Thanksgiving Turkey Taste Test

This Thanksgiving two turkeys came to the table: one standard turkey who’d lived the typical (dare I say unhappy?) turkey life, and another who had been raised free, eating organic munchies, on a local farm.  The average turkey costs less than $0.70 per pound, while its happier cousin went for ~$4-5 per pound (coming out to $60 total).   Was it worth it?

Come dinner time I was excited for a side-by-side comparison of the two birds and indeed most guests performed their own assessments.  Everyone overwhelmingly noted the local/organic birds’ superiority.  The traditional turkey was a bit mushy, tasted like turkey always does, and turned into a sort of stringy and dry mash in my mouth.  Which is fine until you put it head to head with its competition.  The free-range bird was moist, rich with flavor, and enjoyable to bight into – where the typical turkey gives way to my teeth, this local bird provided some sort of delectable resistance to my bight.  Definitely worth the surcharge.

 

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.

 

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.