Figuring out first-hand food
It was six or seven years ago that I read Complications, Atul Gawande’s collection of essays. Gawande is a practicing surgeon who writes about medicine and public health, and one of the collection’s essays, “Education of a Knife,” is about the problem of teaching surgical procedures to newly minted doctors. Every would-be surgeon has to [...]
Today our broody hen, Queenie, successfully hatched a turkey poult. She’s got four more eggs to go (one broke), and we have yet to see whether she can teach them life’s basics, like eating, drinking, and avoiding being crushed by a well-meaning but clumsy mother surrogate. But we have a poult. We have a poult.
What is it with cross-species amity? I’m a sucker for all those pictures of two different kinds of animals playing together, or napping together, or otherwise cohabiting peacefully. I love it when horses make friends with goats, when a gorilla takes care of a human, even when dogs and cats live happily in the same [...]
Mess with Thanksgiving at your peril. The traditional meal, anchored by a roast turkey, has been woven into the fabric of our American identity. And it’s not just because, as kids, that’s what we ate. As kids, we also made turkeys by tracing our hands and Pilgrim hats out of black construction paper as we [...]
God I hate brining. Sure, the concept is nice. The results are even good. But the actual brining is a royal pain in the ass. This year I’m brining two turkeys, about seventeen pounds each. They started the day in our boat cooler, submerged in ice water with three others – the five that remained [...]
I was very small when my mother explained death to me. Everything alive eventually dies, she told me. Pets, plants, grandmothers. You and me. And it is death, she has always said, that makes life precious. But that’s not strictly true. It isn’t death that makes life precious. It’s knowledge of death. Something our six [...]
It’s been nigh-on two weeks of near-death experiences around here. First we had our sick chicken, Flopsy, who couldn’t seem to stand on her own two feet. Then we had my father, hospitalized with an EKG that looked like one of those seismic meters during an earthquake. Then the cat, who’s become decidedly indoorsy in [...]
It’s a banner year for chipmunks. And no wonder. The boneheads who own the property they live on seem finally to have figured out how to create a chipmunk-friendly environment. They scatter cracked corn on the ground for their chickens. They’ve actually managed to grow a few nice tomatoes, just at ground level. And they [...]
Our turkey pen is made exclusively of materials designed to contain other kinds of animals. The main structure is made of cattle panels, which are 16-foot sections of galvanized, heavy-gauge fencing. Since cows don’t fit through turkey-sized holes, we had to line the bottom couple of feet with chicken wire. If it can keep in [...]
One of our turkey poults died and, for the first time, I was upset by a livestock death. The poults were big enough that we put them in the all-purpose poultry pen, which had been vacated by the ducks a week earlier. We’d cleaned out the house and the sheltered area under it, but 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 …]
TwitteringThis 
by 
hosted by 
, secured by 
© Tamar Haspel, 2010. See linking policies .
Recent Comments