Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (21 page)

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Regressive: human destiny lies in our mastery of life, not in our adapting to limits.

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Unnecessary: the global economy will—as it always has—wobble and right itself. Some individuals may suffer along the way, but the arc of history bends toward material progress.

Most of the time, this nay-saying rolls off my back. If resilience, resourcefulness, and relocalization prove to simply be lifestyle choices and not lifeboats, so what? The emotional, spiritual, and relational benefits far outweigh the “rewards” of consumerism. Will it turn the tide or turn out to be one more good (alternative) college try? So what, if it is fulfilling, empowering, and fun for those who do it?

October Surprise: It's Not Over!

There was one unexpected result of that Bellingham experience. Someone there said to me in a “gotcha” way, “All well and good to do this experiment in September. Try doing it in January.” Smirk, smirk. What I wanted to say was, “You try doing this in September and then get back to me.” But I didn't. I just started to calculate how I would do it in January. I could tinker with the “it” a bit, expanding the radius and including more exotics. I could also do “it” in February so “it” didn't feel like New Year's penance for the wanton gluttony of the holidays. Plus February has three fewer days than January.

What if local meant a circle that includes Whidbey and Bellingham, includes Island, Skagit, Whatcom, Snohomish, King, and Jefferson counties—which together might be a viable, diverse, resilient food system for all who live in their bosom.

For today, it was enough to expand the definition of 10-mile eating to include eating locally wherever I found myself. But from February, what might I learn?

As I dozed in the car on the way home from Bellingham, tummy full, friends packed around me like sardines, the phrase “50 percent within 50 miles in February” floated to the surface. That had a ring to it. I'll do it, I said to myself. I was back in my sustainability-as-an-extreme-sport mind. But I was also nervous, as I often am when I say yes to what seems impossible but worthy. Visions of hours at the stove turning withered potatoes into paltry gruel pecked at my mind like a chicken. Indeed, I did feel chicken. But I knew I would do it.

How Much Is That Chicken in the Freezer—Tra-La?

Speaking of poultry . . . my next challenge was the five-dollars-a-pound chicken. Before this experiment began I was a chicken-a-week gal, expecting to pay no more that five to eight dollars for a bird. Now, making every effort to fulfill my promise to eat the majority of my food from Tricia's bounty, I was faced with paying for a pound what I might pay for an entire bird.

When Tricia said her neighbor Tobey raised chickens and would possibly sell a few from his freezer, I did not calculate cost. I didn't even think I had to. How much could a chicken cost, anyway?

I went over to Tobey's in a fine mood, sort of expecting that same moving experience of neighborliness I had had with Sandra. But that was not to be. Not that Tobey was anything but generous and cheerful. After all, he had a limited supply and was willing to share. It was the sticker shock when the bill came that turned that feeling of neighborliness into the reality of commerce.

Twenty-five dollars for a chicken??!! I'd never even paid that for a Thanksgiving turkey. My brain went into overdrive. I considered putting on my Shirley Temple adorable persona and cajoling that chicken out of his hands—just because I am so cute. On the other hand, Frugal Girl wanted to bargain. My starving inner Tiny Tim wanted to steal it for dinner. My omnivore just wanted that chicken—whatever the price! The inner debate raged on, but I knew that none of these characters really understood what it took Tobey to raise that chicken.

When we want to say something costs a significant amount we say, “And that's not chicken feed,” as if feeding chickens were cheap. As I learned, it is not cheap at all. Let's do the math.

I checked my local friend's calculations against the chatter on the chicken forums on the Web. There seemed a consensus that factoring in . . .

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the cost of chicks,

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the cost (and quality) of feed,

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and the cost of your local electricity,

. . . the producer puts out $2 a pound in expenses to raise a chicken. Was Tobey ripping me off, then, by charging $5? No, because you have to also factor in the cost of labor.

Let's say you raise 25 chickens—how many hours a day are you tending and feeding them? One farmer in my region estimated about 20 hours of labor total for 75 chickens. Man, how does she feed, water, slaughter, pluck, gut, and pack a chicken in 16 minutes? Reading further, I saw how—she doesn't factor in the labor of her daughter and girlfriends on slaughter day. Dollars to doughnuts, as they say, she sent her daughter out to feed and water the chicks as well. And what about the time driving to the feed store and back for chicks and feed? And what about her time in the chicken chatrooms on the Internet?

I'm going to say that an honest assessment would be an hour of labor per chicken. Let's pay everyone a low wage, about $10 per hour.

For 25 chicks, the labor cost would be $250, or another $10 per five-pound chicken. Now we're up to $4 a pound.

Shall we include the cost of building and fencing a chicken house, the cost of water, or the cost of losing a chicken or two to animals or disease? Add in even a homemade chicken plucker, plus a small fraction of the taxes and insurance on your home (unless you also live in the coop), and you could say $5 a pound is easily the real cost of raising one five-pound bird.

Could I really look Tobey in the eye and say that he, a family man, should earn $10 an hour and never be able to take his brood—so to speak—out to dinner and a movie?

At the same time, Frugal Girl whined, why should I pay $25 a chicken when I can get them on sale at the Star Store for $1.49 a pound, or $7.50 a chicken? Is it my job to subsidize my local growers just because the U.S. government doesn't?

Now let's look at how the industrial producers can sell their chickens for so much less. Economies of scale (many more chickens in much less space per bird) and mechanization are key factors. For instance, the time the grower must spend on an individual bird from hatched to processed and ready for shipping is probably minutes, not hours. The big producers use biotechnology to grow bigger, meatier birds, even as confined as they are. They hatch their own chicks, saving more money. And there is labor; their workers might be getting only minimum wage, which is often quite low in Big Chicken states.

Research at Tufts University reveals one more factor—and a big one. Feed for industrial-scale chicken production is sold to the producers at below cost—thanks to government price supports and subsidies. Because my tax dollars are subsidizing the big guys but not the little guys, consider the price disparity to be due, in part, to how my government tilts the playing field toward the factories rather than the farms.

Weighing all this—the data, not the chickens—I asked myself this question: What other assumptions, habits, entitlements, misinformation, and unconsciousness made me gasp at the cost of Tobey's chicken?

Mark Bittman's Itty-Bitty Bits of Meat Diet

One big assumption to go on the chopping block—so to speak—was the amount of meat I needed per day.

During my 10-mile month I entertained myself while prepping food by watching TED talks. These are twelve- to twenty-minute presentations at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) hip-to-the-max conferences. The best, most interesting minds of our generation are given tight parameters about how to do a TED talk and then given a big live audience, a big PowerPoint screen, and big Internet exposure to present—briefly—their big ideas. There I found Mark Bittman, celebrity chef, cookbook writer, and columnist for the
New York Times
. He's big on a diet of vegetables, grains, fruits, and itty-bitty bits of meat. In fact, he recommends we eat only half a pound of meat a week! Folks, that's what I eat a day. This was not a welcome opinion, but I chose to keep my trap shut and mind open.

To Meat or Not to Meat?

As with so many other diet recommendations, the experts don't agree about meat.

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Vegans eat no animals or animal products.

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Vegetarians eat no animals, though they eat dairy and eggs.

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Fisho-chicko vegetarians eat Bittman-bitty amounts of animal protein.

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Omnivores eat what they like—which could range from organic grass-fed beef to a McDonald's burger.

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Paleo dieters believe in meat.

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Weston Price advocates are practically religious in their belief that animal flesh and fat has not only been given a bad rep, it's an essential part of a healthy diet. They eat butter and well-marbled (grass-fed) steak. They boil bones (especially bovine knuckles) to make nourishing broths. They believe organ meats from wild animals are especially healthy food.

I've wavered in my choices, wanting to be “good” but also wanting to eat “good”—as in yummy—meat.

As I mentioned, John Robbins's first book,
Diet for a New America,
got me off eating beef, unable to stomach the facts about animal cruelty.

When I read
Eat Right for Your Type
by Peter J. D'Adamo, I went back to beef as an essential part of a type O diet. In fact, this cured a tropical affliction I'd picked up in the jungles of Thailand.

By the time I watched Colin Campbell's
Forks Over Knives,
about the health benefits of a vegan diet, I'd already yo-yoed enough. I didn't want to do anything about it—even if it was right.

When I read the environmental argument: that ten pounds of grain are needed to raise one pound of meat—and we can eat grain—my habit and heritage fought back. Meat for protein for me wasn't just a choice. It was an article of faith.

I grew up with a food pyramid that had meat at the broad base. My mother served meat with every meal. As I learned to cook, I was told a plate must be balanced: starch, vegetable, meat. By the time I was an adult I firmly believed that animal protein was both the basis of a good diet and the pinnacle of good eating.

Now Bittman's ideas were biting me. Would I actually be healthier if I ate half the meat? Because I really like meat in all its hearty, fatty glory.

Since I was, thanks to the 10-mile diet, in myth-busting mode, I asked, Who wins if I believe I must eat three pounds of meat a week? I imagined swallowing a commercially grown chicken a week and wondered, Had I swallowed the industrial food story hook, line, and sinker? Was Bittman's argument the duh-uh truth?

My faith in meat protein teetering, I considered Bittman's claim again. Meat in moderation rather than the meal. Enjoy animal protein this way, or by eating milk, cheese, and eggs in all the many ways we do. That attitude made sense. I decided to keep it for now and see if I wanted to keep it for good.

Why Should Chicken Be Cheaper Than Beef?

From this perspective, five dollars a pound for chicken was Goldilocks's Golden Mean—not too much, not too little, but just right—at least for my budget. If I ate less meat per meal, I could now survive on two chickens a month rather than four, so that five-dollars-a-pound chicken starts to compete with the “free-range” chicken that's usually about two dollars a pound at the grocery store. (Especially knowing that
free range
might mean only that the chickens simply have a chance, like any prisoner, to walk around a small fenced yard every day, not that they're pecking at grubs in lush fields of grass.) Of course a really free-range organic bird, like the ones from Organic Prairie, the meat-producing arm of the Organic Valley Dairy Cooperative, sells for about five dollars a pound, so if you want quality meat from happy(er) birds, that does seem to be the price you'll pay. But if I started eating half as much chicken my food budget would stay the same. Frugal Girl was happy again. She'd halved the cost by halving the portion.

Having worked through all this, the next thing I realized was that if you compare the price of local chicken to the price of local beef you'll wonder what the fuss is about. Lean ground Long Family burger was five dollars a pound, just a little more than ultralean industrial beef at the supermarket. Why do we assume chicken is worth less than beef? The size of the brain? If so, why do we accept that salmon in the supermarket is minimally seven dollars a pound? To say something is cheap or expensive, you have to ask: compared to what?

So five-dollars-a-pound chicken it was, and here's the final consideration about why it is worth it. Taste. I'll tell you in chapter 7 about how that local chicken tasted. After reading my description you might well decide to raise chickens in your backyard no matter what the cost!

Where's the Wheat?

By week three I would have paid five dollars a pound for anything made of wheat if I could have gotten my hands on it. As you know, my hunt for crunch bordered on insanity. Sadly, no wheat grew within range. Or so I thought until a visit with Eric and Britt after another milk pickup. When I bemoaned for the umpteenth time my lack of crackers, Eric said, “I planted five rows of wheat as an experiment, but after the rain it molded and I'm not going to use it.” Within minutes a deal was struck.

Soon I stood in that patch of mildewing wheat trying to figure out how to harvest it. I had no scythe. I had no whirling-engine mower. So I borrowed some scissors and clipped the heads off one row, filling a big shopping bag.

Once home I wondered, “Now what do I do?” I remembered the women in Thailand working a food pedal thresher. I remembered lovely
National Geographic
photos of African women winnowing grain by tossing it repeatedly in big round baskets, letting the wind take away the chaff. I remembered the big millstone I'd seen that had been turned by donkeys tempted ever forward by bags of feed just out of reach. Threshing. Winnowing. Grinding. How hard could that be?