Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [48]
We decided to join the small club of people who are maintaining breeding flocks of heritage turkeys—birds whose endearing traits include the capacity to do their own breeding, all by themselves. Eight rare heritage turkey breeds still exist: Jersey Buff, Black Spanish, Beltsville Small White, Standard Bronze, Narragansett, Royal Palm, Midget White, and Bourbon Red. We picked the last one. They are handsome and famously tasty, but for me it was also a matter of rooting for the home team. This breed comes from Bourbon County, Kentucky, a stone’s throw from where I grew up. I imagined my paternal grandmother playing in the yard of the farm where these birds were originally bred—an actual possibility. Fewer than two thousand Bourbon Reds now remain in breeding flocks. It struck me as a patriotic calling that I should help spare this American breed from extinction.
Slow Food has employed the paradox of saving rare breeds by getting more people to eat them, and that’s exactly what happened in its 2003 Ark of Taste turkey project. So many people signed up in the spring for heirloom Thanksgiving turkeys instead of the standard Butterball, an unprecedented number of U.S. farmers were called upon to raise them. The demand has continued. So we jumped on that wagon, hoping to have our rare birds and eat them too.
Lily’s chickens, however, were a different story: her own. The day of their promised arrival had been circled on her calendar for many months: April 23, my babies due! Some parents would worry about a daughter taking on maternal responsibility so early in life, but Lily was already experienced. She started keeping her first small laying flock as a first-grader, back in Tucson where the coop had to be fortified against coyotes and bobcats. The part of our move to Virginia that Lily most dreaded, in fact, was saying good-bye to her girls. (The friends who adopted them are kind enough to keep us posted on their health, welfare, and egg production.) We prepared her for the move by promising she could start all over again once we got to the farm. It would be a better place for chickens with abundant green pasture for a real free-range flock, not just a handful of penned layers. “You could even sell some of the eggs,” I’d added casually.
Say no more. She was off to her room to do some calculations. Lily is the sole member of our family with gifts in the entrepreneurial direction. Soon she was back with a notebook under her arm. “It’s okay to move,” she said. “I’ll have an egg business.”
A few days later she brought up the subject again, wanting to be reassured that our Virginia hens would just be for eggs, not for meat. Lily knew what farming was about, and while she’d had no problem eating our early turkey experiments, chickens held a different place in her emotional landscape. How can I convey her fondness for chickens? Other little girls have ballerinas or Barbie posters on their bedroom walls; my daughter has a calendar titled “The Fairest Fowl.” One of the earliest lessons in poultry husbandry we had to teach her was “Why we don’t kiss chickens on the mouth.” On the sad day one of her hens died, she wept loudly for an entire afternoon. I made the mistake of pointing out that it was just a chicken.
“You don’t understand, Mama,” she said, red-eyed. “I love my chickens as much as I love you.”
Well, shut me up. She realized she’d hurt my feelings, because she crept out of her room an hour later to revise the evaluation. “I didn’t really mean that, Mama,” she sniffled. “I’m sorry. If I love my chickens six, I love you seven.”
Oh, good. I’m not asking who’s a ten.
So I knew, in our discussions of poultry commerce, I needed to be reassuring. “They’ll be your chickens,” I told her. “You