The urge to name our chickens

By Elizabeth Nickson

Of all the madnesses of the early 21st century, nothing is more bizarre than our relationship with food. Almost every woman I know has developed a fetish around eating, and of course, not eating, until we are so tied in knots that white tea, some days, is pretty much the only option.

Madness, that is, unless you are growing your own food, and know the name of the chicken you are eating. There lies sterling virtue — and safety. “If the world goes to hell,” said a country friend the other day, “we’ll just plant the lawn space with a vegetable garden and buy some chickens.”

Other friends plunge right in. A filmmaker pal is starting a meadery, making honey wine that she’ll sell at the foot of her driveway to tourists. Another buys a leg of lamb for a dinner party from a neighbouring farm. Cost? $230. For a leg of lamb. The sticker shock was eased by the virtue of supporting a local farmer. Just down the street from me in the city, two women have covered the boulevard in compost under which grow onion, squash, and garlic. Their lawn too is covered with permaculture, which means, roughly, growing food not only without pesticides and herbicides, but so that the earth itself is replenished. Their house and garden is a charming sight; their rigorously green principles and obvious adherence to an embracing community ethic warms the whole neighbourhood. Surely, we are moving toward their version of a good future.

“Food security” is a new demand, based on a new fear. If the world goes to hell, will we have enough to eat? On Salt Spring Island, once the fruit and vegetable garden for all of British Columbia, we have only enough food to feed two percent of our residents. But that is starting to change too. The first farmland trust was struck this year. It sequesters 80 acres of prime development land and assigns it to active agriculture. There will be more. It is the one thing Salt Spring’s residents can agree on.

But is the world going to hell, and will we all need vegetable gardens? Of course not. But human change always takes place in a stew of paranoia, noisy argument, looming financial catastrophe, and lack of reason. In fact, the modern food system is a miracle of human ingenuity. Every year, more people eat better and have greater choice. But we in the wealthy West now want our food to be ethical, we want it to be clean, we need it to be real, not sourced from a monoculture 5000 kilometres away that depletes the earth and poisons us with cancer-causing agricultural chemicals.

This is what is driving Canadians toward virtuous eating. As a society (and for most of us, as individuals), we are so rich, privileged, and lucky that we can actually afford to reject modernism and its works. Everything else is next. The pull may be largely unconscious, but it is toward more intimate lives. We want to be recognized for the individuals we are, not for our marketing demographic. We want to pull our soft human selves out of the metallic world of ambition and workplace ferocity. The world we have created is monstrous, hard, and dangerous. We want to tear it down, and then rebuild it along a prosperous, egalitarian, gentle version of the mid-19th century. So we’ll know the chicken down the road and its human parents — and we’ll be able to handle the sticker shock.

Elizabeth Nickson is a Canadian freelance journalist.

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