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Counting chickens
Last night’s chicken dinner (roast chicken with the skin removed and no gravy?!) brought to mind all kinds of chickeny issues. Like the Victoria Film Fest‘s screening of Mad City Chickens which was most entertaining and made me wish for a little coop in my own backyard. I loved the tale of Consuela the battery hen who was rescued from a Wisconsin dump – she was one of the old laying hens who’d been gassed and dumped by the local battery egg operation, only “they don’t always die” according to the guard at the gate. She’d been debeaked and was nearly bald from the crowded conditions she’d been living in, but with a little TLC and daily handfuls of greens from her foster mother she revived and started laying again.Which brought to mind the opening chapter of Singer and Mason‘s book, The Way We Eat, and its discussion about the different breeding aims for different kinds of poultry. Battery hens are bred to live long enough to produce eggs at top capacity, while broilers are raised to be hungry – so they gain weight rapidly enough to be slaughtered at 6 weeks. Which basically means surplus battery hens are not the right shape for today’s chicken dinners, which is how they end up in landfills.
Although chickens have a lifespan of 5 years, those manipulated into high-yield egg laying last a little more than a year; there is an industry practice of forced moulting which causes them to lay a bit longer; this involves starving them for between 5-14 days, and depriving them of water for part of this time. When they are finished as layers, they are killed, not always humanely. Let us just say that the Coen Brothers were not the only ones to find a novel and revolting use for a chipper.
And there are other living by-products to dispose of. Battery hens lay eggs, some of which are intended for hatcheries to produce more battery hens. But male chicks are an unwanted by-product, much like the male calves from dairy cows. In the example cited by Singer and Mason, male chicks are dropped (sometimes live) into the garbage; a UK website on factory farming says male chicks are killed and their bodies used for animal feed or fertilizer.
Some clarification over egg types, by the way. Unless otherwise labelled, the cheap white eggs in every supermarket are from battery hens, living in unspeakable conditions in cages too crowded to allow them to stretch their wings. Free run eggs are from hens that are not caged, but may be living in overcrowded conditions in barns; free range eggs are from barn-reared chickens with access to the outdoors (which they may elect not to use); organic eggs are from hens fed on organic feed; and if the words ‘pasture-reared’ appear anywhere it means the hens were raised outdoors.
Chicken issues are very topical, at least in the UK. Last year celebrity chef and sustainable food advocate Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and others embarked on a public information campaign about factory farming of chicken. And Felicity Lawrence‘s Not on the Label spilled the beans on EC regulations which allow the injection of chicken with hydrolized animal proteins so that they will better retain the water this meat is injected with, boosting its weight and retail value while giving it that characteristic industrial texture of soggy cardboard.
After reading a bit more about de-beaking, which, depending on the method used, can be the equivalent of having your nose sliced off by a hot razor, and is done to prevent aggression and cannibalism (caused in turn by overcrowded conditions) among battery hens, I browsed the website of United Poultry Concerns, which aims to raise awareness about battery hens and industrial poultry rearing. And because I do love a chicken dinner, as long as I know where my chicken came from, I thought with some gratitude about having Farmer Dan within reach, to sell me pasture-raised organic chook.
In brighter news, I’d heard that Oak Bay, notorious for restrictive bylaws, had relaxed its rules on keeping backyard chickens. Not sure if this is the change I’d heard about, but the poultry section of the animal control bylaw there was amended last August to allow up to 5 birds to be kept, as long as your lot is large enough.
And if you’ve read this far, you deserve to read Steven Dobyns’ excellent poem, Spiritual Chickens. Brraaaawk!
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Googley do
Several of us sat in on a web conference call this week to learn more about how the Google Book Settlement affects Canadian authors. The call included a review of the powerpoint presentation found here in pdf, on the Access Copyright site.
There is more information available on Google, including a way to check whether your (in-print) books have been digitized by Google up to January 5, 2009, and are therefore covered by the settlement.
Be warned, you must create a Registry account in order to search for your books, and this registry asks for a lot of personal information; you can’t proceed to the search screen until you provide it. Surely this is some kind of violation of privacy? I have written to Rust Consulting (a Minneapolis-based “trusted leader for complex data management…claims processing and award distribution”), who appears to be the owner of the registry, with the following questions; I’ll let you know if I get an answer:
- Why is this amount of information required for a search to see if I’m included? Why not ask for it only if/when the search has produced results for a claim?
- If I’m not included, what do you intend to do with my personal information?
- Why does your form not explain which fields are required fields? You obviously know which ones are required.
But back to your created works. If your books are covered, you have until January 5, 2010 to claim for payment; or until May 5, 2009 to opt out (if, for example, you want to pursue your own claim through the courts with Google). The money set aside for compensating authors for the violation of copyright entailed by the digitization project amounts to a stonking great payment of around $60 per book for single-authored books. Hurrah! Enough for a bottle of champagne (or slightly more cava or prosecco).
The reason authors are pursuing this is that Google, whose stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (while reaping huge corporate profits themselves), has in this ambition conveniently side-stepped any responsibility to allow authors to earn a living from their writings. Which is the whole point of copyright.
During the web conference, one author wondered why libraries thought they had the right to offer their collections for free digitization, when they do not own the copyright. Nobody had a good answer on this call; it would be interesting to hear a library’s reasoning.
The whole process is skewed towards the interests of everybody except the people who created the work being passed around for free. The libraries who donate their collections to the project get a digitized copy back; the authors of those works do not.
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Food poetry, real dirt and western syrup
Elizabeth sent me this review of a food poetry collection by Deanna Fong, which sounds fantastic.
We watched The Real Dirt on Farmer John last night; it was a terrific documentary, though for a while we were weeping into our popcorn and hoping against hope for a happy ending. Glad to say they gave us one. And lots of information about CSA programs; I was shocked to realise the one at Angelic Organics was over ten years old!I was sad to have missed the Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival in Duncan last weekend. There’s a small but active group of local syrup makers called the Sapsuckers, who tap the western maple – lower in sugar than its more famous eastern counterpart, but still doable (as is birch) – and offer workshops and advice on making syrup.
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
