Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [50]
“First of all, some Araucanas,” she decided. “Because they lay pretty green eggs. My customers will like those.”
I agreed, impressed with her instincts for customer service.
“And for the main laying flock I want about ten hens,” she said. “We’ll keep one of the roosters so we can have chicks the next spring.”
She read listings for the heavy breeds, studying which ones were strong winter layers, which were good mothers (some breeds have motherhood entirely bred out of them and won’t deign to sit on their own eggs). She settled on a distinguished red-and-black breed called Partridge Rocks. We ordered sixteen of these, straight run (unsexed), of which about half would grow up to be females. Lily knows you can’t have too many roosters in a flock—she had mentioned we would “keep” one of the males, implying the rest would be dispatched. I didn’t comment. But it seemed we were now about seven roosters closer to a horse. I hoped they would all be very, very mean.
She paused over a section of the catalog titled “Broilers, Roasters and Fryers.”
“Look at these,” she said, showing me a picture of an athletic-looking fowl, all breast and drumstick. “Compact bodies and broad, deep breasts…,” she read aloud. “These super meat qualities have made the Dark Cornish a truly gourmet item.”
“You’re sure you want to raise meat birds too?” I asked. “Only if you want to, honey.” I was starting to crumble. “You’ll get your horse someday, no matter what.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I won’t name them. I’ll have my old pet hens to love.”
“Of course,” I said. “Pets are pets. Food is food.”
Out on the near horizon, Lily’s future horse pawed the ground and whinnied.
* * *
Eating My Sister’s Chickens
BY CAMILLE
During my first year of college, one of my frequent conversations went like this:
“Camille, you’re a vegetarian, right?”
“Well, no.”
“No? You really seem like the type.”
“Well, I only eat free-range meat.”
“Free who?”
I guess I do seem like the type. Personal health and the environment are important to me, and my vocational path even hints at vegetarianism—I teach yoga, and may study nutrition in graduate school. The meat-eating question is one I’ve considered from a lot of angles, but that’s not easy to explain in thirty seconds. A lunch line is probably not the best place to do it, either. For one thing, all meat is not created equal. Cows and chickens that spent their lives in feedlots, fattening up on foods they did not evolve to eat, plus antibiotics, produce different meat from their counterparts that lived outdoors in fresh air, eating grass. That’s one nutritional consideration to bear in mind while weighing the pros and cons of vegetarianism.
There are others, too. Vegetarians and vegans should consider taking iron supplements because the amount of this nutrient found in plant sources is minuscule compared with the amount found in meat. Of course, eating plenty of iron-containing dark leafy greens, legumes, and whole grains is a good plan. Along with a host of other essential nutrients, they do offer a good bit of iron, but in some cases it may not be enough to keep the body producing hemoglobin. Vitamin B12 is also tricky; in its natural form it’s found only in animal products. There are traces of it in fermented soy and seaweed, but the Vegetarian Society warns that the form of B12 in plant sources is likely unavailable to human digestion. This means that vegans—people who eat no meat, dairy, or eggs—need to rely on supplements or
foods fortified with B12 to prevent this dangerous deficiency. Vegan diets also tend to be skimpy in the calcium department, so supplements there can be helpful as well.
Humans are naturally adapted to an omnivorous diet: we have canine teeth for tearing meat and plenty of enzymes in our guts to digest the proteins and fats found in animals. Ancestral societies in every part of the world have historically relied on some animal products for sustenance.