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An appreciation of the farm egg

Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year Of Food Life hasn't yet worked its way through the family to my stack of unread books, but, because she's a Kentucky-born writer and widely read, I've read an excerpt in a magazine along the way, and read a bit about her book in the Lexington paper.

If I understand correctly, Kingsolver and her family sought to do a simple and difficult thing for a year: To eat food grown locally. It is a habit I hope they have sustained past publication of her book, and a habit we seek to acquire, as best we can.

Susan is reading it just now. She looked up at one point and nodded toward our kitchen counter. "Those bananas, and that pineapple?" she said. "Those are the Humvees of food."

I am not anxious to think so hard about food, nor do I think it wise to take our present comforts as an entitlement.

A variety of reasons make buying local produce particularly important today. It means we support local farmers, whose work and knowledge we will increasingly need if the coming petroleum shortage arrives before our politicians find their spines. It means we support heirloom species of plants (and animals, I suppose) that are commercially insignificant or have not yet been genetically modified so as to fit comfortably into supermarket bins. It means we eat fresher food that has been grown for its taste, not for its ability to survive global transportation in a modular container.

This is not yet easily done where we live. Susan came back from the supermarket one day and said she'd been obliged to choose strawberries grown in California over organic strawberries grown in South America.

Now...I recognize that our ability to choose carefully what we eat is, in part, a reflection of our middle income status. That, too, seems grossly unfair.

But I sat down to write simply about the egg.

For portions of the last year we have been the beneficiary of the fecundity of local chickens, and the kindness of their owners. Our refrigerator has regularly been filled with a dozen or three eggs from several sources, shared out around town because they cannot, evidently, be sold, and they won't keep forever.

Now, I'm a kid from the suburbs. My mother's family raised chickens during the Depression, back in Merced, and she doesn't eat eggs, nor cook chicken to this day. We had already fashioned the habit of buying the expensive organic free-range chicken eggs at Kroger's (they're about three times the price of regular eggs, and rarely go on sale) when these local eggs began arriving. We tend to eat eggs most mornings, one way or another, because it's an important meal and a good way to begin the day and all that.

The first dozen local eggs were more than a little intimidating. One of them came from a duck. One was particularly small and it wasn't clear to me where it came from, exactly. Their yolk is a different, darker color than we are accustomed to, and their flavor is much, much stronger. Some of the eggs have feathers attached. And other stuff, a reminder of which end of the chicken they emerge from.

Let's face it: Store eggs are a polite form of tofu. They're a protein source that takes on the flavor of whatever you add, be it salt and pepper or hot sauce or cheese or whatever. They have little flavor on their own. Farm fresh eggs took some getting used to, and the shells don't have a uniform thickness, and they're not all the same size and color.

But they taste like eggs.

It took me a while to get used to it, but we ran out this week and are back to the Kroger top shelf brown eggs, and it ain't the same.

One of the kids at the Fuzzy Duck said last week that only the day before had she learned there was more than one kind of chicken.

This is why it's important to eat local produce, best we can.

It's better for us. It tastes better. It consumes less petrol. It supports a local farmer, and it's one less thing we need to drive across town to pick up from one of the big boxes.

We also have bought a share in a Community Supported Agriculture venture, which is to say, we are sharing in the harvest from a local organic farm. We did this back in Nashville, and have finally found a farmer near Morehead who is interested in trying this relationship. Once a week she delivers a basket of produce; whatever's in season, whatever came in. It makes meal planning a bit more of a challenge, and we may need to plan to do more canning before it's all over.

But fresh fruit and vegetables, grown in the next county...we are fortunate, in many ways.

Posted by grant on June 13, 2007 3:57 PM | Permalink