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Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: southern New Jersey
Posts: 3,183
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Some people go through a grocery store filled with wonder at the great progress in foods available to us over the past 50 or 60 years. Thanks to air transport, agribusiness, computers, and other engines of contemporary technology we can eat almost anything we desire every day of the year. New Jersey blueberries may have a season of only a month in mid-summer, but in the preceding months of the year we can have in succession blueberries from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. When our season is over, we can get them from Michigan and Ontario--just before the crop from Chile appears in our local produce section.
“Local” here means only that the produce section is in a grocery store near where we live. The fruits and vegetables--also meats and dairy products--that we purchase and consume travel, on average, 1500 miles before reaching our grocery carts. I’m something of a curmudgeon, but I’ll say it anyway: a cantaloupe in January that has been picked in Mexico three weeks ago and shipped to my Safeway does not even begin to match another melon in August, that was picked this morning, vine ripe and glistening with dew.
But my own trips up and down the grocery aisles fill me not with wonder but with a vague sense of dread. This is particularly true at the meat and dairy counters, and not just because of the dawning possibility of mad cow disease. Everything is easy and convenient. Hundreds and hundreds of other people have taken most of the work out of fixing and eating a meal. Take chicken. It comes in yellow plastic trays covered with plastic film--dark meat, white meat, whole breasts with skin and bones, skinless, boned breasts cut in half. I wonder: how many of these folks who grab packs of ready to cook chicken would know what to do if hungry and presented with a live Rhode Island Red hen?
As the senior gray beard on this board, I remember what I learned on a little farm near Irving, Texas, in the 1950s. If you have a flock of chickens and a yen for southern fried chicken, it wasn’t as easy as running down to the Acme for some cut up and ready to cook. There were steps. First, you had to decide which bird was destined next to grace your table. Then you had to catch it. Then you had to kill it. Some of the options here were: decapitate it with an ax, or wring its neck. Next you had to get rid of its feathers, and if it was an older bird, singe it. Then it had to be drawn, to get rid of its guts and “lights.”
Lately, the thought of raising some chickens has flickered through my consciousness.
There are lots of reasons.
One of my sisters-in-law has had a flock of hens for the past couple of years. She says that the fresh eggs she gathers daily from their coop are about 2000 times better tasting than anything from the store, even in cartons labeled “organic” and “free roaming, antibiotic- and hormone-free.” She’s too fond of the members of her flock to kill any for her table, but she reckons that they would make the best fried chicken she’s tasted since the end of the Korean War.
If I had chickens out back, I’d have wonderful eggs, too--and I think I’d get round to recovery that lost knowledge of cleaning and dressing them. The process isn’t pleasant to think about, but I’ll bet it’s a whole lot more appetizing to consider than a clear understanding of what goes on in the processing vats of one of those huge poultry factories.
Chickens defecate, of course. And the stuff once it dries out a little is great fertilizer. I could put it on my tomato patch--where I grow “Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter” and other old heirloom varieties that were bred to taste good, not just travel well from California to New Jersey.
Then there are the aesthetic and moral reasons. Once upon a time, not long ago, there were scores and scores of chicken “races.” Besides those Rhode Island Reds, for starters, there were Plymouth Rocks, Wyandottes, Buff Orphingtons, Golden Bantams. Feathers were a rainbow of hues, and a mature, mean old rooster was wonderful to behold, but not much fun to have you in pursuit.
Roosters and hens are also educational to have around. My family’s flock back in those gone days of World War II gave me my first inkling of what sex was all about. There aren’t many roosters around any more. And Purdue and the other companies don’t raise the old varieties. They raise birds that are bred to huddle in tiny dark places and to grow to eating size in about three minutes. If somebody doesn’t keep the old sorts going, they may well just disappear from the face of our planet.
I’d also like chickens because I enjoy the sound of a rooster crowing at dawn--a sound that reflects the rhythm of the changing days and seasons.
I’d like chickens because raising them would raise the level of my contribution to my family’s nutrition, as an active participant not a passive shopper.
But I know what would happen as soon as my neighbors heard the first crow of daylight...or heard the clucking of my rooster’s harem. The cops would come. There are laws where I live. Barnyard animals are forbidden. If we want friend chicken or eggs, the right and proper thing to do is to drive to Safeway. Anything else is unAmerican. I’ll bet that George Bush gets his eggs from the grocery store, not some personal flock out back in Crawford.
I have a modest proposal, however. Let’s all work to get those anti-chicken laws off the books. Let’s teach our children and grandchildren the truth about where we stand in the food chain. Let’s teach them to worry about important things--about hawks; about a real fox in an actual henhouse, not a metaphorical fox in a metaphorical henhouse.
Cockadoodle. Do.
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
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