The Chickens Came First

I gave up fast food about 2 months ago, not for the first time but hopefully for the last. The stuff was killing me. My metabolism is not fast food friendly, or maybe it's too fast food friendly. In my job, I spend a great deal of time in my car. It's my office, my waiting room, my supply room. It is often my coffee shop. Fast food fits right in with my work life, and thanks to my poor choices I am very much overweight and out of shape.

About 2 months ago, I tweaked my knee (also not for the first time) and was once again reminded of just how much weight my poor knees are moving around. My doctor said there was nothing much to be done about it, and it would just take time to heal.

So I decided to resume the joint supplements and fish oil, and I also purchased a small ultrasound device which finally got my knee to being functional again. And I decided that I have got to lose weight. Weight-loss diets don't usually work well for me, because the key to losing weight is that you change your lifestyle, as most of us know. And I kind of like my lifestyle in some respects. I brew ale. I make cheese. Sourdough starter lives in my 'fridge. Cooking and food fascinate me, and they are a hobby that I share with my dear Miach. The problem isn't the food we cook at home, it's the food that I eat in the car and the crappy snack stuff.

The chickens are what started me trying to be more mindful of the ecology of eating. Chickens are fascinating and amazing. They will eat just about everything, including your leftovers, and give you an egg in return. Egg white is perfect protein. Our chickens produce way more eggs than we can eat. We give eggs to our friends, and some of our friends have been very happy to have them because their budgets are tight. There is a big difference between fresh eggs from free range chickens who are living the high life, and eggs from a production farm that houses hundreds of hens in cages where they can barely stand up and get no fresh grass or bugs.

The same is true of tomatoes. Everyone knows that store-bought tomatoes taste pretty much like cardboard. They're pretty, and they add color to a salad, and a scientist will tell you that they have all the same nutrients, but they do not come close to tasting as good as a home grown tomato.

So, pondering eggs and tomatoes, and being obsessed with food and how it's made, one naturally begins to want to control not only how the food is prepared, but how it's grown. A lot of the reason that agribusiness must use chemical fertilizers and pesticides is because large-scale plant production is just like large-scale egg production. It isn't natural. It's economical and efficient.

Not that many years ago, we didn't eat the way we do now. My grandparents slaughtered a hog every fall, made their own ketchup, canned their own vegetables, raised chickens for eggs and meat. One grandmother made the best damn pickles I have ever tasted, both "bread and butter" and "lime" (both were made with cucumbers). The other grandmother made award-winning egg noodles and rhubarb pie. Both grandmothers canned their own food. My mother, a modern woman, froze the vegetables that my father grew in our sizable garden in the suburbs. We had corn, tomatoes, brussel sprouts, turnips, carrots, peas, and green beans.

I learned all this as a kid, and here I am living in one of the best climates in the world for growing vegetables year 'round, and instead of growing vegetables I've been obediently making myself fat on food that is quick and cheap. When we cook meals our parents and grandparents cooked, many times the food does not taste like we remember it, and we blame our aging taste buds or in moments of clarity we acknowledge that mass-produced food is just not as tasty but far be it from us to grow our own. We don't have the time for that.

Out here in the country, even when you think you're all urbanized, life is just different. People you know butcher their own meat, they hunt, they fish. You are gifted game meat frequently.

Last year there was a small roadside stand along Highway 49 that sprung up for a brief period in the summer/fall, obviously when the garden on the property began producing more than expected. It was a thing of beauty, driving by that lush garden. So sometime during the mild winter months, I decided to make raised beds and Miach made three of them, with hardware cloth on the bottom 'cause we have ground squirrels. And we got a barrel composter, and faithfully put all the peels and tea bags and egg shells and stuff that we used to throw away in there. And the chickens ate all the stale bread, and leftover rice and spaghetti. So, we are throwing very little away now. The chickens have straw bedding and use wood shavings in their nesting boxes, and when we clean the coop what we have is a perfect mix of chicken poop (green waste, nitrogen) and fibrous material (brown waste, carbon). In fact, the floor of the chicken run is much improved soil. The chickens scratch in it, turn the compost, and it becomes dirt. But throwing the old straw from the coop onto the chicken run would just be too much, so we haul the coop bedding out to the front pasture and mound it up, and it magically turns into composted soil. I went out there this winter to turn the pile, 'cause that's what you're supposed to do. I've tried in the past to compost yard waste, and it has never worked out. But chicken poop and straw, now there's evidently the magical mixture. That pile was steaming, and underneath when I turned the pile, there were huge fat earthworms. In the spring, after at least 4 months of composting, I went down and hauled most of it back up as black soil, but it was just a fraction of what we needed to fill the raised beds, so we ordered a truckload of topsoil and managed to get 2 beds filled and planted before it got too hot. I planted tomatoes, peppers and eggplant in one and acorn squash and melons in the other. The melon seedlings fainted in the heat and died, but they were the only loss. The squash is now a huge bushy thing with leaves the size of platters. I remembered after it flowered profusely that we used to eat fried squash blossoms when I was a kid, and realized that all those flowers just couldn't make fruit and that our mothers probably realized that and culled it down and treated us. The tomato plants grew outrageously and we have been getting 2 to 6 tomatoes daily for the last couple weeks. The hot banana peppers are fruiting, but so far the green sweet and red sweet aren't. The eggplant is fruiting, and I'm just not sure when it's best to pick it. It is only about cucumber sized now. I planted some bush beans, to dry and make soups out of this winter. We might try sweet potatoes this weekend, in the third bed, we have some that have sprouted. This winter, I'll get a handle on this gardening bit and grow my own seedlings to plant in the spring. I have a whole collection of heirloom seeds from Seed Savers .

So, here is the current hierarchy of food:

• Try to grow it ourselves.
• If we don't grow it, buy it at the local Farmer's Market in Auburn. This includes fruits, vegetables that we aren't growing, and meat.
• If we want to eat it and it isn't at the Farmer's Market, buy California-grown organic.
• If we absolutely must have something that isn't in season in California, at least buy organic.

This can be a real aggravation at times. And I know that it can be argued quite reasonably that it makes no difference nutritionally. But it makes a big difference in taste, and it makes a big difference spiritually. It's important for me to feel that we can feed ourselves and even help feed others from the fruits of our own labor (and the chickens labor, I suppose). It's my goal to can and freeze any surplus of our garden, and it occurred to me after the last of the cherries at the Farmer's Market were gone that it would have been smart to have bought enough of them to can or to have made into pie filling or preserves. I'm keeping my eye on the blackberries at the Market and hope not to miss the boat when the big harvest comes on them! I suspect that I'll know much more about what to get in bulk and when, by next year.

Has this made a difference in my health? Subjectively, I feel more energetic. Lately my skin has developed a pinkish undertone that seems very nice. I don't have as many issues with my digestion. My weight is not changing, which is kind of a shock, since I mostly eat fruit and eggs and yogurt and tomato juice for lunch now instead of huge fast food meals with fries and colas. I'm sure that people who think it doesn't matter where your calories come from, you just need to count them, would feel justifiably smug about that. Just as I felt smug about the Chinese pet food crisis ('cause we cook our dogs food ourselves for the most part), and I now feel smug about outbreaks of salmonella. Life is a gamble, and there are no guarantees, so my philosophy is to do that which makes you feel that you have some control and that you are walking as gently and respectfully as you can on Mother Earth.