An Egg a Day

So much about raising chickens appeals to me: reconnecting with nature, knowing where my food comes from, eating wholesome eggs. We raised seven little chicks this summer. We kept them warm and fed, petted them, and allowed them to perch on us and run around the TV room. Once the chicks grew, we moved them to a coop outside and started counting the days till we get fresh, natural, home-grown eggs. Instead, one chick after the other began, unmistakably, to crow. Out of seven chicks, five turned out to be roosters.

I am fortunate to live in a town that allows roosters, so long as the neighbors don’t complain. But five roosters? On two little hens? Turns out there are no places willing to take in roosters. In my search for a rooster home, I called Animal Place in Vacaville. Jacie, the adoption coordinator, told me she hears stories such as mine all the time. People are promised that they will get 98% female, but the real ratio is a lot more like 50% male. At birth, chicks are “sexed” to find out if they are male or female and the males killed. But the sexing is not accurate. Females end up killed just as much as males, and people still end up with roosters. The best way, she said, is to adopt a hen.

Animal Place rescues hens from factory farms. Have you ever wondered for how long hens lay eggs and what happens to them once they stop? I have never given the matter any thought, and I was stunned when Dave, another Animal Place coordinator, told me that farmers replace (translation: kill) their chickens every two years. These “used-up” chickens are not, in case you were wondering, the chickens that we buy to eat.

In March, Animal Place, in cooperation with Stanislaus Animal Services Agency, rescued 5000 chickens from a factory farm in Turlock. 45,000 more chickens died after the owners abandoned the factory, leaving the hens without food or water. When Dar and I came to Vacaville to pick up four hens, Animal Place still had about 300 birds left. Dave explained that these birds were raised to lay. Their combs hung long and strange across their heads -- from lack of sunshine during their year and a half at the factory farm, Dave explained.

Today, one of these leghorns is sick with an egg stuck in her reproductive system. Her prognosis is not good. She might die. She might live but never lay any more eggs. Either way, she is no longer just a chicken -- since we want to keep her we now look at her as a pet. The vet explained to me that since these birds are genetically-modified to lay an egg a day -- a completely unnatural phenomena -- they tend to have many reproductive problems.

I wanted to get back to nature, to reconnect to who I am on the most basic and fundamental level. Instead I find myself bowled over by just how deep our rape of this earth really is. I try to be environmentally conscious and conscientious, and yet I find that I eat eggs of chickens bred like machines who are kept for only as long as they are useful. And there’s no way around that. No matter if they are pasture-raised, cage-free, organic, free-range.

This is true for so much of what we eat. Soybeans and corn. Milk. Meat. Eggs. Chocolate and coffee. We seem irretrievably divorced from what should be natural and pure in our food. I feel so sad today. I am sad about the millions of chickens slaughtered in the United States every year after they have laid eggs for their allotted 18 months. I feel sad for all the little chicks that are killed at birth. I feel sad for cows and pigs, goats and sheep, all animals who are so useful to us, and who we reject once their usefulness ceases. And sad for Clementine in her cage, suffering from her stuck egg, which, if it were not for our consumer, supply and demand society, she would never have had to worry about.

To find out more about the life of chickens:
Society for the Advancement of Animal Wellbeing
Animal Place

Food! Food! Food!

Thanksgiving and the parties around my mom’s birthday have given me some five or six extra pounds around the midsection, a not-so-little gift which I would rather like to return. It always amazes me how much easier it is to gain weight than to lose it, and having never been much prone to dieting, I feel very helpless about how to proceed.

I train at the gym three times a week and go to pilates twice. I jog sometimes around my home, walk the dogs and go on hikes. I think of myself as a fairly active person. It seems to me that my weight ought to remain low due to all this exercise, but for some reason this theory simply does not hold.

Taking a look at my eating habits does not make me feel much better. I eat a lot of chocolate, though now that I’m in love with this brand of chocolate called Taza, I eat less. It’s very dark chocolate and gritty, being stone-ground, and somehow one piece of it suffices. I feel like I eat a lot of vegetables throughout the day, but looking closely at yesterday, for example, reveals that I had a bit of salad for breakfast, then a few cooked carrots for lunch, and a couple cucumber and carrot sticks for dinner. Not that much. My mood falls even lower when I consider that I always pour olive oil on my salad, and that the goulash from lunch had been sautéed in canola oil before cooked.

I’m going to make chicken soup today with lots of veggies inside, and this thought makes me feel a lot better. I guess in order to eat healthier I’m going to have to make an effort to eat at home oftener, to cook myself, and to add more vegetables to everything I make.

I have one friend who, whenever I’m upset about my weight or comment on looking fat, tells me that our weight fluctuates in winter and summer, that it’s natural to gain or lose as much as seven pounds at these times. She also says to talk about myself in the way I want my daughter to talk about herself. That’s a big statement, because I definitely would not want Eden to have issues with her weight. Ever, if possible.

I feel very ambivalent about these extra pounds. I wish to accept myself the way I am, with a belly or without, but it’s very hard. I think mainly I want to feel healthy, fit and strong, and I guess I don’t right now. Perhaps keeping the balance of eating as healthy as I can and working out is the important aspect, and my weight is not much more important than as a side product. Today I can’t quite reconcile myself to this, but tomorrow, as always, is a new day, the perfect day to start.