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Category: Reflections
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Paradise for Few – Hell for Many
Looking at the peaceful pictures of roosters, hens and chicks at a man and his hoe®, it’s easy to get lulled into thinking that this is how many chickens spend their lives, happy and carefree. If you want spectacular eggs, this is what it takes.But the truth of how eggs are really produced is not so idyllic. According to the American Egg Board, there are roughly 280,000,000 egg laying hens in the US and they lay 75,000,000,000 eggs each year, about 10% of the world egg production. Almost none of these egg laying hens have the a man and his hoe® experience. A tiny percentage of them have something approaching what the chickens here have. Sadly, according to NPR, 90% of egg laying hens in the US live out their lives in wire cages. Most of the rest spend their lives in very crowded, cage-free hen houses.
Today, I came across an article from Australia at Australian Broadcasting Corporation, reminding me again just how dreadful most egg production is. When you buy inexpensive eggs at Walmart, Costco, and most any supermarket, those eggs were most likely produced in a facility similar to that pictured below. In these battery farms, the hens spend their entire lives, four to six in a small wire cage. They never get to snuggle down in a soft, straw nest to lay an egg in peace. They never get to sun themselves under a blue sky. They never get to roll around in the dirt. They never get to do the things chickens want and need to do.
The result is billions of inexpensive eggs, but at an incredible cost to the hens. There is also a tremendous human cost. First, to the egg farmers who must face the unspeakable suffering they inflict on the tens of thousands of chickens under their care. It’s hard to imagine that farmers doing this do not incur an emotional cost.Then there is the cost to everyone who eats these eggs. Can it possibly be healthy to eat eggs produced by hens who live in such dreadful condition? This type of egg production makes people believe that it is possible to produce good food cheaply, but when it comes to eggs, that is a lie. Creating eggs worthy of human consumption takes a lot of space and time. To create an egg worth putting in your mouth, a hen needs to spend her day outdoors, free to go wherever she wants to. She needs to be able to scratch in the dirt for earthworms and bugs. She needs to be able to roll around in the dirt. She needs to be able to soak in the sun. And she needs a clean, quiet nest to lay her great egg.
So when you buy your eggs, demand eggs that are worthy of you.
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NYT – What Farm to Table Got Wrong
Worth reading is What Farm to Table Got Wrong by Dan Barber of the New York Times. Despite the movement for local food and supporting local farmers, he notes the following:
In the last five years, we’ve lost nearly 100,000 farms (mostly midsize ones). Today, 1.1 percent of farms in the United States account for nearly 45 percent of farm revenues. Despite being farm-to-table’s favorite targets, corn and soy account for more than 50 percent of our harvested acres for the first time ever. Between 2006 and 2011, over a million acres of native prairie were plowed up in the so-called Western Corn Belt to make way for these two crops, the most rapid loss of grasslands since we started using tractors to bust sod on the Great Plains in the 1920s.
In the article he visits a grain farmer growing organic emmer wheat and describes the lengthy process the farmer takes growing his wheat. Before his fields are ready to grow a crop of wheat, he rotates a series of crops through the field. He begins with a cover crop of like mustard. He follows that with a legume crop like soybeans or kidney beans. After that he grows oats or rye. Each one of these crops does its part enhancing the soil. Only after all these crops have been rotated through the field is the field ready to grow a crop of emmer wheat.
What is needed to support this intensive process is for people to buy each of these crops. As Dan Barber points out:
It’s one thing for chefs to advocate cooking with the whole farm; it’s another thing to make these uncelebrated crops staples in ordinary kitchens. Bridging that divide will require a new network of regional processors and distributors.
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Eat Beautiful Things
The great thing about growing your own food is that you can plant beautiful things to eat. Chive flower buds and blossoms add a splash of color to salads.
And don’t forget to plant plenty of flowers to decorate your table.
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Iris, Wysteria, and Babies
It’s Iris and Wysteria season, a terrific time of the year to be outdoors.
It’s an auspicious day to be born. These chicks are just hours old, safe and snug with their mother. The clutch is due tomorrow so these two are on the early side.
It’s a day for making a fuss. Hazel is making a fuss, but so many hens do after they’ve laid an egg. I guess if we had something as large as an egg coming out of our butt, we’d want to talk about it too.
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It’s a day for temporary art. The alcove in the entry way is a handy place to display eggs gathered this afternoon.
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Where Do Tulips Go When They Die?
Where do tulips go when they die? They fall onto their tombstones and slowly vanish.
And these geriatric tulips are nearing their end. They are still beautiful, just like old people with all their wrinkles. At the beginning of the month, they were so fresh. Now, they are losing their shape, getting wobbly, and gracefully showing their age. But their beauty endures to the end.
