Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken

I was talking on the telephone with a friend in the comics community, and happened to mention I'd just finished a book on chickens. I've known Michael for a number of years, but somehow I'd never mentioned that I was working on this book. When he broke into loud laughter, I replied (with somewhat injured dignity) that E.B. White diagnosed it years ago: to work on chickens is to set yourself up to be laughed at. But then Michael said I simply had to watch "the best power point in the world," and he insisted on staying on the line while he emailed the link to me, and as I watched it. I now pause this blog for anyone reading it to return to the title, and click on it to play the youtube video. I'll be back later with some more words about it.

Tomorrow afternoon we are throwing a pre-Thanksgiving party tomorrow in honor of the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture, PASA. This local organization helps small farmers to learn to grow food more sustainably, and to market their produce and livestock via the Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign that they created. It also puts on a large conference every February that draws a national audience, remarkably right in the backyard of one of the major agricultural colleges in the Big Ten.

I've attended several of the "field days" that PASA puts on throughout the year. At one I met farmers who raise pastured chickens for eggs, and who came up with the great idea of "adoptiing out" newly hatched chicks to families over Easter, with the proviso that they must take good care of the birds, which go back to the farm after Easter. The adoptive families can then visit "their birds" at the farm, and while they are visiting, pick up some free-range eggs. At another field day, I joined a group of people interested in learning about a Mobile Poultry Processing Unit created by a local poultry processor. He explained how to do humane poultry processing, minimizing the stress and pain to the birds before their ultimate demise, and then he demonstrated. The group attending the field day ranged from other poultry farmers and would-be poultry farmers to a couple working to create terraced poultry farming in a tropical island which because of the unfavorable balance of trade has become a food desert, where all meat must be shipped in from the USA. PASA has been a real resource for all of us (farmers, foodies, and fellow travelers) in central PA, and it felt like time to do our bit in return.

But that brings me back to that youtube clip my friend Michael emailed to me. By now I hope I'm not spoiling the fun if I say Doug Zongker's "Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken" was presented at the AAAS--The American Association for the Advancement of Science--in the Humor panel. This parody of academic power point presentations comes complete with indecipherable graphs and insider-identity-confirming special language that to outsiders seems like gobbledegook. Little wonder that the audience received it with uproarious laughter.

Did I feel insulted by this email message, my husband asked me later that evening? Far from it: to me, the clip illustrates exactly the point E.B. White made years ago: people find chickens funny."Talking about chickens is a risky thing," he confided. To his city friends the chicken was "a comic prop straight out of vaudeville." What are the risks entailed in talking about chickens? Or, to turn the question around, what institutions and practices are at risk when we pay attention to the everyday, ordinary chicken? That's exactly the point I was exploring in Poultry Science, Chicken Culture, and the primer or alphabet that resulted is defiantly partial in both senses of the term: in the sense of being partial rather than epistemologically complete (one of the primary goals of academic research), and in the sense of being affectively connected, partial rather than objective (the other goal of academic research). Working on my book, I felt a mixture of absorption and a kind of joyous levity: risky pleasure indeed.

Emergenc(e/y) of the First White Male

Well, the tall skinny white hen with the striking red comb and the Aracauna-like beard has finally come out of the closet, and she's a rooster. I had suspected as much: her stance was too upright, her tail held too high, her run too vigorous and direct, her profile narrow rather than beamy. And yet she never crowed, and she didn't seem to be interested in the other hens.

But this morning, when I went out in the high winds of this grey November to let the birds out of the hen house, he flared his wing like the flamenco dancer he clearly is, and immediately began to tred a willing hen. No crowing yet, but he is definitely rooster number 2 in my flock of only 22 birds. The other rooster is a year older: a beautiful cross between a Salmon Faverolle and an Australorpe that we acquired from a breeder in Belleville who swore she had sexed them all. Humph. I'd be happy to have two roosters, but they won't be happy to share the hens and the feed and the space in the hen house and yard. The last pair we had fought til they were bloodied, and then finally the younger dispatched the older. I don't want these birds to repeat that experience: it was too hard to watch. And yet I'm attached to both of them. We'll see what emerges. In any case, the emergence of this particular White Male marks a moment of closure, reminding me of Ruth Ozeki's story, "The Death of the Last White Male," which she wrote in dialogue with one of my earliest pieces for the book, "Chicken Auguries." Very fitting realization--of the existence of my First White Male--on the day I've just learned the first copy of PSCC is on its way to me. [The book title is too long: it'll have to be an acronym in this blog, but at least an acronym without the violent overtones of the defense intellectuals' acronyms in Carol Cohn's brilliant essay, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." There, the acronym served to distance human beings from the material horrors of nuclear war: here, the acronym merely helps me get past texuality to the actual materiality of my living, maturing, changing birds.]

Violence does loom in my hen house, but I can't abstract it into an acronym.