Figuring out first-hand food
1/6 update: The update is that there is no update. Our chicken is in her straw-lined cage, with food and water, and she is exactly the same. She can move around a little, but we don’t know that she’s eaten or drunk anything. A call to local vets revealed that broad-spectrum antibiotics are prescribed only [...]
If there were statistics on such a thing, I would be willing to bet that the data would show that chicken owners are much more likely than your average American to have a garden. Chicken-keeping and vegetable-growing come from closely related impulses. You want to eat eggs, you want to eat squash, and you like [...]
You can’t fully appreciate the menace that is rust until you and your belongings spend a lot of time in the water, on the water, or near the water. Until we moved here, the only battles I fought with rust were in the toilet, where the iron in the water left those nasty streaks. Now, [...]
It never bloody ends. Rocky, our smallest chick, so named because she was both a barred rock and an underdog, got picked off by a hawk. She had a beak problem, either a deformity or an injury, that apparently made it tough to eat, and her development lagged behind. Still, she was growing. She was [...]
I can never understand other people’s happiness unless it’s derived exactly the way mine is. If it makes you happy to fish, to talk to people smarter than you, and to watch episodes of The Good Life back to back, I get it. But if opera, kayaking, and adventure travel float your boat, your psyche [...]
6/28 Update: Chicken Little was showing some of the same signs that Droopy had, and Kevin wanted to check if there was fluid in her lungs. He turned her upside down and, sure enough, a little fluid dripped out her beak. And then she just died. Because there was fluid in her lungs, we probably [...]
Our chickens are getting old. They’re long in the beak, over the hill, past their prime. They’re no spring chickens. The most obvious clue is the dwindling egg supply. In their heyday, our seven birds delivered almost three dozen eggs a week. Now, two years into their lifespan, we don’t get that much in a [...]
I believe in editors. I’ve had the good fortune to be edited by some of the best in the business. My books were read, amended, and read again by Tracy Bernstein at Penguin and, before that, by Maria Guarnaschelli (then) at Scribner. My magazine and newspaper work has almost always been made better by the smart, [...]
“You know what your problem is?” Kevin asked me one day, early in our courtship. What do you answer when someone asks you whether you know what your problem is? The possibilities are endless. I went with, “No.” We were grocery shopping, in the produce aisle at Fairway, and Kevin turned and picked up a [...]
One of the pleasures of living with livestock is that you see animals often enough to begin to understand their behavior. Differences in chickens that wouldn’t be apparent to a visitor become patterns to the people who see them every day. It’s charming when a chicken jumps into a car to see what’s in the [...]
Tamar Haspel has been writing about food and health for over a decade. She recently moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod. She’s adjusting well. [Read More …]
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