Eggs in a Nest Part 2: Call it like it is.

Don't hate me...I think the English language is awesome. That's right, I said it. Other countries have committees to keep words out of their lexicon. We add words like, "D'oh" to our dictionaries. We have duplicate, triplicate, even quadruplicate words for things, including animals and food.

This can tell you something really interesting about our culture. Our words keep our food sources separate from the prepared, packaged food we buy in the grocery store. For example: You raise a cow on a farm. You eat beef. You raise pigs, you eat pork. You might drive by a nice pasture of fluffy sheep. You don't eat sheep...you eat mutton.

You can actually trace the origins of this back to the Norman invasion of England. When the wealthy French came and took over, they referred to their food (which was served to them already cooked) using French terms (boeuf, moutton, porc). The English peasants who actually raised the animals used the Old or Middle-English names to refer to their livestock.

We retain that separation of language today, and with it a weird tendancy to want to separate the food on our plate from the source. I beleive this goes beyond guilt about eating a cute little sheep. Somehow, we are disgusted by the dirtyness of eating. After all, it is killing another living thing to eat it. It puts us on the food chain. It makes us an animal.

I know how lucky I am to have grown up knowing exactly where my food comes from. One of my earliest vacation memories was a trip our family took to visit my father's friend on a dairy farm in upstate New York. We stayed in an (extra?) farm house, and ate our cereal with a pitcher of fresh milk on the table.

That week, we explored pastures, rode horses, and took a tour of the dairy barn. Other than my favorite pants being splattered with cow poop, it was a pretty ideal vacation for a little kid. In the back of my mind, I still harbor the fantasy of leaving it all behind, and going to live on a farm like that...until I remember that we were vacationing on a farm, not working on it.

It is a lot of work to take care of animals. We found this out when we raised chickens for 4-H. We had big, white Leghorns. They got so fat that you could see the skin between their feathers. And they were scary. I think they are evidence that dinosaurs didn't go extinct...they evolved into broiler chickens that peck at your legs when you get too close. We used to have to wear my dad's huge rubber boots when we fed them.

It was kind of a relief when it was time to off them. My mom got the dirty job. Those chickens had no idea what was coming. A loop of rope, a stump and a hatchet...we saw, literally, what it meant to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. But that year we ate chicken...not a clean little slab of shrink-wrapped boneless, skinless, white meat.

By the way, chicken is one of the words we use interchangeably for livestock and food. In fact, if you raise chickens, you might even call the young ones pullets - which comes from the French - poulet. Another example of the beauty of the English Language - no consistency whatsoever.

Later we got laying hens. They were beatiful Rhode Island Reds, with dark maroon iridescent feathers. In the morning we'd walk barefoot through the wet grass to the chicken coop (they were much gentler than the Leghorns). There were two sides to the coop, the goat side, and the chicken side. You let the goats out, and then unhooked the little, wooden door to get at the hens' boxes. They were lined with hay, and there were always warm eggs waiting for you in the morning.

All year long we made egg salad and scrambled eggs and eggnog. We gave them away to anyone who would take them (who knew how valuable those free range eggs were back then?). If the eggs went bad, we stood on the corner of the deck and used them for target practice, aiming for the tallest, straightest tree in the woods.

Sounds idealic, right? And then I remember cleaning the chicken coop. Ugh. It was so gross. The hay, woodchips, and chicken poop condensed on the floor into this wierd composite, almost like plywood. You had to chip it up with a shovel. The smell was awful. But it was all part of our food chain. We ate the eggs that came from that coop, so we had a stake in keeping it clean. (I'm spouting off about the interconnectednes of food now, but at the time I didn't think about it. I just hated cleaning the chicken coop.)

We never successfully had a vegetable garden. There was the random squash plant that showed up in my mom's flower garden. We lived in the woods in the middle of nowhere. It was a place where the tomatoes never ripened because of all the shade.

But we did raise pigs. We named them Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. Dad built a pig-pen on the hill in the back yard. We filled their water trough, poured their feed, and zapped ourselves on the electric fence. In the summer the smell could drive you out of town, but in the winter, our freezer was stocked with hams and bacon. Dad even blew up one of the pig's bladders like Pa does in Little House in the Big Woods and let us play with it. Grossed out yet? Sorry. That's the reality of raising and eating food.

At the Burrow, we don't really have room for anything other than our dog. As much as I love that I grew up with pigs and goats and chickens, I'm not sure I'm up for the task as an adult. I now realize how much work my parents had to do...and we complained about having to feed and water them!

But we do live a half mile from the farm where we have a family share. On sunny days, I walk with Evan to pick up cabbages and beets, turnips and greens from the overflowing bins in the cool barn. We fill up the basket under his stroller seat, and park it at the edge of the row of dill and cilantro. After picking herbs for the week, we walk home. Our feet get dirty. Our fingers get stained from the vegetables. This is how your food should come.

I know that I am lucky to live so close to the farm, and to be able to buy a share. I think it is a crime that everyone can't get their food this way if they want to. Organic, fresh food is simply not affordable. Too many people are forced to buy whatever the grocery store happens to have in stock from the other side of the country. Even that is too expensive. What's affordable? Pasta. Rice. Not free range chicken. Not organic, local hakuri turnips.

I don't take the interconnectedness of food for granted anymore. And I'm grateful that Evan will grow up in a place where he has to get his hands dirty before he can wash them for dinner.