Someday, my sweet Henrietta

It’s been something I’ve been aware of, but it wasn’t until after reading the segment in Jamie Oliver’s book, Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life, that I’ve become enthralled with the idea of keeping chickens.  I guess the excitement Jamie Oliver conveys about raising chickens and how fantastic their fresh eggs are has sold me on the dream of having my own set of hens for egg-laying purposes.  Not that I eat that many eggs to begin with.  Actually, I don’t really care for eggs in general, aside from deviled and hard-boiled eggs.  I don’t even like quiche all that much.

But I want chickens!  When I get settled in somewhere and have a scratch of backyard, I’m going to get two or three chickens, and one will be named Henrietta.  Of course.  They can roost in a tree and cluck and hang out in the backyard.  It will be great!

My history with chickens has been much like everyone else’s.  I had been chased by angry chickens as an unsteady toddler in the Philippines, ate chicken adobo with rice, then abstained from chicken meat and all other meat at the age of twelve, with occasional dining mishaps in which I was fed chicken from a small collection of places over the years.  My uncle Greg in Manila has raised roosters for cockfighting, which is a brutal sport that’s persisted throughout human history not just in developing nations, but here in the US as well, despite it being illegal in all fifty states and in DC. 

I previously had a rather dismissive opinion on chickens until reading the chapter on this humble bird in Altruistic Armadillos to Zenlike Zebras: A Menagerie of 100 Favorite Animals, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.  It’s a swell book for any animal lover, and my opinion of the chicken was changed to that of respect after Masson’s loving anecdotes and information about the fowl.  It was in Masson’s book I learnt chickens can, indeed, fly.  The reason why those of us not acquainted with live chickens seem to think chickens are unable to fly is because chickens actually don’t fly very high or far, and most conventional farmers clip or pin their wings.

Earlier this year, I had read an article from NPR, City Folk Flock to Raise Small Livestock at Home.  The idea of a young man walking around LA with a fat, happy chicken in his arm amused me, and I was interested in this movement of keeping chickens, whether due to financial strains or a desire for a humane, sustainable source of food.  Also, some of the comments on NPR’s website for this article are truly inspiring, such as Nancy Pullen’s:

I’m a backyard chicken keeper. I have two lovely hens, Clementine and Buttercup. Not only do they furnish us with fresh eggs daily, they are hilarious. They’re as curious as any cat and as eager to greet you as any dog. A fifty pound bag of feed costs about eleven dollars and lasts months. In return you get a dozen eggs a week and free entertainment. I have a Rhode Island Red and a Barred Plymouth Rock. They’re hearty, easy to care for (ten minutes a day) and truly a delight. I live in a subdivision on a half acre lot and my neighbors enjoy my girls as much as I do. The kids like to scatter feed and the adults know who to borrow eggs from.

Although I have to wait on getting my own little brood of feathered ladies, if you are intrigued, there are several websites online that will help you get started on learning the basics of chicken care, what to look for in a chicken, what sort of home your chicken needs, and soforth.  The City Chicken seems to be a grand start, with an extensive FAQ section on how to fight City Hall if they try to smack some law down on your backyard brood, common chicken diseases, how to introduce new feathers into the existing flock, and more.  You can also find information on WikiHow on how to keep chickens for an idea.  Another great link is BackYardChickens.com, featuring an active Chicken Forum.  Some cities already have developed a chicken-raising community, so you may want to see if your town has one; Duluth, Madison and Seattle are just a few places where people are raising chickens in their backyards (or maybe even apartments, considering this group in NYC).

There are also quite a few books out on how to keep chickens.  Pick your favourite bookstore or library to see what they have in stock.  YouTube is also loaded with videos of people filming their pet chickens.  

I told my roommate about my feathered aspirations, and about how chickens will roost in trees (yes, chickens can fly a bit) and they like to be around people whose company they enjoy, and he told me, “You just want little friends.”  

Perhaps I do, and what’s so wrong with that?  Like Jamie Oliver, I’d like to reach the good life, with chickens in the yard, a couple of beehives here and there, edible plants in the garden, and, well, an urban ideal based on sustainable, locavore living.  I can’t reach it now, but  I’d like to be ready for the moment when it comes.

Happy Inauguration Day

I’ve never wished anyone a Happy Inauguration Day.  This is the first time ever, and hopefully, it won’t be the last.  I left work early today to watch the inauguration on television, and Barack Obama’s inauguration speech was very moving.

There is so much work set forward for President Obama, and all of us as US citizens: war, climate change, energy consumption, international relations.  Also, cheese.  Prior to leaving office, Dubya has put forth legislation to increase the tariff for Roquefort cheese to 300 percent.  Seriously, what the hell?  It’s bad enough young raw-milk cheese is verboten in the United States (see Illegal Cheese), but now Roquefort!  Roquefort!  I haven’t even tried it, to be honest, but it looks good!

Hopefully, Obama will rectify this situation.

In more inaugural-food news, NPR has an article, Charity Organization Helps with Inaugural Meals, which features Michelle Obama’s Shortbread Cookie recipe.  It certainly sounds good.  I love shortbread cookies, and these cookies seem a lot more dressed up than the cookies I’ve made in the past.  I don’t know if I’ll make them anytime soon, as I normally don’t have cake flour on hand (although I know cake flour can be substituted with all-purpose with a bit of measuring and mixing), but anything that blends lemon and orange zest together is a happy thing.

Also, Slashfood has a little list of the wine President Obama had at today’s luncheon.  All things considered, the cost of each bottle is actually very modest–even I can afford them, exception being the 2005 Goldeneye Pinot Noir at $50.  Another point of note is that these bottles are all American picks.  According to the Bloomberg article the Slashfood article cites, “Only U.S. wines are served at all events, a policy since the Carter administration.”

Yesterday I hosted a potluck, and it turned out well.  Thanks to everyone who came; it was good to see some folks I haven’t seen in a while.  The apartment Clark and I share really wasn’t meant to hold as many people as it did, but it was good fun.  There was LOADS of food, and there still is; our fridge is packed with mac n’ cheese, risotto, broccoli casserole, pasta salad, soda… we couldn’t fit Clark’s chili in our fridge (it’s in Marie and Mike’s fridge now), and we have cornbread and root beer cake on the table.

Does anyone want to come by for some leftovers?

Clark’s chili was a big hit, and it looks like my root beer cake sustained some damage from potluckers who managed to save a little room for dessert.  I was still icing the thing when people arrived, but at least I finished it in time for Jeanette to put her samosas, salsa and egg dish on the table I cleared off.  Fran and Joe brought siopao from one of the Asian groceries, and I may have a few boxes of those in my fridge or freezer (oooh!).  My parents brought the broccoli casserole and pasta salad, which will likely be my dinner tonight or lunch tomorrow.  In addition to the root beer bundt cake I made from the book Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, which I received from Clark for the holidays, I made mac n’ cheese and blueberry cornbread.  

If you happened to miss it, you can hear President Obama’s inaugural speech on NPR.

Putting the squeeze on olive oil fraud

According to this article from NPR.org, my favourite source for online news, Connecticut is the first state in the nation to enforce standards to protect the purity of olive oil.  This came about after food inspectors tested cheap bottles of what was labelled as “extra-virgin olive oil,” which turned out to have a blend of other oils–hazelnut, peanut, soy, etc–with perhaps a bit of olive-pomace oil thrown in.  According to The Olive Oil Source, olive-pomace oil is obtained by treating the ground flesh and pits after pressing with solvents or other physical treatments, and is considered inferior to virgin and extra-virgin olive oils.  In fact, it’s generally used for soapmaking and industrial purposes.

For people with serious nut allergies, this is something to be aware of.  I’ve been buying Newman’s Own Organic Extra-Virgin Olive Oil, and it’s been fine and dandy for me.  It’s unfortunate there are manufacturers who lack the scruples to sell an honest product, especially when it’s an inferior product which can cause people with allergies to be sick or worse.  California is slated to consider olive oil regulation next, and New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island are also considering setting state standards.  Let’s hope this will be taken up on the federal level.

Michael Pollan is my hero

I came across Michael Pollan’s visit to Fresh Air on NPR’s website, where he and the show’s host, Terry Gross, discuss Pollan’s Farmer in Chief article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine.

If you have the time, I would advise listening to the show online, Food As A National Security Issue, because the way our food is grown is an American issue that touches upon many other issues which are getting lots of press as we lead up to Election Day: oil and energy costs, jobs, subsidies, education, the economy, the environment.  At forty minutes, it’s a lengthy show, but it’s incredibly informative, and if you’re already familiar with Michael Pollan’s other books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, it should be something you’ll find interesting.

In the show, Pollan is arguing for “wringing the oil out of our food,” meaning taking out the fossil fuels we use to grow much of our food here in America and moving to a more sustainable, “solar-based” farming style, in which we use the sun as the primary source of energy for our farming needs, and utilise farming practices to reduce, or possibly eliminate, the fossil fuels we use for fertiliser and pesticides which pollute our land and cost farmers money.  He cites a practice in Argentina where farmers are on an 8-year cycle for growing beef and crops: farmers have beef cattle graze on pastureland for five years, then grow crops such as wheat or soy on the land for three years, because the soil is so rich after having the cows on the land due to their manure.  A similar practice was done at Polyface Farms, which Pollan talks about in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Pollan said on Fresh Air, “[T]he era of cheap food is over.  It’s over because of high energy prices, and it probably won’t come back, so we are going to have to rethink the whole food system.”

In The New York Times Magazine article, An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief, Pollan touches in depth on how we need to rethink the food system Americans have become trapped in, and how the system touches upon health care, climate change and the energy crisis.  On the topic of health care, Pollan writes, “While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.”

There are several other good points he makes in the article, and I encourage you to read it, or at least listen to the interview he has with Terry Gross.  We do need to make a serious paradigm shift in American attitudes towards food, and hopefully the next president will take these concerns to heart and create a system that is beneficial for farmers, consumers and the environment.

But he won’t unless the American people begin to take our food seriously, transcending the colour lines between red and blue issues.  On this, Pollan sounds optimistic in his article: 

The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.

Truly, this is an American cause, whether you consider yourself a conservative, liberal, apolitical or a member of the Boston Tea Party (seriously, it’s a real party).  If we want to decrease or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, the answer isn’t as simple as “drill here, drill now.”  We need to restructure the way we farm food, the way we ship food, way we buy food, the way we make food, and the way we think about food.

And you, yes you, are capable of starting this change.  There are small, simple ways to ameliorate this crisis that you can do, no matter your income.  Buy local when you can to decrease the cost of shipping food, and to get the freshest product possible.  If you eat meat, buy grass-fed beef when you can (read about why grass-fed beef is better for you and for the cows on The Food Revolution, where the article even quotes Michael Pollan, go fig).

Here’s a big one: Learn how to cook.  By cooking, you can control what is put into your body, and you can make leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch.  If you live alone, and buying ingredients for some meals seems beyond your price range, especially when it “serves 4-6,” get together with friends and have them bring along some  of the ingredients.  If you don’t know how to boil an egg, get one of your friends or your parents to teach you how to cook, or just wing it.  Check out cookbooks from your local library, or borrow them from your foodie friends.  Websites abound with recipes, so if you got some arugula in your recent Orlando Organics order and don’t know what to do with it, here are some sites to get you started:

• MarthaStewart.com - I recommend the Everyday Food recipes, as they tend to  be simpler.
• Allrecipes.com – Marie’s favourite source for recipes.
• VegWeb.com – Vegan recipes, with reviews.
• OpenSourceFood.com – See photos of food made by professional and amateur cooks, and share your own recipes and creations once you get going.