The Chickens

We've recently become close friends with a family who is doing what we want to be doing in the near future: living off the land. They are very gracious and inviting and have taken us under their wing. Mostly under their chicken's wings...

We're raising 50 broiler chickens with them this summer, providing half of the capital and as much man-power as they need, too. We go to the farm to take care of the chicks at least once a week and Rob and Paul built two "chicken tractors" which will be the home for these chickens as they reach maturity. They'll spend their last 3-4 weeks out in the pasture in the sunshine feasting on bugs and grasses and having about the best life a soup-pot destined chicken can have.

This will be the first time I've been around chicken butchering since I was about Maggie's age and while I think it's important to raise our own food, to know what goes into it (literally, like the aforementioned bugs and grass), and to respect it in a way you can't do when you buy a slab of sterile meat at the big box grocery, I am not looking forward to the carnage that's in these chickens' future. I have a soft heart for animals. And I love to eat them. It's a hard dichotomy to work with.

Happily, especially for my girls, there are also 8 new layer hens who do not have the same fate as the broilers. The girls know that they can spoil and pet the layers and that they will not be Sunday dinner. I think that will create a little bit of comfort for them. This is a hard life lesson, that food sometimes comes from the death of an animal. It used to be common place.

I hope to instill in my kids the respect for food that has been lost in the last few generations as we move further and further from the homestead and animals become cogs in a machine, arriving in our refrigerators faceless and nearly bloodless. I hope my family will approach mealtimes with more reverence, that less meat will be left on plates, that left-overs will be eaten with gratitude instead of a grudge. It may be too much to ask.

But I don't think that it is. Have you hugged your food source lately? You should.