A lot of people start eating organic food for selfish reasons. I've eaten organic fruits and vegetables pretty much my whole life and it wasn't because I spared a lot of thought about the benefits for the planet. Really it was my mom who sent me down the organics road and she wasn't thinking about Mother Earth either. I'd guess the logic for her was that organic food was healthier for our bodies and would make us more attractive with nicer skin. My mother would probably drink powdered kitten bones stirred into puppy tears if someone told her it would reverse sun damage. She's a lovely woman though.

What the word organic means has changed a lot over the years and if you think about food for a while you realize how many words are used to manipulate our food choices, even words like organic that are supposed to signify something. Natural, healthy, gourmet, traditional, farm fresh. It's someone's job, lots of someones, to place those words in a pleasing fashion across all kinds of packaging so you and I will happily shell out a little extra money for them. And I have to admit they get me all the time. It's because I'm a snob and have been since my mom started feeding me solid foods, bits of fruit that she hoped would turn me into some sort of eternally youthful organic super being who could keep away cancer with a flex of the muscle. I got used to the taste and the smell and the look of it all.

Of course it's the look of things that's most easily manipulated by human hands, we quite excel at it. Packaging I associate with healthy tasty things are covering all sorts of crap and unless I'm very careful I don't always discern the difference between the two until after I leave the store. One answer of course is to eat whole foods, nothing processed or as little processing as possible. Processed items have lots of ingredients and the more ingredients something has the less you can know about what you're eating, the more places these ingredients came from, the more fuel that went into the machines to transport and make them. But, meh, I like cheese puffs. Much to my detriment.

Another solution is don't be taken in. Something has begun to change for me over the last year and I can't say why it's happening or if it'll last. I don't necessarily eat organic for me anymore. Or even eat organic at all if there's a minimally treated option available grown within a few hundred miles instead of Argentina. I don't buy things just because they have nice wrappings (well, there was a recent incident with some cheese wrapped in a leaf but a lesson was learned). Now I'm trying to eat organic and locally for the environment and makes the world a healthier place not just my body. I haven't really tried to do this through a winter yet, so I think a lot of canning is in my near future. We'll see.

Anyway I was in a farmer's market and thinking about all this and how smug I am when I noticed a table covered in little plastic containers. There were pretty labels glued to them and inside were a few stems of Johnny-Jump-Ups. These flowers are edible and very pleasing to the eye and I stopped to look at them and admire how clever this farmer was selling something cheaply produced as Gourmet. They have little nutritional value, aren't filling or even that flavorful but they look great! Cleverness appreciated, I then thought, What A Scam.

Plastic containers? Four dollars? Gourmet flowers? What? Nuts!

There will always be something exhilirating about buying a little special something for yourself, there will always be a need for organic farmers to make money through 'specialty' items. But this particular item is a call to arms (exaggerration). A lot of people could reduce their food costs, get in touch with the cycle of planting and harvest, find a use for compost in their own homes just by growing something on their window sill or fire escape or yard if they're lucky enough to have one. Why not start with flowers? They're easy to grow, pretty, don't require a lot of space and you can put them in drinks, on cakes, make them into candies, put them on spreadable cheese, in salads, and teas. Wont really cut your food costs but maybe adding a decorative element to a meal that was produced by their own hand would inspire people to grow something more challenging the following season and the one after that. First the thing that pleases the eye, then the thing that pleases the body and then the thing that pleases the world. The order should be reversed-World, Body, Eye- but you have to start somewhere. And no plastic containers required!

This is a great list of edible flowers and recipes for them:

http://whatscookingamerica.net/EdibleFlowers/EdibleFlowersMain.htm

The Old Ennui

The last couple weeks I've been moping around and immersing myself in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon and generally falling off the Living Right Wagon. Until pretty recently I didn't have a very firm idea of what living right means exactly. More like a vague outline- no students loitering after school, no horrible murders with hearts being removed. And also no smoking. Buffy Huzzah! But as a day to day guide those aren't issues I really wrastle with. Smoking, bleh.

So if I had to make a new living right code it would look something like this-exercise, eat healthy food that is good for the environment that you can share with family and friends, slay demons. Easy! Well, I haven't been managing any of my to-do list and am in a shame spiral. This happens to me pretty much every year in late summer. It's probably common for most peeps to look back on the long languorous days of possibility that make up June July and August and think, "WTF was I doing??". It's odd because many of us look forward to the season as being a time to sit on our lazy asses, watch stupid movies and fall asleep on the beach. I've done those things in spades this year and now that the shortening of days is visible I feel like I've accomplished nothing! Though I've accomplished everything summer's meant for! A Paradox.

When I'm feeling depressed all my actions compound and beget. So I haven't written a blog post in awhile? Might as well not bother then! Haven't gone for a run in a week? Might as well not for another month. Or ever (fuck running). When you feel like you haven't done anything right in a long time the effort to change becomes monumental. I think this is why we don't do things we know we should, because it seems like all the times we were doing the wrong thing can never be balanced out...or we'll get on the Living Right Wagon just to get knocked into the dust further down the road. That's pretty much why I've never flossed. Though I really should. Oh god, I'm going to hell! Or some alternate dimension composed entirely of shrimp (Buffy Huzzah!)!

Which brings me to my low point today. I went to Chipotle.

I wont say going to Chipotle is the low point for my entire life because that would certainly be an exaggeration. But definitely for today. Fast food restaurants have become bad to think for me, by which I mean they're now mentally in the category of the inedible. I was a Chipotle believer for quite awhile, particularly working in Midtown where choices were slim and disturbingly gritty. A burrito from Chipotle seemed like a pretty clean tasty alternative. I knew they were owned by McDonald's and had a kind of 'boo corporate' thought when I found out, but rice and beans are my fav.

Then I read Fast Food Nation and threw up in my mouth. I couldn't walk into Chipotle and not see the evil wrapped in every burrito. It didn't help that the last one I ate (before today) was draped by an employee's dirty dish cloth before my very horrified eyes. Anyway, it's been awhile since I've been inside a fast food restaurant except to use the bathroom and I was surprised by the list of numbers paralleling the prices on the menu hanging above the counter. What could they be trying to tell me? Okay, so they were labeled 'calories' but a salad was listed as being 118-813 calories. Huh? That's quite a range there. So is that the leaves and then the cheese with sour cream? Mm. Sour cream. All the items were like that, with a calorie low several hundred integers from its high.

I'd heard this whole calorie listing thing was going to become mandatory but hadn't witnessed it though now dimly recall the gals at the office screeching about having consumed 1800 calorie lunches all year. Personally, I don't count calories. I know what I'm eating and what will be likely to make me fat and what it feels like to be stuffed to the gills. When I make bad choices and eat a family sized bag of potato chips for dinner instead of a balanced meal I don't look at the bag and flip out because I've eaten my caloric intake for the week in one sitting. I flip out because I'm an idiot...hmm there goes the Living Right Wagon again!

I'm kind of on the fence about this whole calorie listing thing. Yes, nutritional information should be available, but is counting calories the same thing as knowing about good nutrition ? Is it good to ask corporations to take responsibility for their customers health or are we passing the buck and ignoring the question of health education in schools? Are these listings so vague that their informational value is just a kind of scarecrow to the wary i.e. 'look out you may possibly be eating 813 calories or maybe just 118, no knowing'? And if you do risk, then it's your own fault you obese diabetes-courting fuck up!?

Anyway, I ate one. A burrito bowl this time since the calorie content ranges about a 200 less than the burrito. But I got chips so that probably added the overall. Jesus. I might as well just eat a bag of potato chips and go die under a rock. I'm feeling terrible remorse and have sworn off the fast food again. Because of the evil thing not the calorie thing. It really is all about choices, the choice to eat something you cooked for yourself from healthy whole ingredients, the choice to change out of your footie pajamas and go out to enjoy a warm summer day, the choice to floss. Tomorrow I'm going to make a better choice and if the day after that I fall back on old habits it's okay. I can catch the Living As Best As I Can Carriage.

This is a website from that helpful NY gov trying to tell us how to be, which I found reading about this whole law thing and it tickled me. Very sensible advice overall though they recommend reducing television viewing hours. You know what I say to that?

Buffy Huzzah!

I Will Feed You Nothing But Yogurt and Honey

My first day on Frosty Morning Farms Karl drove me from Cortlandt to Commonplace. Jason and Alison were at the Farmer's Market in Cazenovia. My bus was an hour late and I was starving and experiencing the usual anxiety I get whenever I'm physically discomfited. We stood silently in the kitchen I'd get to know pretty well over the next ten days until Karl politely asked me if I'd like some yogurt.

I mentioned before that he makes his own yogurt from their goat's milk. How you make yogurt-heat a bunch of milk, add a container of yogurt. More yogurt ensues. Sorry, didn't write down the recipe. Really I'm not a huge yogurt fan but I'd taken a personal (and thus easily broken) vow to embrace whatever foodstuffs were thrown my way during this little trip, since that seemed like the spirit of eating locally and off your own labor. So I said yes, a bowl of yogurt would be dee-lightful.

From one of the coolers he plucked a mason jar full of white liquid. It didn't have the consistency of milk, exactly. Cream was gathering on top and it dripped slightly slower than water into a bowl the size of my head that he'd set out for me. "That's plenty!" I shrieked but it was already full up to the brim. I was holding a spoon and looking at the glop despondently when he pushed a second mason jar my way-this one was opaque gold and the top came stickily away. Honey, raised right there on the farm, unfiltered and the perfect compliment in a heaping spoonful to Karl's yogurt. I'm not exaggerating when I say these two things together were in the top five best flavor combinations I've ever had in my whole life. I slurped that mother up.

While the mysteries of yogurt propagation are less than intriguing to me, bee keeping is like Jedi Knight mysterious...by which I mean COOL. Honey itself is an amazing entity, something edible that never goes bad or sour or molds or does anything but taste like heaven sauce. Something my main squeeze Michael Pollan writes (about apples, not honey, in The Botany of Desire) is that in this day and age with sugar cheaply abounding we take for granted the transcendent power of sweetness. How precious a bee hive would be in a world without sugar. Can you picture the anticipatory mouth watering that happens in your mouth when you long for something sweet? How when it touches your tongue it's so overwhelming it's almost like pain?

A few weeks later at Cross Island Farms I got to peak into actual beehives and wear the hat and everything. David Belding keeps three beehives, two that he harvests from and one that is just building up its brood now. They're Buckfast, a popular variety that is a hybrid from England known for its gentleness...except in the Americas where they're known for their swarming and possible hybridization with the African killer bees blah blah. David prefers the Italian honey bees which are supposed to be quite sweet but they're very vulnerable to harsh winters and there are quite long harsh winters up by the St. Lawrence river. His last Italian hive died out awhile ago. He does still have an Italian Mentor, a man named John who came by the house one day to check on David's hives while David was out. I watched him open up the Buckfast hive and cut out combs the bees had been building in a gap between frames. He had a wild turkey feather he used to brush the bees out of his way and told me in a heavy Italian accent that David's bees were nasty and made no honey unlike HIS bees which were totally awesome super great. Later I found a wild turkey feather of my own by the house and have kept it to start off my bee keeping kit.



A couple days later David decided to check on the hives himself at John's urging. He and another bee-keeping friend, also confusingly named David, donned their suits. After watching John perform the same tasks with nothing more than a hair net and turkey feather they looked a bit like overdressed aliens wandering down the road in the blazing heat.

David Two was a very mild-mannered man who proudly showed me his swollen thumb, stung just a few days before. One of his hives had flown suddenly off which is not an uncommon occurrence. He'd found them in a tree near his house about fifteen feet off the ground and was considering how to reclaim them without being swarmed and stung at the top of a ladder. The interesting thing about bees (one of the many interesting things) is that even the most domesticated varieties might pick up and leave you someday or a wild variety might fall under the spell of man's hand, lured by sugar water and protection from mites or simply the hazy dream of a smoking bellow.

Perhaps you've heard about the sudden death of honeybees we've been having the last few years, huge populations dying out dramatically and unexpectedly. Most of the deaths are taking place in the large commercial migratory beekeeping sector. That's exactly what it sounds like-companies that tie up their bee hives, shove them on the back of a truck and cart them from farm to farm. It's mainly for pollination and without that pollination vegetable and fruit growth is detrimentally affected. David One and Two agree that the deaths aren't necessarily environmental factors such as pollution, the more likely cause is just plain old stress. Bees aren't meant for the highway (also the idea of a giant angry bee filled truck driving beside you sounds kind of like a bad idea on steroids). They're yet another example of something in nature that can be hugely beneficial to its caretakers when managed on a small scale, on site, but when taken to a commercial size will collapse in on itself.

Bees have some advantage. Unlike livestock shoved in CAFOs or genetically modified corn they can decide when they've had enough, close up their combs and set off for the wild wild woods, leaving us behind. With our sour yogurt.

Feel It In Your Heart

Friday night I dozed in a garden and got bitten by bugs. The garden was in Queens at P.S. 1 in their gravel filled courtyard that's been transformed into an urban farm of sorts, a giant structure of cardboard tubes rising above our heads growing a variety of produce suited to the intense sunlight beaming down on industrial L.I.C. It's kind of embarrassing but I had no idea that this thing was here. Or there, actually. The only reason I was at P.S. 1 was to hear a lecture by Michael Pollan and though completely appropriate it was a surprise to discover the rows of fresh greens, tomatoes and zucchini plants (shudder). The structure is supposedly built with environmental consideration and all the building materials are completely recyclable- which is more than you can say about most art right there. Here's the website page describing the project in flowery language:

http://www.ps1.org/exhibitions/view/201/

One thing this page didn't answer for me was how do they pick the stuff at the top? Also how do the chickens fit in? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they do. What is life without animals crammed into every nook and crevice? An empty shell. If anyone has answers to my first two questions please pass them along.

Disorder and lackadaisy were pretty much the mode of the event and it wasn't long before me and my friend Zach were shotgunning free wine at the 'private' reception. Michael Pollan sat behind a table in the corner signing books and chatting up his guests. I'd seen him arrive in the courtyard and giggled like a school girl. If you don't know who M.P. is let me introduce you to a truly engaging writer. He's the author of Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and most recently In Defense of Food. All of these books are about food issues in America and to some degree across the world and they're all pretty enjoyable to read. Some of Pollan's 'big ideas' that run through out his books, in a very general list, are how plants have in many ways domesticated us by appealing to our desires the same way a flower manipulates a bird or bee with its color and scent, how corn has crept into our food supply across the board and now our cars as well, how we view nature as something that must be slowly depleted for us to survive and the alternative systems of farming that give back to the land in ways that make it richer, and how nuttycakes people are about what they put into their mouth without the strength of regional diets to give us some direction (we can get anything anytime! even when it's not in season or from this hemisphere! what do I cram in my mouth?!).

What to cram in my mouth is a pretty consuming question for me so naturally I'm one of Michael Pollan's many groupies. Rosy cheeked from wine and sunshine we hustled up to the lecture hall, a big circular room with a spinning mirror on the ceiling. Zach and I took seats on the already crowded floor since chairs had long ago been staked out. When the crowd was ambling around the courtyard it had seemed like a sparse turnout but now we were crammed thigh to thigh in a way very reminiscent of a fire hazard. The mirror reflected the crush down on us and the room heated up to pressure cooker levels. In the mirror I could see a few other friends seated in the front row. I waved.

Finally the man himself appeared! I have to say at first I was nervous. M.P. built up his speech slowly, recounting his first stoner musings out in his garden watching bees hover around his apple blossoms which went a little something like this (paraphrasing): Hey, bees think they're important but really the flowers are making the bees work for them...whoa, what if the potatoes I'm planting are making ME work for THEM by being so tasty? Fuuuuck...We are all both Subjects and Objects.

Which is all basically the basis for Botany of Desire and the overheated crowd was obviously having this collective thought, "We know, already! Inspire us with something new, ok? It's hot as fuck in here." So he did.

"It's one thing to know something. It's another thing to feel it in your heart," said Michael, splaying his hand across his chest. Essentially he was saying that many of us know what industrial farming is doing to us both ecologically and as a society but until you feel how important it is you can't make a change in your own life or the world. That's where art and writing come in, the tools to bring the meaning of a situation from people's heads to their hearts. Which is why he was at P.S. 1. It's called SYNERGY.

I say that without sarcasm. I say that with very little sarcasm. Michael Pollan's books, particularly The Omnivore's Dilemma, were truly the catalyst for feeling all this organic farming shizzy in my heart. Perhaps it had been building from a thousand different experiences throughout my life, from eating organic fruit and vegetables growing up to working in a neighborhood garden all through junior high and high school, but without his writing I might not have reached a place where I wanted to make meaningful choices about what I eat and also how I live. One aspect of his work you can't help but notice is the intensity of his desire to know. There are so many things we let pass by without challenging their origin, meaning and affect on us because it's such a burden to find out and then carry the weight of that knowledge around. Michael Pollan wants to know everything and he wants to share it. That kind of curiosity is incredibly moving.

Anyway, after the lecture we went out to dinner with a couple other attendees at a restaurant in Fort Greene called iCi that buys fresh local food and cooks it verrrry deliciously. They buy some of their produce from Added Value, a program that grows produce in Red Hook with city kids as a way of connecting them to healthier living and eating choices. It was a beautiful evening, cool and breezy out in iCi's garden/yard where I was also bitten by bugs. We ate from each other's plates, appreciating the flavor and the company.

Here's a link to Added Value, they're pretty cool:

http://www.added-value.org/announce/

Just When You Think You Wont Wake Up Covered In Blisters

So the morning David and I were going to lance a boil on one of the new she-goats I discovered a delightful rash of my own all across my knees, hands and arms. At first I was kind of intrigued and fascinated by it. The rash presented (this is about to get gross and then grosser) as a red blotch that felt about as painful as a light scrape then rose into a water filled mound. They were of various sizes and depths of wateriness and in the work of a few moments I'd pretty much annihilated them. Full Disclosure: I've begged friends to let me stick pins in things as intimate as blood blisters. Begged.

"That was weird," I thought and went about my daily business at Cross Island Farms. Goat boil lancing, garlic harvesting, zucchini picking ::Cue Ominous Music:: and planting carrots.

Before leaving NYC I'd considered a lot of the bad things that could happen to me on a farm. I might loose a limb in a thresher or get rabies from a raccoon nesting in my tent or just a good old fashioned horse trampling. Of course the shit that goes down is never what we expect. The evening after their first appearance was just a couple days before I was heading home and I thought the wounds would quickly heal up and that'd be the end of it. I was mildly disappointed that I wouldn't be able to show them off. It wasn't until the bus ride home that I thought, "I have a problem. And no health insurance."

The scary red blotches had begun rising up all over my forearms past my elbows. Tiny splotches climbed each knuckle of my fingers and soon every one of them had a royal blister crown. I controlled my well cultivated urge to open them up to the horrors of the Greyhound bus bacterial pool and tried to keep a level head.

If you're like me (I like to think everyone is) then you've probably made a top one hundred worst ways to die list. I have to say 'covered in blisters' is one of my top twenty five at least. Also, I've never really been prone to allergies. I get a little sneezy around the time when everyone walks around sneezy mumbling, "They say this is a bad pollen year," but that's it. If you're unused to surprising skin rashes the mind immediately goes to the worst case scenario. Hiding my oozing sores from the other passengers for fear of being put out on the road as a leper, I tried to figure out what I'd done to deserve this. I remembered a conversation I'd had with Karl Frost almost two weeks prior, when he noticed my dirt blackened fingers and cracked skin after a particularly diggy day.

"Won't have such soft white hands now!" he mocked.

"My hands bounce back quickly," I said. Smugly.

Now I was being punished for my confidence.Because our ailment's appearances correlated I associated my blisters with the she-goat's boil. She almost seemed responsible. Somewhere on the property she'd gotten sick and then so had I! Of course the she-goat had an infection on her face probably from where one of her fellow goat inmates had butted her and punctured the skin, which was pretty dissimilar from my condition. Who knew what secret violent lives goats lead?

I held gauze and rubbing alcohol for David as he squeezed the infection out of her wound. Normally right up my ally but I didn't want to get butted myself. She looked both annoyed and relieved, gobbling up grain as reward for tolerating us. When I arrived back in NYC tender and freaked I poured on the rubbing alcohol myself and thought of her again. It's funny how vulnerable you become at the first sign of illness especially when the symptoms are consistent with one of God's plagues. Any animal, livestock or pet, is at the mercy of their caretaker. I'd felt sorry for the goat waiting out in her pen for someone to notice that something was wrong, that she needed help and also for her natural fear of being handled and treated. Then there I was trembling in the bathroom over my own problems, as fearful and disturbed as she'd been as we climbed over the fence.

Anyway, I eventually realized I wasn't going to die, at least from this, and my blisters were caused by contact with the almost invisible spines all over the stems and leaves of the zucchini plants I'd been picking from all week. They've all healed, kind of, into charming reddish white scars on my glowing farmer's tan. So yes, my hands functionality have bounced back if not their lovely white softness. Not YET, Karl! Lessons Learned: Wear work gloves. Get health insurance. Be grateful you didn't pick zucchini with your face.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Cheesecloth

So I was just thinking about cheese like I do every morning, noon and night. This is not going to be a oh-what-a-world entry in the life and times of a boring not-knowing it all...it's more of a holy-shit-that-was-cool kind of post. BECAUSE IT'S ABOUT MAKING CHEESE!

That's right, suckas (my U key is really sticky for some reason but I didn't mind until it made it hard to type suckas), my man Karl Frost makes his own delicious farm fresh cheese and he does it sans animal bits or cultures. He milks his goats twice a day and saves it up in mason jars, sticking them in coolers. They have one cooler out in the barn under a Power Rangers blanket and one in the kitchen. The Frosts have no fridge so this makes them eat up all the little bits of leftovers most of us forget in the back of our refrigerators until they're as discolored and malformed as our sense of human decency. I ate a lot of meals there that I then ate for lunch the following day and then again for dinner but with some yogurt mixed in or something (yogurt also made my Karl. The man is a wizard). It sounds boring but it kind of made the cook/s more creative in their cooking because they knew the taste would have to entertain them for awhile. Also there were a lot of us to eat everything-Karl, Alison, Jason, myself and the young family down the road who I think of as The Gilligans even though that's only the mom's name, Wendy. Yuri is her non-husband and Elu is their baby. They had recently moved to Commonplace and were fixing up a cabin far up the road with the promise that they could live and homestead there in exchange for their work. I liked them very much but was also weirded out because Wendy is my exact age. Watching her carry around a baby is freaky though their family in general seems really happy. Wendy and Yuri stopped by most evenings after a long day of spackling and ditch filling by their cabin, either to help cook or do some work around the farm in exchange for their CSA share. Elu is about eleven months and when I first met them at the Strawberry Festival I thought "This poor sunburned bug bitten baby! Damned hippies!" Now I just kind of feel sorry for all those lily white babes who never breath fresh air or eat dirt.

Anyway...

When the coolers are full Karl gets out his equipment-a double boiler, a thermometer, and a cheese cloth. He boils about five gallons of goat milk to 180 degrees, takes it off the stove then adds one and a half cups either white vinegar or apple cider vinegar. BAM! Milk curdles.


He uses a strainer to separate the curds from the whey (suddenly that little Miss Moffet jam bag has some visuals) then packs them in a cheese cloth adding salt and chopped garlic, which in turn gets stuck into a cheese shaped container with holes all over and a lid. On top of the lid he sets a bucket full of water. The weight of the bucket pushes down the lid and squeezes more whey through the cheesecloth. The longer you leave the weight on, the dryer the cheese gets. Karl saves the whey for Alison to soak beans in since she thinks it makes them less gas inducing...No. No, it doesn't.



The final product is very light and airy cheese. It's not meant to be aged but rather eaten up right away. It's almost like cottage cheese but not nearly as curdy or wet. You can slice it. And eat it. Mmm. People call all the time asking for Karl's cheese which he no longer makes to sell. This isn't hearsay, I answered the phone a few times to these requests.

A kind of interesting 'fact' (I didn't verify it at all) is that a lot of dairy farmers, of which there are many in upstate New York, make money through specialty items they can produce with their milk like cheese or butter. We kind of undervalue milk even grass fed organic because we're so used to buying cheaps quarts of cow juice. Dani, from Cross Island Farms, described this as Added Value, their time and knowledge making the milk more valuable to buyers. Also CHEESE IS DELICIOUS!

I was going to put a link here to a make your own cheese website but there are a million of them. Go to 'google.com' and type in 'make cheese'. Or follow Karl's recipe if you have a lot of goat milk handy. I'm buying a cheesecloth myself.

The Chicken in the Egg

The chickens behind my tent were 'enclosed' by a wire fence...chicken wire you might say...with a hen house and a mulberry tree that rained delicious tidbits on them with every passing breeze. I write enclosed hesitantly since the chickens embraced the term free range with more abandon than their human masters probably intended when putting up that enclosure. Most of them are young and small enough to squeeze out the gaps and run wild through the garden, popping out at unexpected moments from every nook and cranny ("how did you get in my backpack?"). The rest take short flights from the yard to the top of the fence to outside the yard. Or the one or two smart enough to fly up into the mulberry tree hang out up there much of the day snatching the ripest sweetest fruits from reaching human fingers.

I think one of the first animals I spared a sympathetic thought for outside my own household or the Amazon rain forest were chickens. I felt some responsibility for them since they were my primary meat source. Without chickens life would be an unending march of tofu. It doesn't take much looking to find out how most chickens are raised, not free and easy in the shade of a mulberry tree, but stacked to the ceiling wing to wing, legs breaking underneath the weight of bodies bred to grown at unnatural rates. I found out about it...and didn't really give a shit. A teenage girl I'm teaching this summer who recently gave up her vegetarianism put it this way: "I was just like, why shouldn't I eat this chicken? I'm better than this chicken. So I ate it." She also admitted that the chicken (one of the boxed up varieties, presumably) was stringy and not very tasty.

The Frosts had two kinds of chickens-the back yard chickens, the ones in the pen, and the front yard chickens, a smaller golden variety who were just beginning to raise up their babies and still had the luxury of a rooster. Occasionally the rooster would try to chase a back yard escapee, strutting comically after a hen twice his size but mostly the front yard chickens hung out around the goats stealing their grain and sleeping slumped over on their stable doors. A couple more teenagers in on the tainted vegetarianism conversation asked me this,"What's better, caged chicken or free range? CAGED is better because free range you give them some nice time outside and then BAM kill them. The caged never know what they're missing." Well, I know what they're missing. It's pretty good.

Alison Frost took me to the county fair where she'd been asked to judge the art submissions for the 4H club. What I know about the 4H club is pretty limited and since it's a very extensive program this is just the most basic description-4H is an agricultural club where kids experiment with the crafts that are popular with scouts like wilderness survival but also raising livestock, baking, jam making, vegetable growing etc. etc. Its also a way to make money since every ribbon earned in each category is traded in for points which equal a small amount of cash. So Alison and her kids used to come to the county fair with their goats, rabbits, chickens, giant squash, preserves and pieces of art to collect points and socialize with other home schooled farm kids in the area. They're too grown for it now but Alison's still tight with 4H organizers and she invited me along to guest judge.

The county fair was pretty dead in the middle of a broiling hot day except for the judges and their 4H child assistants (why weren't they in school come to think of it?) with stacks of drawings and aprons and quilts in front of them. On the walls and in booths were posters and dioramas of farm activities and in one corner was a small cage full of chicks next to an incubator. As Alison sorted through the elementary school drawings-she gave away blue ribbons until they ran out, then we had to admit some were red ribbon material-I wandered over to the chicken exhibition trying to sneak a finger through the cage bars and pet a downy head. A girl of about nine or ten came up and pointed to the most demented looking one staggering around, its black fuzz a bit sticky and dusty looking, and said proudly, "That's my chick. I donated the egg."

"He's looking a little bedraggled," I said, thoughtlessly.

"Well, he just hatched," she informed me like I was a fucking idiot. Shut me the hell up!

I looked over at the incubator which had a clear plastic top. Inside were about a dozen eggs of different sizes and colors. Did you know some chickens lay blue eggs? Not like a robin's egg blue more a greeny blue, like sea foam. Along a few were hairline fractures and to my everlasting shock a baby chick kicked its way out of a shell as I watched. It lay there slick with birth, breathing shallowly on the damp paper towel of the incubator as stunned to be alive as I was to see it being born. The little farm girl shook her head at my slack jawed ignorance and wandered away.

So there's knowing and then there's knowing where chickens come from, how they come into this world and how they go out of it and all the ways they can be treated in between. The chickens at the Frost's have a sweet life and then BAM it's over. But chickens in factory farms live lives they probably wish would be over a lot quicker. It's interesting to think about how an organization like 4H might awaken a lot of school kids to the amazing responsibility of raising an animal to feed yourself and your family, to point at a chicken and say, "That's mine", knowing the care that went into its life as well as the benefits of its death. Of course 4H does not in any way cater exclusively to organic or free range farmers, for all I know that little dusty baby was going off to to be shoved in a cage with a hundred brothers and sisters.

I stood for a long time over the incubator, entranced. The newborn chick lay under the weight of its fresh existence, tossed to an uncertain future on the shore of its sea foam shell.


If you'd like to read a bit about 4H they have a crazy convoluted website here:

www.4-h.org