When I first visited my in-laws' little farm, I had never seen chickens up close. So I poked out into the chicken yard with a certain fascination while my then-girlfriend was saying her greetings to her folks. The chickens were all running around (eyeing me quite warily, not sure if I was the fox or the farmer), pecking at bugs and doing what chickens do. Except one: there was one lying motionless in the middle of the chicken yard. So, urban rube that I was, I called out to my girlfriend's dad: "Um, sir, is that one sleeping?" He peered over, and said, "oh, that one's dead. Throw it on the compost heap, would you?" Throw it on the compost heap?!? I gingerly picked up the chicken by its feet, not entirely sure what I was doing, vaguely afraid of dead chicken disease. I figured out which one was the compost heap and, still holding it with two fingers, gently slung it on the top. At this point, I was unsure if I was supposed to bury it or whatever. I went back over to where my future father-in-law was doing something with the rest of the family, and I asked, wondering if there was some sort of ceremony in store, "What was its name?"
The response of course was peals of laughter, followed by more peals of laughter when they realized I wasn't being intentionally funny. Naming the chickens? Even on a little farm, hardly industrial, just a big garden and some horses and chickens and not a lot else, the idea was so...sentimental.
I will say that's the only chicken I've seen die of natural causes at this farm. Chickens on the farm either end up the fox's dinner or the farmer's. Not that I've been around for the demise of many of them, and the girls generally live a long happy life including a healthy retirement from what I can glean.
I buy "organic" "free range" eggs at the store. The requirements for these designations are not what you might think. "Organic" is just a designation for the lack of certain additives to the food, not an active healthy bug-eating chicken. "Free range" only requires that the chickens have access to the open air, out of a cage, for a small portion of the day - whether or not they choose to take advantage of the opportunity is a big unknown. They do taste better than factory eggs.
During the winter, the veggie CSA we piggyback on has an egg option, and we get a half dozen with every box. You can tell the difference between store "organic free range" and these eggs instantly. The shells are slightly thicker, the color yellower, the proteins puff up more in the pan (or cake). They're also of course more irregularly colored, of irregular size, and as such any given recipe made with them will be both more delicious and slightly unpredictable with respect to consistency.
But neither the "organic free range" nor the CSA farm eggs hold a candle to those from my in-laws (er, in-laws' chickens, you know what I mean.) These eggs are a lovely orange, they have shape and texture unlike even the CSA eggs, and the shells are THICK. I don't have a micrometer handy but the difference is stark. The store or CSA eggs are, well, fragile, thin, they break easily, you get the little shattering pattern on the egg that results in the occasional eggshell shard coming into your egg when you break it. My in-laws' eggshells look like, well, they could be used to protect a growing chicken embryo until it's ready to hatch. Natural, in a word.
I am fortunate to have crazy/thoughtful in-laws who pack a dozen eggs in their carry-on luggage when they come out to visit us. The eggs, unrefrigerated and tossed about for 3000 miles, are never the worse for the wear. In the store, the eggs I buy have a broken one in the dozen at least once a month.
Of the modern food fads, one I find kind of cute and hopeful is the neophyte home chicken farmer. I know of at least three people in our area who are keeping chickens now. I can't imagine it's cost effective, and frankly, the fact that the chickens are given names suggests to me it's a lifestyle thing more than actual farming. That said, nothing wrong at all with trying to grow your own food - we'd keep chickens if we can. The only way you can be sure of the provenance of your food is to grow it yourself.
But you can't get sentimental about the practice. Farm life isn't nature but it has its own realities which, even for the happiest of chickens, have cruel implications if one anthropomorphizes the animals' lives. Fair and humane (to use an anthropomorphic concept) treatment of animals is a spectrum, not a black and white exercise, and like most aspects of life there's both compromise and optimization along the spectrum.
And the reality of modern life, of course, is having the space and wherewithal to raise your own chickens is a luxury of the rich (certainly relative to the lifestyles of most of the people in the world). I am reminded that decentralization of agriculture, if that's a goal of local food, would have to necessarily be a long process dependent on an incredibly complex array of other factors, including a completely different population profile worldwide. Climates in the vast majority of the world are inhospitable to agriculture for most or all of the year. We need to be a richer civilization relative to the number of people on the planet before every chicken can be as happy as my in-laws and every egg as good. (Choosing not to eat chickens or eggs is an option, although I'm not sure it's not an impoverishing one in its way, literally. It would certainly be the ultimate disaster for chickens.)
That would be the order of the chicken and the egg.
In the meantime, I will feel rich and fortunate every time I have one of in in-laws' eggs.
