Chickens are beautiful, until you have to raise them. Via UGArdner @ Flickr
Okay, so my critique here is likely as shallow and bad as the thing I’m critiquing, but this fucking article from the NYT is bugging the shit out of me for myriad reasons.
First of all: “femivore” means “one who or that which eats women,” not “women who raise chickens,” or “women who are producing rather than buying their food.”
Second of all: Dear Peggy Orenstein, Your four friends in Berkeley /= a trend. And your friends in Berkeley /= the face of the new homesteaders,which I would argue is an actual movement, albeit a necessarily delocalized one.
Third of all: Orenstein doesn’t seem to know if she envies or dismisses her friends who raise chickens, and it results in a mess of a article. Oh no, my hastily prepared whole wheat quesadillas! But chicken coops are an (ungilded) cage! Omnivore’s dilemma! Feminist dilemma!
Fourth of all: Orenstein could have written an interesting piece about “Radical Homemakers,” in a larger economic context (like: raising chickens is difficult work that for most people will be a net loss), or in a back-lash-y context (like: here’s a “new” way that a certain class of women are being pressured to perform a certain model of domesticity), or in a social history context, given that raising chickens to produce sufficient amounts of food for the family and a little extra money–you’ve heard the term “egg money” to refer to a housewife’s little private stash?–has traditionally been seen as an appropriate type of work for women. But no.
Fifth of all: Raising chickens is difficult and rather nasty work. Take it from a midwesterner. It ain’t all easter baskets and bucolic splendor, people. “Chicken shit” is an insult for a very good reason.
Sixth of all: FEMIVORE IS NOT A WORD.
To be clear, I’m not insulting farmers or homesteaders, cause that is serious, difficult work that–wow, like a lot of women’s work!–is not very well remunerated or recognized. I’m insulted by Orenstein’s piece, which is treating a (usually) politically motivated choice by people today as an idealized hobby of the uber-privileged. Marie Antoinette liked to play at being a shepherdess, too, you know.
I’m going to just copy what I just wrote on another forum about this exact topic:
The Onion has this covered already:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38861
“Grueling Household Tasks Of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman”
As for my views:
a) Technically, a femivore would be a person who eats women.
b) As someone from a rural Appalachian farming community, and only a generation removed from farming for a living, I find it really hard to romanticize what is a very tough, demanding, financially challenging lifestyle (one which often leads to terrible injuries). I’m actually kind of offended that people who are “playing farmer” in communities like Berkeley think this means they understand what it is to farm for your own subsistence – not least of all because they clearly have the fallback of running to the supermarket if one of their crops fails.
c) On actual farms, while women may be responsible for a lot of household tasks, they also work very very hard in the fields when every possible hand is needed to set plants, harvest, etc. These are the hard tasks that have to be done by hand, btw, not while riding on top of a tractor.
d) Both of my grandmothers grew up on farms, and while neither would probably have used the word “feminist”, both had skills in business, manual chores and homemaking. The author states that “they’re still transforming the definition of homemaker to one that’s more about soil than dirt, fresh air than air freshener”. This isn’t new. It has always been this way in rural communities. They aren’t “returning” to anything. In many parts of the country, this way of life has continued in a direct line. And people don’t always think it’s fun – just necessary. The people I grew up around grew their own veggies, canned and made things at home because it was practical, not because it was trendy.
e) This is inherently classist, as it focuses on families who have the ability to live on one primary income, families where the woman has the time to fuss about with chickens and gardens, and families who have the capital to invest in hobby-farming, and families who are landowners.
f) The entire piece gives me my usual reaction of “damn city people thinking they invented things.”
Flackette, as someone who still has relatives farming in rural Ireland (and trust me it’s not something you want to be doing right now given the Irish economy) thank you for saying this much much better than I could have.
I feel like this is part of a larger trend of people who were born into the Western world romanticizing lifestyles that they consider to be “pure” and “genuine” rather than “something that we invented new technologies to avoid having to do”. I just find it incredibly pretentious when people treat stuff like grocery stores and indoor plumbing as things that distract us from true philosophical contemplation or whatever as opposed to things that some people in the world are literally dying due to the lack of. Like, if that’s your passion, okay, go for it, but a lot of the people I’ve read who are into this sort of thing act as if no one who lives in a city or suburb could possibly understand true beauty or the meaning of life or what have you.
Ah, flackette, that Onion article is a gem. And from 2001!
As far as the city-people idealizing the rural (when they’re not denigrating it, which is the other 50% of the time), baraqiel, you might consider picking up Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City, which is rather old lit crit now, but still spot on, and with wide cultural implications, AFAIC.
@PhD – As a city person, I do try not to denigrate the country — it’s not for me, but I respect how some people prefer the open air and such. But the suburbs, now that’s something everyone can agree to hate. ^_~
The thing I didn’t know about chickens, and I tried them (I live outside city limits), is that you have to lock them up at night. SOMEBODY eats them even in suburbia. Dogs? Coons? As for a social observation, none of us know the meaning of work like they must have every century till ours.
“[T]he omnivore’s dilemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament”? You mean that running away from the big bad world and raising chickens is a political statement?
Farming,on a commercial scale, is one thing. But this stuff is troubling. It seems so insular and self-absorbed. Yeah, reducing your carbon footprint is good, but so is being part of your community and the world.
And yeah, could there be anything more privileged than “modern preindustrialism”? You have got to be kidding. It just insults everyone who is trying to stay alive on this planet and who would find a supermarket or access to schools and health care a miracle.
Yes, a mess of an article. And “femivore”? Yikes and blech at the same time. What a muddle. While I’m all for critiquing privileged Western white women for appropriating the lived experiences of rural and/or poor folks in a search for authenticity, or deeper meaning, or whatever, at the same time I’m uncomfy with Orenstein labeling these women as “precious” (even if it “has variegations of meaning” whateverthehell). It has a whiff of sexism, no? She acknowledges that the wages of housewifery under Big P are still problematic, but seems, what? Insecure in her own choices? while eyeballing the response of these women.
@Joe: Dogs, coons, cats, foxes, coyotes, hawks, eagles…everything eats chicken! Except for PhDork
And most of those animals are just as happy to prey on chickens in the backyards of Marin County as they are on rural farms.
The Marie Antoinette thing is what gets me. Oooh, upper-middle-class college grads fill their inner emptiness by playing at farming! FUCK THAT. Talk to a woman in the Third World for whom a few good laying hens are the difference between subsisting and starving.
“I’m insulted by Orenstein’s piece, which is treating a (usually) politically motivated choice by people today as an idealized hobby of the uber-privileged.” THIS.
I never knew until recently what a hippie, trendy upbringing I had. My dad, who is now a physician, also has a masters in botany and is thus quite the gardener. My stepmother has a degree in bryology, which is the study of mosses and ferns, and is quite an avid herbologist. My mother is just an all around handyperson who likes growing her own food, chopping her own wood, and renovating her own home in her off time from being a nurse practitioner. Needless to say, between these three, I grew up eating food we grew ourselves. I learned how to can. I learned how to pull weeds. We spent family time in the garden. We even had our own chickens, and, for a while, a pig. It wasn’t until I got to college that I even tasted a frozen vegetable, and by then it was too late. Now I try to grow much of my own food (ok, so, my husband really does the gardening) and eat locally, because that’s the kind of food I like to eat, the type of food I was raised on. I’m not particularly wealthy at this point in my life, and I have a full time day job. I’m not some desperate uber privileged housewife screwing around with a hobby because I think it makes me authentic.
@krismcn: It has a whiff of sexism, no?
Yes. And pretty much every single “trend piece” the Times publishes about upper-middle-class women and their parenting/career choices has that whiff too (if not an outright reek). Even if, as PhDork noted, the “trend” consists of the author and three of her friends from Bryn Mawr.
Go flackette!
Farm girl moved to the city here. I still do gardening and canning and am mulling owning chickens once we buy our own place – but that’s because I have the skills and believe in self-sufficiency and so on.
There is so much wrong with this article, I can’t even begin. But implying that farm work or gardening work is dilletantish or faddish has no clue what is really involved. And I’m speaking as someone who juggles these activities with a full time city job. My family back home runs a full working farm and their are no gender barriers or norms in the work they do. My sister (oldest of the three sisters on the farm) runs the cattle operation and does the day to day grunt work with the hay/grain/mechanics side – my dad is still involved but less and less as he gets older – while the two younger girls do a lot of animal and tractor work. I have some brothers who come round to help at harvest time, but it’s the women who are involved day to day and make the decisions. My mom fulfills the “farm spouse” as opposed to “farmer” role – she works the farm, but also works off of the farm as a nurse.
I’d also like to add that the “real” back to the landers (folks returning to farms, as opposed to always having been on the farm) are doing it to be self-sustaining, to have a smaller ecological footprint, and to run a business. These are not “stay-at-home wives” in the stereotyped sense. They are farmers – small business owners who work from home. Nobody called my father a stay-at-home dad for being a farmer while my mom worked in town. But somehow my mom was considered a stay-at-home mother before she went back to nursing even though she is/was a farmer too. Agh!
/run on, poorly structured comment
I cant even play Farmville. Why can’t they just let women be who they are?
It took me a while to figure out why this piece bugged me as hard as it does. Now I know.
BECAUSE IT ASSUMES ONLY WOMEN COOK! There’s no way a Serious Man ™ would ever stoop to the level of home making! A Real Man works at the office, and returns to his home, where his Real Woman will have fixed his home made organic dinner.
This piece could have been great. If only the message had been: “home making/cooking/caring for relatives is important. Therefore men and women should shoulder their share of the burden”. The way the piece stands, it’s the 1950s all over again. It’s almost ctrl-C/ctrl-V from the Feminine Mystique. And not in a good way. At all.
heh, from the title, I thought this would be a discussion related to The Edible Woman. But, though it has been a while since I read it, I think it is…
I sometimes wish I had more patience for gardening. It’s the prep that is daunting – getting our yard ready to grow anything will take A LOT of time, and work that isn’t the “lovingly-tended tomatoes”-type. More like backbreaking bush removal. Last year, we chose to spend leisure time on more leisurely pursuits. Lazy, lazy us! We’ll see what happens this time around …the time to start is now. It burns me that those (4) women are likely the type to say “of course I only feed Junior the organic kale from our garden. I CARE about what he puts in his body” while looking down at parents who choose to spend time rolling around on the floor with Junior instead of planting cover crops, and buy imported peas at Safeway. Or, at least, the media will portray them as that type, in Mommy Wars round 576.
Our area has a lot of home-chicken raisers, and I’m occasionally tempted. Fresh eggs really do taste amazing, and I don’t enjoy paying $5/dozen for the treat. A couple of hens in the back yard seems like a not-bad idea.
Then I remember being swarmed by my dad’s flock if I was late to feed them. I remember being pecked if someone was trying to hide her eggs. I remember the smell. And the urge passes quickly. Also, what do these people do with their older hens? Are their suburban housewives slaughtering fryers in their backyards? Because I find that hard to imagine.
I grow a lot of our own food, and it’s important to me. But anyone who thinks canning is romantic has (a) never canned much and (b) never felt that frisson of absolute fear that someone will drop off their excess tomatoes or zucchini on your porch when you’re not home to stop them.
I thought the ‘urban chicken’ thing had already been identified as a fake trend about a year ago. Not that that ever stops the NYT. I’m not that far from Berkeley, and only know of one person who’s raising chickens, and he’s a dude. Who lives in Berkeley…
Anyway, like some of my fellow harpies, I’m one generation removed from the farm, so although I do enjoy gardening, I don’t have the urge to romanticize it.
@Av0gadro – You live in the PNW west of the Cascades too, right? Quite a few backyard coops in my town too. A big flock is a lot of work, but 4 hens isn’t much work at all, really (we get about 3 eggs a day from those 4, just right for our level of egg consumption with occasional give-aways). I wouldn’t keep them if they were much work (or smelly). My guess is, for backyard flocks, predation keeps anyone from actually having to deal with a geriatric chicken. We’ve lost one to a neighbor’s dog, one to a frickin’ EAGLE, and almost lost one to an owl. You kind of have to resign yourself to occasionally losing one if you let them roam the yard. Part of the reason why we don’t name them individually (also, in case I get sick of them and decide to stew ‘em up). So 2 of them are 4 years old and still laying daily. I’ve heard they can live for a decade plus if they don’t get eaten by something along the way.
I was going to grow some potatoes in old tires until I realized that old tires are more expensive than potatoes.
Ugh. Again with the photogenic white women cradling their chickens. I wrote a piece about chickens for the Ethicurean a while back: http://bit.ly/24FwgK And yeah, that’s my garden, into which the chickens are no longer allowed since I figured out what damage they do, and probably gave my bf food poisoning from too close an encounter with chicken shit. I like having chickens. I love the eggs, and the shitty straw makes great fertilizer. But all this romanticizing the chickens makes me crazy — they’re really not all cuddly, at least not mine. I work at home, so can have a garden and can the extra and keep chickens. But as solace for the ills of those rich white girls who quit working … spare me.
@annimal: I’ve always been around urban chickens…when I first moved to Brooklyn in 1996, my Puerto Rican neighbors had a couple, including a rooster who was despised by the whole neighborhood for his incessant crowing and aggressive policing of the sidewalk outside their house. Then I moved to a Greek neighborhood in Queens, where my neighbors kept laying hens and rabbits (the bunnies were for meat). People were super-resourceful about keeping them, and the city never seemed to hassle anyone about it.
But of course, immigrants in the outer boroughs who raise animals for food aren’t a trend piece for the Times the way soccer moms in Berkley are.
But of course, immigrants in the outer boroughs who raise animals for food aren’t a trend piece for the Times the way soccer moms in Berkley are.
This. Where I grew up (Seattle) I saw backyard flocks and hutches (and the occasional goat) a bunch of times in predominantly immigrant neighborhoods. But we all know it’s only a thing if white people do it. Then it becomes a thing to mock if/when lots of ladies do it.
Gah! As someone who grew up on a working dairy farm (with huge garden, canning, etc), it galls me to read about this romanticization of growing your own ‘X’. And yes, it’s a great story when upperclass white women do it. Gah.
But we all know it’s only a thing if white people do it. Then it becomes a thing to mock if/when lots of ladies do it.
Yeah, I hate the ‘Ooh it’s a trend because upper class women are doing it’ pieces as much as anyone, but it’s not actually those four women’s fault their friend talks about them, and not upper class stay at home moms’ faults in general that mainstream media fetishizes them. Comments like “But as solace for the ills of those rich white girls who quit working … “ make me a little uncomfortable – though to be fair, that could just because I’m an upper class stay-at-home mom.
Yes, krismcn, it’s Eugene for me. It’s not immigrants here, but with the hippie culture here, it’s not bored housewives (see, I do it too!) either.
@Bellacoker- LOL, you just summed up my whole view on this issue. If people want to garden, can, or raise chickens as a hobby, I say more power to them. But don’t pretend it’s not incredibly inefficient.
agreed Av0gadro, there is definitely an unwritten rule that any hobby or profession that is dominated by women can only be taken seriously once men get involved.
women interested in fashion = frivolous
men interested in fashion = art
I bet if men started quitting their jobs to grow crops and raise chickens nobody would be calling it a silly privileged people fad.
I raise chickens. And it isn’t that hard. Feed, water, collect eggs, shut the run at night. It also isn’t that nasty if you have a limited number of hens and live in a relatively dry area. Here in the southwest, where it rains rarely, it is easy. I live in a urban neighborhood in a small city. I’m not raising them to be trendy. I like the eggs, I enjoy watching the chickens, it is fun. Yes, it is ‘inefficient’ but so are other hobbies.
Coming late to the discussion… but I had a small flock of chickens running around my backyard for a few years and it seemed pretty easy to me. We got tons of cruelty-free, organic eggs for about $8 a month, got lots of great material for the compost pile, and supplied the local food bank with extra eggs we couldn’t use. Also, I thought it was fun to observe chicken culture. That whole thing about the rooster running the henhouse and defending the hens? Um, no. My flock was totally matriarchal, and whenever one of my cats got into the chicken run the hens got together and rushed it, pecking and squawking to run it off while the rooster lazily pecked around as if nothing was out of order. Also, I designed a chicken coop that was really easy to clean out and gather eggs from, so maybe my experience is the exception rather than the rule.
Also, anyone bought cage-free, hormone-free, organic eggs lately? For less than $4 a dozen? Keeping chickens isn’t cost-effective if you’re comparing your cost to the unsustainably produced $.99/dozen grocery store eggs that were raised on gov’t subsidized corn and have been in cold storage for a good 6 months before they even reach your grocery store. But that’s comparing apples to oranges.
Rachel_in_WY: you’re totally right about comparing apples to oranges. Or eggs to, uh…other eggs. I think the super-crunchy eggs were something like $5/dozen at the greenmarket, last time I looked.
And in cold storage for SIX MONTHS? Really? Holy cow. Or chicken.