Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [17]
Given that you can buy a live chick for $3.00 and chicken feed is synonymous with cheap, raising hens might seem like a brilliant way to provide affordable eggs to your household. Is it? If you’ve read this far, you are smirking, and rightly so. But I’ll break it down just for the record.
We collected approximately 450 eggs in the first nine months of keeping chickens. We spent $954.86 on chicks, feed, lightbulbs, wire, carpentry, medicine, lice powder, bedding, and hiring neighbor kids to tend the birds when we went on vacation. This works out to $2.12 per egg. Safeway eggs: $0.18 apiece. Even if you buy pastured eggs from the farmer’s market, you probably won’t pay more than $0.50 per egg.
Granted, for most of this time, most of our chickens were not yet laying. Moreover, there were onetime start-up expenses, like carpentry, that inflated the cost. I expected the equation to improve during the second nine months. It only got worse, because in addition to replacing ten dead chickens, we shelled out $3,500 for that fence. At some point I stopped counting eggs and keeping receipts. It’s hard to earn back $3,500 in eggs. At Safeway prices, that’s almost 2,000 dozen.
Of course, you can’t get fresher eggs. When you crack a homegrown egg next to a supermarket egg, the yolk is brighter and rounder. Does this matter? I can’t taste a difference, though others insist that they can. Moreover, apart from the lower risk of contracting salmonella from a backyard egg, I’m not even sure you can make a health argument. According to some studies, eggs from chickens that are raised on “pasture” (i.e., the backyard) are significantly more nutritious than supermarket eggs, with less cholesterol and more healthy omega-3 fatty acids. According to other studies, however, they also contain higher levels of carcinogenic dioxins and PCBs, which they pick up from pecking around in our (apparently) almost universally polluted soils.
There is an ethical component to chickens that I find compelling. However expensive—and keeping chickens can be expensive—I do believe that it is one of the most ecologically and morally important changes you can make in your eating habits. The eggs require no packaging or trucking, and our chickens compost many pounds of lettuce cores, eggshells, carrot peels, and sandwich crusts every week.
That said, you can buy humanely raised, local, organic eggs in most parts of the country and it will very likely cost you less than keeping them. The truth is, my family and I keep chickens now because we think they’re beautiful and funny and we like to watch them scratching around. They make me smile, they make me think, and they come when I call. They are my chickens and I am their person. I have become the kind of dope who buys a tea towel because there’s a picture of a hen on it. I am a chicken fancier, and although it wasn’t at all what I’d intended or expected when we bought those first chicks, enthusiasm is its own reward.
MAYONNAISE
Like whipped cream, homemade mayonnaise is a magical food that manages to be simultaneously rich and ethereal, almost evaporating on the tongue. Sadly, homemade mayonnaise lasts only a couple of days and it would be both exhausting and expensive to emulsify mayonnaise every time you wanted to make a tuna salad sandwich. There’s little more sumptuous than homemade mayo—on a BLT, for dipping french fries—but Hellmann’s has its place.
Make it or buy it? Both
Hassle: Slight
Cost comparison: It costs $1.51 to make a batch of mayo. Best Foods: $1.75.
1 large egg yolk
1½ teaspoons Dijon mustard
Kosher salt to taste
Juice of half a lemon
1¼ cups neutral vegetable oil
1. Place the egg yolk,