My Obsession With Chickens

A late August entry that family and friends may tell you there's no profit in reading. But they are very wrong.

Hello, everyone! Notice anything new? America Eats! has a new name. This little newsletter of mine has evolved since it debuted four years ago and gone in vastly different directions than the original concept. The new name, Stories, seems to be a much more accurate descriptive of what I send to you each week. It’s a soft opening to see how it feels. Come fall, it’ll take on full wind and sail forward. Or something like that. I’d be grateful if you let me know what you think! ~ Pat

The first time I really thought about chickens—live as opposed to dead—was the morning after we moved into our first house. My husband and I were collapsed on our bed. Attached to overwhelming exhaustion, there may have been our guilt abouting stealing the down payment from our three-year-old son (long story). There was also the rising dread of what we had gotten ourselves into. At the very least, there was the immediate need to acquire familiarity with tools we didn’t even know existed. Over all this were the sounds of our child having leaped out of his little bed and now cavorting about the unfamiliar rooms above us. All kinds of disasters awaited him. Splintered wooden floors; lead paint; unstable ceilings; steep unmoored stairs, for instance. Yet, we were the kind of parents who believed a child should be fearless and explore on his own. He’d be fine. And so we continued to lie in bed muttering prayers.

Then came the sound of faint, non-human screeches. They seemed to come from the basement. My husband went looking for our son. I descended to the basement. There, penned in under the stairs by loose wire, was a chicken. She did not look well at all, scrawny and lethargic with a distinct air that she could keel over any second. She screeched again and I scrammed back up the stairs, yelling for my husband. He went down into the basement to verify my account, returned a second later, and called the previous owners.

Turned out the chicken was left behind because she was a little sick and they didn’t have a place to keep her in their new home. We were not sympathetic and increasingly panicked. What should we do with the sick chicken in the basement? What do you feed a chicken? Should we leave the lights on for her? Maybe she’d be happier if we let her out from under the steps to scratch and peck at the basement’s dirt floor. The most we ended up doing was to slide a bowl of water in her direction, along with some lettuce and apple slices. The chicken seemed to appreciate our effort, although not enough to rally over the two days it took for her former owner to come fetch her. He scooped her into a plastic crate and left the wire barrier behind, just in case we might want to keep a few chickens of our own.

My next encounter was a visit to Chinatown’s famed tic-tac-toe playing chicken. She was a very mesmerizing chicken as she measured the mettle of her challengers. Like everyone who visited her, I lost repeated games. Soon after, Calvin Trillin reported in The New Yorker that she had disappeared and was never seen in the city again.

But these two events were not the source of my obsession. This would happen 20 years later while attending the Ohio National Poultry Show.

Perhaps the size of a football field and a bit more, the hall was full of tables stacked three high with cages. The chickens collective protests raised the metal roof. I walked up and down the long aisles, head bobbing from bottom to top cage, to greet the ladies. How can one think that life wouldn’t be enriched by daily communing with such splendid creatures?

Asel, a Shamo, and the 2023 champion of the Ohio National Competition.

Back home, it was clear that this may not be a universal belief. Only a few family members and friends sat long enough to gaze at my 332 photographs of my favorite girls, either displeased about being pent in their cages or strutting about in a ring displaying all their feathered fineries. The pictures of roosters received a little more attention if only because of the anticipation that I had recorded cockfights. I did not. They are illegal in Ohio.

It’s fair to say that after I returned from Ohio I began to spend an ungodly amount of time learning about chickens. It is my favorite way to avoid doing whatever I say I am doing. This includes writing, which goes to show you how fierce my chicken passion is. There’s no levelheaded reason for why I have fallen so hard for chickens. Just so your know, I have other obessions, such as my long affection for the all-but-forgotten author, David Graham Phillips (see notes), or lard icing. But chickens automatically steal my heart, second only to the crazy dogs I have own. Something about them immediately calms the many mental bumps in my day.

May I bore you with just a few chicken tidbits? No one knows how many different breeds of chickens there are in the world, including The American Poultry Association. Chickens originated in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago. Occasional military conquests and the growth of trade routes brought them to the rest of the world where they crossbred on their own or by careful husbandry. They are the most intelligent of creatures, with a rich emotional life. Chickens are loyal and true friends.

One of the many sorrows of my life is that I do not have my own chicken flock. My garden has a good spot to build a commodious coop. It will be heavily fenced to deter the possums and racoons that act like they own the neighborhood alley. My neighbor two doors down is interested in going in on me. He grew up on a farm and knows even more about chickens than I do.

The problem is the neighbor between us. She has a variety of city officials and the local precinct on speed dial. It is legal to raise chickens in New York City, but she would probably suck out all my considerable joy and replace it with crippling angst.

I don’t know why I’m telling you about my chicken infatuation. I keep it to myself unless any topic remotely attached to chickens come up. But it’s mid- August so no one is reading this. But if anyone does, perhaps, like me, they may come to realize that thinking and reading about chickens and watching many videos about chickens is a perfect way to ignore whatever else is going on in their lives.

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Reasons to look up David Graham Phillips

• He was considered among the great muckraking journalists of his day.

• He wrote 24 novels known for their political and social themes, especially about the limited resources women encountered.

• His last great novel was Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, which explored the struggles of poor and working class single women to support themselves.

• He was shot to death by a rich husband who believed his wife was the model for Susan Lenox.

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Thanks for coming by today! I’d sure like to hear from you about the new name and, of course, your own secret weird obsession. If nothing else, go on and press that little heart button to tell Substack these stories are pretty damn good.

And don’t forget…..