Food and Sociality … with Chickens!

(Jersey Giants, photo from http://www.hamandeggsranch.com)

I decided to have an egg this morning, only one. As usual when I decide to limit my breakfast to a single egg, I carefully selected one of Blackie’s eggs. Blackie is a Jersey Giant, a larger-sized hen with beautiful iridescent black plumage, and her eggs are easily identifiable as somewhat larger and paler in hue among the other brown eggs I get from my Rhode Island Red and Barred Rock. This morning it suddenly occurred to me how bizarre it would have been for me a year ago actually to know the chicken I was indebted to for my breakfast! We have discussed at great length in class the many ways in which food binds people to each other and the kinds of obligations that a gift of food can incur. Now when I open my back door, I hear a rising chorus of chicken sounds anticipating my arrival with a gift. For the last two days this has been the chopped up stalks of the collard greens we cooked in the evening class last Thursday. When I open the little door to the nesting box to check for eggs, it seems almost like a disruption of the cosmic balance of things if I don’t come bearing some sort of special treat, even if it is a handful of dandelion greens grabbed en route to the coop. The chickens relish these greens as a break from their organic feed, carefully calibrated to maximize egg laying, and their scratch, a mixture of corn and other grains calculated to add “interest” to their diet. The greens also intensify the beta-carotene in the eggs, which brings a direct benefit to me and my family when we eat these eggs as part of our diet. What the chickens don’t eat gets blended in the dirt floor of the coop along with chicken droppings and the shaved wood chips used as bedding and swept from the coop periodically, all of which, in the course of a month or two becomes an unbelievably rich compost for the garden, what Keith Possee calls “completing the circle.”