of course), BoA, Yahoo!, Schwab, Genentech, PG&E, Budweiser, AutoTrader.com, esurance, Diamond Foods and so many more.  Even the cup holders were sponsored. And all the  historical snippets shown on the score board between innings were sponsored by someone or other to the extent that I wasn’t sure if I was watching legit content or advertisements.  38,000+ fans in the audience and we still need millions in corporate dollars?  If baseball players weren’t getting paid so much, maybe this wouldn’t be necessary.  And maybe I could have paid attention to the game without being bombarded by irrelevant messaging.
2. Americans are forced to consume empty calories at the game: During a nearly four hour game one is bound to get hungry and outside food and beverage are not allowed in the park as far as I can tell.  So spectators are corraled into purchasing nutritiously barren, calorie-laden, super-sized and monopoly-priced food.  Had I been a raw foodist or even remotely concerned about my health, I would have gone hungry.  As it is I enjoy eating more than watching baseball so I consumed  a hotdog, a massive bag of cotton candy and a beer.  Yum.
3. Each game produces tons of trash that could be avoided or recycled/composted: This was one of the biggest things on my mind throughout the game.  I myself produced a whole beercup-full of waste and I had limited my consumption due to cash flow restrictions.  Now think of 38,000 folks all eating similarly and producing a good amount of waste including plastic bottles and cups, foil hot dog wrappings, plastic bags, cardboard trays, paper packaging, and volumes of food waste.  A lot of this can be diverted from the landfill.  Now consider that I saw only 1 recycle bin (I hope and assume there were at least a few more), not a single compost bin, and a trash can every 20 feet.  This is San Francisco!  I can only hope the contents of the trash cans are recycled offsite, though I bet I would have seen messaging bragging about this if this were the case.  To top it all off, the park gave away bobble head dolls to the first 20,000 fans, each of which is made of plastic and who knows what else, and packaged in plastic, Styrofoam, and cardboard!  What’s wrong with this picture?  Why are we so motivated by free junk and so lazy that we can’t be expected to do anything more than leave our disposable detritus at our feet after a rousing game?

I know I’m crazy, but I’m envisioning a baseball game closer to the game’s roots.  This all might sound like bogus wishful thinking, but imagine this – a baseball game with not an ad nor a sponsor to be seen; where only organic (maybe even local) food is available, such as free range chicken and burgers, salad, organic beer, fresh squeezed fruit juice and so on; all food is served on bring your own flatware and cutlery or people are trusted with reusable plates, cups and silverware that fans are asked to return to vendors or drop boxes in the park; and games are played during daylight hours whenever possible to take advantage of the sun which energy intensive lighting will never rival.  These changes are way far out I know and would undoubtedly drive up the price of a ticket (unless players were paid less, in which case the team would suffer recruitment challenges and lose fans and so on).  But under no other circumstances would I be compelled to hold season’s tickets.

 

If you haven’t read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, watch new documentary, Food Inc

Slow Food Nation came to San Francisco this weekend. I wish it would happen every weekend, though I imagine that might be the definition of the word “unsustainable.” I managed to get into a sneak peak of clips from Food Inc accompanied by a panel discussion with Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, among other works, Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, Robert Kenner, producer and director of the film, and Harold Goldstein, Executive Director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy. I highly recommend reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book which will absolutely change the way you buy, eat, enjoy and think about food (I say that only 2/3 of the way through the book!). However, if you’re anything like me and for whatever reason find yourself with very little time to read, just go see Food Inc, which premieres next week at the Toronto film festival. I’m hoping Food Inc will do for food politics and the local food movement what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change. Joel Salatin, pictured below, is a heroic figure in both Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Inc. I don’t care to give too many details of the film based on the clips I saw, but I will share one powerful analogy Michael Pollan left us with. On the topic of the future of industrial food, Pollan said he sees it withering in a similar manner as the Catholic Church. Luther’s equivalents have already nailed their Theses to the door of the industrial food system and Pollan predicts the sprouting of other food doctrines will continue (think local, organic, humane, raw etc) to contribute to the gradual death of our current mainstream food culture.