Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Backyard Chickens
Said I throw me corn, me no call no fowl;
I saying, Cook-cook-cook, cluk-cluk-cluk
Bob Marley - Who The Cap Fit
Hot Chicks
Legal or Not, Chickens Are the Chic New Backyard Addition
By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Shenandoah is a red-feathered hen nestled under the right arm of Anna Mae Conrad, who is 10 and lives in Takoma Park. "When you hold her for a long time," Anna Mae says, "you can feel her relax; you can feel her putting pressure on you." Anna Mae strokes the stole of plumage around Shenandoah's neck, and the bird closes her eyes in a moment of chicken bliss. "This is actually my chicken."
The announcement is to distinguish Shenandoah from the four other hens clucking softly in the back yard of the home where Anna Mae lives with mom Mary Cush, dad Kevin Conrad and sister Zhania. The family got its first bird six years ago, and the hens live in a converted greenhouse in a corner of the shaded lot, which is in an established suburban neighborhood inside the Capital Beltway.
The Conrads are at the vanguard of a resurgent interest in backyard chicken keeping, especially in distinctly nonrural settings. In cities across the United States, raising backyard poultry has suddenly become as chic as growing your own vegetables. It's all part of the back-to-the-land movement whose proponents want to save on grocery bills, take control of their food supply and reduce the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture.
The urban homesteading movement got a huge symbolic boost this spring when the first family installed a 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden at the White House. Poultry is the natural next step in the sustainable back yard; chickens produce eggs, devour kitchen scraps and add manure to the compost pile.
"Chickens are America's cool new pet," said Dave Belanger, publisher of the magazine Backyard Poultry. When he launched it three years ago, "we were thinking 15 to 20 thousand" subscriptions, he said. The print run for the bimonthly is now 100,000.
Belanger's magazine is published in Wisconsin, where five years ago chicken activists in Madison succeeded in getting the city council to reverse a ban on chicken coops. Madison's ordinance is typical of other cities'. You can raise chickens for eggs, not meat; they must be enclosed in a coop or run; and it's strictly a hen party: Roosters who crow day and night are prohibited.
In Baltimore, you can keep up to four hens (no roosters, ducks, geese or, darn, ostriches), in a coop no closer than 25 feet from a neighbor's residence. A one-time fee of $60 is required for the permit.
Whether the Obamas could join the ranks of chicken fanciers may be a more difficult question. The District does not permit backyard chickens, said Michael Rupert, a spokesman for the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. You can have racing pigeons and captive-bred species of cage birds, meaning parrots and the like, but you can't have chickens.
The District's ban stands in contrast to other cities in the nation that have either permitted poultry all along or succumbed to pressure recently to allow them once more. In and around Washington, the convergence of so many jurisdictions each with its own rules has clouded the question of whether chickens are allowed. The resulting confusion has produced two types of chicken owners: Those who raise poultry openly and lawfully and those who do so in the shadows.
Kevin Conrad is confident he meets the requirements of Montgomery County (see sidebar on local ordinances), but elsewhere in Takoma Park another owner, fearing the loss of chickens his daughter views as pets, is willing to talk only anonymously.
He started keeping the chickens early last year and has three hens. Two of the chickens he raised turned out to be roosters, and they were given to a friend in a rural area. His neighbors have been supportive and share in the eggs, he said. Chickens "are easy pets, and the eggs you get from them are spectacular," he said. Two close neighbors also keep chickens, and he is about to allow another neighbor's daughter to keep some hens in his coop in exchange for chicken-sitting when needed.
I am walking along a block of rowhouses on Capitol Hill to meet a young professional who is also flying under the chicken radar. She offered to show me her coop, but anonymously, because she feared that her enterprise was unlawful. She leads me through the house to the back yard, where three Rhode Island Red hen hybrids live in a homemade coop and adjoining run, which is enclosed with chicken wire. "I bought a circular saw to make it," she said. The coop is lined with newspapers (try doing that with a laptop), and the base slides out for cleaning.
When she returns from work, she lets the hens out to roam in the garden, which includes newly planted fruit trees and raised beds with lettuce, beans and strawberries in growth.
"It's been fascinating," she said. "All my neighbors know about them, and some of the neighborhood kids love to come over and collect the eggs. They're really curious about them, and they love to feed them."
She got the hens -- named Dree, Dot and Fluffy Bottom -- in March as 1-year-old egg layers and says they are quiet and their coop is easy to keep clean. "I named them after my grandmothers. Well, not Fluffy Bottom," she said.
"I really like producing my own food," she said. "My father always had a vegetable garden."
The District's anti-chicken stance troubles activists such as Liz Falk, who ran an inner-city vegetable garden on Seventh Street NW before moving the enterprise to the former playing field of the shuttered Gage Eckington Elementary School in LeDroit Park. "Other cities are more welcoming of urban agriculture than us," she said.
To those who would say chickens should be raised only in the country, Falk would say no. "Why don't we grow food where the people are? It's so much more sustainable," she said. She'd like to keep poultry at the garden, called Common Good City Farm, but "we are unclear as to the law."
So what's it like to keep chickens? From what I gather, they are exasperating, dumb, funny, beautiful and so hopelessly ill-equipped to survive on their own that you have to love them. They also have a distinct social hierarchy. In the Capitol Hill garden, Dot rules the roost and poor Dree is last in the pecking order.
Whether in the country or city, unprotected birds will usually fall prey to an array of predators, including hawks, owls, raccoons and, of course, foxes.
Until this winter, Robin Wedewer's coop in rural Calvert County was ruled by a black feathered cock bird named Johnny Cash. The second banana was a white rooster, T. Boone Chickens. Late one afternoon, as the light was fading, she returned to her 22-acre farm in Huntingtown to see a pile of white feathers on the front lawn, another pile on the back lawn. Johnny had vanished in what may have been an eagle attack. T. Boone was gravely injured, with talon wounds on his sides. Wedewer's 18-year-old son, Benjamin, had dug a grave behind the chicken coop, not expecting him to last the night, but the plucky bird pulled through.
T. Boone still walks with a pronounced limp, but he now rules the roost. He crows a lot, but he has a lot to crow about, both as protector of his harem and as its lone lusty prince. He guards the hens while they take dust baths behind a lilac bush, and if Maude and Myrtle, two red starters, wander off, he will call to them and go racing off to retrieve them. With a limp. When he finds food, he will offer a low, repeated cluck, which is his way of telling the hens to dig in.
Wedewer gets about half a dozen eggs a day and raves about the flavor, the size and color of the yolks, and the stiffness of the whites. The chickens live in an Amish-built playhouse and a caged run that Wedewer and her husband, Harry, put together from lumber and chicken wire last year when they got the birds. "I make my own cheese, my own wine vinegar, my own wine," she said. "Why not have chickens?"
In the evening, the Wedewers like to sit in lawn chairs by the vegetable garden and watch the birds scratching around. "We call it chicken TV," she said.
For the Conrads in Takoma Park, the chickens have been a way to introduce their children to the joys and grimmer realities of the natural world. One of their birds was taken by a fox, another by a raccoon. "It's like a big science project," Mary Cush said.
For her most recent birthday, Anna Mae had friends over for a slumber party. "When we woke up, we all got to go into the coop and pick our own egg for breakfast," she said.
I saying, Cook-cook-cook, cluk-cluk-cluk
Bob Marley - Who The Cap Fit
Hot Chicks
Legal or Not, Chickens Are the Chic New Backyard Addition
By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Shenandoah is a red-feathered hen nestled under the right arm of Anna Mae Conrad, who is 10 and lives in Takoma Park. "When you hold her for a long time," Anna Mae says, "you can feel her relax; you can feel her putting pressure on you." Anna Mae strokes the stole of plumage around Shenandoah's neck, and the bird closes her eyes in a moment of chicken bliss. "This is actually my chicken."
The announcement is to distinguish Shenandoah from the four other hens clucking softly in the back yard of the home where Anna Mae lives with mom Mary Cush, dad Kevin Conrad and sister Zhania. The family got its first bird six years ago, and the hens live in a converted greenhouse in a corner of the shaded lot, which is in an established suburban neighborhood inside the Capital Beltway.
The Conrads are at the vanguard of a resurgent interest in backyard chicken keeping, especially in distinctly nonrural settings. In cities across the United States, raising backyard poultry has suddenly become as chic as growing your own vegetables. It's all part of the back-to-the-land movement whose proponents want to save on grocery bills, take control of their food supply and reduce the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture.
The urban homesteading movement got a huge symbolic boost this spring when the first family installed a 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden at the White House. Poultry is the natural next step in the sustainable back yard; chickens produce eggs, devour kitchen scraps and add manure to the compost pile.
"Chickens are America's cool new pet," said Dave Belanger, publisher of the magazine Backyard Poultry. When he launched it three years ago, "we were thinking 15 to 20 thousand" subscriptions, he said. The print run for the bimonthly is now 100,000.
Belanger's magazine is published in Wisconsin, where five years ago chicken activists in Madison succeeded in getting the city council to reverse a ban on chicken coops. Madison's ordinance is typical of other cities'. You can raise chickens for eggs, not meat; they must be enclosed in a coop or run; and it's strictly a hen party: Roosters who crow day and night are prohibited.
In Baltimore, you can keep up to four hens (no roosters, ducks, geese or, darn, ostriches), in a coop no closer than 25 feet from a neighbor's residence. A one-time fee of $60 is required for the permit.
Whether the Obamas could join the ranks of chicken fanciers may be a more difficult question. The District does not permit backyard chickens, said Michael Rupert, a spokesman for the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. You can have racing pigeons and captive-bred species of cage birds, meaning parrots and the like, but you can't have chickens.
The District's ban stands in contrast to other cities in the nation that have either permitted poultry all along or succumbed to pressure recently to allow them once more. In and around Washington, the convergence of so many jurisdictions each with its own rules has clouded the question of whether chickens are allowed. The resulting confusion has produced two types of chicken owners: Those who raise poultry openly and lawfully and those who do so in the shadows.
Kevin Conrad is confident he meets the requirements of Montgomery County (see sidebar on local ordinances), but elsewhere in Takoma Park another owner, fearing the loss of chickens his daughter views as pets, is willing to talk only anonymously.
He started keeping the chickens early last year and has three hens. Two of the chickens he raised turned out to be roosters, and they were given to a friend in a rural area. His neighbors have been supportive and share in the eggs, he said. Chickens "are easy pets, and the eggs you get from them are spectacular," he said. Two close neighbors also keep chickens, and he is about to allow another neighbor's daughter to keep some hens in his coop in exchange for chicken-sitting when needed.
I am walking along a block of rowhouses on Capitol Hill to meet a young professional who is also flying under the chicken radar. She offered to show me her coop, but anonymously, because she feared that her enterprise was unlawful. She leads me through the house to the back yard, where three Rhode Island Red hen hybrids live in a homemade coop and adjoining run, which is enclosed with chicken wire. "I bought a circular saw to make it," she said. The coop is lined with newspapers (try doing that with a laptop), and the base slides out for cleaning.
When she returns from work, she lets the hens out to roam in the garden, which includes newly planted fruit trees and raised beds with lettuce, beans and strawberries in growth.
"It's been fascinating," she said. "All my neighbors know about them, and some of the neighborhood kids love to come over and collect the eggs. They're really curious about them, and they love to feed them."
She got the hens -- named Dree, Dot and Fluffy Bottom -- in March as 1-year-old egg layers and says they are quiet and their coop is easy to keep clean. "I named them after my grandmothers. Well, not Fluffy Bottom," she said.
"I really like producing my own food," she said. "My father always had a vegetable garden."
The District's anti-chicken stance troubles activists such as Liz Falk, who ran an inner-city vegetable garden on Seventh Street NW before moving the enterprise to the former playing field of the shuttered Gage Eckington Elementary School in LeDroit Park. "Other cities are more welcoming of urban agriculture than us," she said.
To those who would say chickens should be raised only in the country, Falk would say no. "Why don't we grow food where the people are? It's so much more sustainable," she said. She'd like to keep poultry at the garden, called Common Good City Farm, but "we are unclear as to the law."
So what's it like to keep chickens? From what I gather, they are exasperating, dumb, funny, beautiful and so hopelessly ill-equipped to survive on their own that you have to love them. They also have a distinct social hierarchy. In the Capitol Hill garden, Dot rules the roost and poor Dree is last in the pecking order.
Whether in the country or city, unprotected birds will usually fall prey to an array of predators, including hawks, owls, raccoons and, of course, foxes.
Until this winter, Robin Wedewer's coop in rural Calvert County was ruled by a black feathered cock bird named Johnny Cash. The second banana was a white rooster, T. Boone Chickens. Late one afternoon, as the light was fading, she returned to her 22-acre farm in Huntingtown to see a pile of white feathers on the front lawn, another pile on the back lawn. Johnny had vanished in what may have been an eagle attack. T. Boone was gravely injured, with talon wounds on his sides. Wedewer's 18-year-old son, Benjamin, had dug a grave behind the chicken coop, not expecting him to last the night, but the plucky bird pulled through.
T. Boone still walks with a pronounced limp, but he now rules the roost. He crows a lot, but he has a lot to crow about, both as protector of his harem and as its lone lusty prince. He guards the hens while they take dust baths behind a lilac bush, and if Maude and Myrtle, two red starters, wander off, he will call to them and go racing off to retrieve them. With a limp. When he finds food, he will offer a low, repeated cluck, which is his way of telling the hens to dig in.
Wedewer gets about half a dozen eggs a day and raves about the flavor, the size and color of the yolks, and the stiffness of the whites. The chickens live in an Amish-built playhouse and a caged run that Wedewer and her husband, Harry, put together from lumber and chicken wire last year when they got the birds. "I make my own cheese, my own wine vinegar, my own wine," she said. "Why not have chickens?"
In the evening, the Wedewers like to sit in lawn chairs by the vegetable garden and watch the birds scratching around. "We call it chicken TV," she said.
For the Conrads in Takoma Park, the chickens have been a way to introduce their children to the joys and grimmer realities of the natural world. One of their birds was taken by a fox, another by a raccoon. "It's like a big science project," Mary Cush said.
For her most recent birthday, Anna Mae had friends over for a slumber party. "When we woke up, we all got to go into the coop and pick our own egg for breakfast," she said.
Tiffins - am I hip or what?
Cutting down on plastic usage is a goal with many worthy reasons. We have been trying to cut down on plastic when we carry our lunch with us to school or work. When I was a kid, lunch boxes were metal but I don't see them any more. A few years ago I saw tiffins at the local National Wholesale Liquidators store (now since closed down) and bought some. We have been able to eliminate using plastic for carrying lunch - no plastic containers, no plastic wrap, no plastic lunch box. And the tiffin retains heat so hot food is at least warm when it is time for lunch.
My kids had no resistance to the tiffins and at this point they have received enough positive comments from a variety of people - kid and adult - that they think the tiffins are cool. I have had two of the tall ones from National Wholesale Liquidators that have problems with their lid - it screws on but it doesn't stop. I also have had two that worked fine. The small one has a clamp lid. National Wholesalers sold the tall one for about $15 and both are stainless steel.
Newly Frugal Indians Revive Tiffin Tradition
Homemade Lunch Delivery Surges
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 10, 2009
MUMBAI -- Outside one of this city's busiest railway stations, Vilesh Shinde balanced 50 metal containers on a wooden board atop his head and rushed into the thick morning traffic, sprinting through the financial district to deliver home-cooked meals to his newest customers: young Indian professionals.
Shinde is one of Mumbai's approximately 5,000 dabbawalas, or lunch deliverymen. Dressed in white caps and starched chef's smocks, bearing foot-tall lunch pails known as tiffins, the fast-moving dabbawalas are a symbol of old India who not long ago appeared to be an endangered species.
With incomes rising and the Indian economy rapidly growing, sociologists predicted the demise of the dabbawala. That is, until the global financial crisis in the past year caused many middle-class urban Indians to return to the tiffin, shunning the city's more expensive restaurants and cafes in favor of the way their grandparents used to eat.
For about $6 a month, the dabbawalas collect lunches from white-collar workers' homes in the city's vast outskirts and deliver them, still hot, directly to their desks in the bustling city center. The business dates back 125 years, to a time when British colonial administrators wanted homemade meals they knew their foreign stomachs could safely handle.
For office workers feeling the economic pinch, Indian women's magazines and talk shows are recommending the dabbawala over debt.
"There's so many more tiffins these days. We can't be late and let down the newcomers. So we have to work really quickly," said Shinde, 32, a third-generation dabbawala whose clientele has doubled in the past three months. "I thought about computer classes. But I stayed with this. I heard there were no jobs. Plus, my customers are always happy to see me."
In the late 1990s, India's burgeoning economy unleashed an explosion of street-food stalls, air-conditioned cafes and international fast-food chains. Suddenly, young Indians wanted lattes with their lentils. The chains successfully Indianized just about every cuisine imaginable: Think masala muffins or McDonald's Chicken Maharaja Mac, two grilled chicken patties with smoke-flavored mayonnaise on a sesame seed bun. Going out to lunch became a status symbol among India's emerging middle class.
Now such spending seems reckless. The engine is slowing, and to many people here, that's not all bad.
"The dabbawalas are part of a culture, an era in India, where frugality and an authentic taste of home were very serious virtues," said Harish Shetty, a prominent psychiatrist in Mumbai. "We all predicted that this would die out. What young person would want to be a dabba in the heat and traffic? What young person wants to bring their lunch to work in India's version of a brown bag? But we were wrong. Now in times of recession, we are finding the old ways still work. That's very comforting."
But the dabbawala revival is not just a matter of rupee-pinching. The lunch deliveryman has recently become a pop-culture icon, with a cult status built on nostalgia for old-time Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. A retro-looking dabbawala appears on coffee mugs and coasters. Psychedelic posters show a white-uniformed dabbawala dreaming of hundreds of tiffins, which swirl around his Gandhi topi, or trademark white cap. There's even an online video game in which players are given a map of an Indian city and must deliver food on time.
In 2006, when more and more urban professionals were dining out or eating lunch at corporate cafeterias, Manish Tripathi, a software engineer, set up a Web site and text-messaging service to boost business for dabbawalas. He was quickly adopted as an honorary dabbawala, because most of the lunchbox carriers aren't computer literate.
But it wasn't until the economic crisis that tiffin services reported a surge in customers not only in Mumbai, but also in Chennai, New Delhi and Bangalore, especially among university students and young workers at high-tech companies.
"The increase in the clientele of dabbawalas . . . is spreading so quickly because people realize they have to return to wholesome, home-cooked food at cheaper rates," said Mohit Satyanand, an economist. "The tiffin is a survivor. It's trendy again."
In Chennai, Geetha Mehta, a housewife-turned-caterer, has become a national celebrity, featured on TV food programs for starting a service that provides an evening tiffin of healthful snacks to students and white-collar employees working into the night.
"We thought these tiffins were for our grandparents. But these days, beggars can't be choosers. Because we have a monthly allowance, we eat out much less than before," said Apurva Yadav, 19, an economics major at Delhi University who recently started using the service.
Though some clients use caterers, in most cases wives, mothers, sisters or domestic cooks assemble lunches for family members in homes throughout Mumbai every morning. Starting at 7 a.m., the dabbawalas pick up the lunches and sort them by destination. From 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., the deliverymen travel the city's railways, the backbone of the system.
Mumbai's railways are so crowded and the commutes so long that the dabbawalas have their own train cars. Outside the stations, they sort the lunchboxes by color-coding or by numbers written on the lids. Then they take off, sometimes on a bicycle, more often on foot.
At 12:15, they take a five-minute chai break, highly unusual in South Asia, where drinking tea is seldom quick. Then they are off again, running through the streets, up and down stairs, delivering lunches.
Sitting in a one-room office in Mumbai, Raghunath D. Medge, president of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust, as the dabbawalas' organization is formally known, proudly displays a gold-plated tiffin on his desk.
"Our dabbawalas don't drink alcohol. They don't waste time. They, in fact, wage a war against time," he said. "You see this modern Mumbai life, it's an artificial life. People miss the old ways. In India, life will change. But the good parts, like a home-cooked lunch, should stay."
Special correspondent Ria Sen in New Delhi contributed to this report.
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)