What is this thing, anyway?

I’ve been mulling over the idea of starting a blog for a while now (hasn’t everyone? Or I guess that’s podcasts now… Maybe that will be next.). But it wasn’t immediately clear what it should even be about. Will it be a cooking blog?  A recipes blog? A “lifestyle” blog? (I’m not even really sure what that means, to be honest.) A blog about reducing waste? A blog about gardening? Chickens? Dogs? Yarn? Crafts? Mending? Homesteading? All of the above? 

I think it’s going to be a little bit of all of those things. What I want most is to share the discovery of how things work. It’s incredibly empowering to observe a complex undertaking and break it down into steps and work through them one by one, until the thing is done. Trying things and working out how to do them until you’ve figured it out, even at a basic level, builds a sense of self-reliance - and once you start to build confidence that things that seemed outlandish a few days or weeks or months ago are now things you know you can achieve, it just grows and grows. With a healthy sense of curiosity and a willingness to fail (sometimes repeatedly), anyone can learn to do just about anything. 

But it’s not just about knowing how to do things. For one thing, in reality, nobody can invest the time it takes to become a true artisan in all the crafts there are in the world to do. Especially not if you have a day job, bills, or family responsibilities. Who among us has not taken on several hobbies, only for them to disappear into the craft supply closet not long after? But not every skill learned needs to be carried with you through life. I was once really really good at making friendship necklaces, but I don’t feel the need to return to that particular craft (... or do I?  I don’t, right? See, this is how it starts). 

No, for me, it’s about much more than just building skills. It’s really about understanding things more deeply - building a connection to the things that make up our world, through the process of engaging in them directly and with a sense of curiosity. 

I hope the following digression will help illustrate what I mean. I think many of us have a memory of being taught to prepare some simple, everyday food. For me, it was eggs. My sister and I were classic Gen X latchkey kids, and my mom taught us how to make simple boiled or fried eggs when I was pretty young. Whether my mom intended to or not, she instilled in me a sense of having the key to the “right” way to make eggs turn out the best they can. Over the years, I’ve tweaked the approach, but I still use the basic method she taught me. I understood it instinctively as something spiritual, by which I mean immutable and inherent to the nature of the world. 

I recall distinctly the first time I went grocery shopping on my own, after moving into my own apartment. I was still in my hometown, less than 20 minutes from where my parents lived, but it was a huge leap of independence. It was a tiny apartment in a shabby 70s building with a small galley kitchen and two roommates. Buying my first carton of eggs and cooking them in my own pot in my “own” kitchen was nothing short of a total evolution of independence. 

Over the next few years of college and graduate school, I became very interested in our food systems, in the US and around the world. I was born on a smallholding in Wyoming and raised in Nebraska, so agriculture was of more than passing interest to me (even though I didn’t have plans to become a farmer). I was captivated by descriptions of integrated farming systems, which led me to see eggs -and of course the chickens that produce them - in a different way. Eggs are a perfect protein, they require precious little in the way of resources to produce, and the chickens that produce them also produce a highly effective form of fertilizer from little more than kitchen scraps and bugs (but if you have fish waste to give them?? Holy cow! Are you on a roll). 

I also learned about zoonotics. My PhD was in anthropology, but I was pursuing an MPH in epidemiology on the side, and I learned about the threats to both animal and human health from the practices of industrial scale animal husbandry. One needn’t even discuss the ethics of the conditions animals are kept in to recognize the threats to animal and human health and well-being posed by the simple density of laying hens on many factory farms. I was on a tight student budget, but I started splashing out for the fancy eggs pretty early in that educational experience. (Let’s not get started on the challenges of adequate consumer labeling - that’s a post for another day.)

At this time, I was living in Atlanta, where city chickens had never been out of style. A friend started a backyard coop, on the agreement that I would chicken-sit when she was out of town. We were both in careers that traveled a lot, so this arrangement worked. I knew chickens were a practical element of an integrated food system. I didn’t expect them to be quite so amusing and endearing. And the eggs were great. 

Flash forward to the present. We just moved into a house that has, among other attractions, what can only be called a five-star chicken coop. And, it came WITH CHICKENS. I’m no longer a chicken auntie, I’m a chicken MOM. It’s a whole new ball game. And let me tell you, these chickens have some issues. I’ll write another post soon about trying to become an overnight expert in chicken health and sociality - for now, suffice it to say, I’ve read about a million chicken blogs in the last few weeks so that I can become an adequately responsible and responsive steward of chickens. 

What has also shifted overnight is my relationship to eggs. The eggs that have been gathered from our chickens feel quite a lot more valuable than the eggs (even fancy ones) purchased at a nominal price at our local Redner’s. Objectively, I understand the inherent value of an egg - I know that resources were used to create it; I know that it cost a farmer a set amount of time and resources to coax that egg out of the chicken that made it; I know it cost the chicken real physical resources to make it. Even knowing all that, it somehow still feels emotionally unburdensome to waste an egg. It’s a cost-benefit calculation more than anything. I certainly try not to waste any eggs if I can help it; but sometimes they simply go unused while life carries on. When eggs get old, I still try not to simply toss them. More than one egg has been mixed into the dogs’ kibble to avoid just that. And even before moving to our new house, I saved the shells - at least, when I lived in Atlanta and had a garden with roses and tomatoes to feed them to. 

But somehow, wasting an egg from my ladies feels altogether different. I suppose they do cost more, if I added up the costs of the bedding and pellets (not to mention medicines) that we invest. However, it’s genuinely not their higher cost that makes an egg from OUR chickens feel more valuable. It’s because we KNOW THOSE CHICKENS. We know how HARD they worked to make those eggs. We know how hard WE worked to care for the hens that made those eggs. I admit, with seven hens, we are not quite keeping up with the egg production, even as prolific a consumer of eggs as I am. But wasting an egg from our ladies would be an unthinkable crime. 

A photo of five eggs, including brown, green, and white eggs.

Our connection to these eggs has changed our relationship with them. Perhaps that is not so surprising? We like a pepper we grew better than a pepper we bought, not just because it’s fresher. 

But the thing is, having these chickens hasn’t just changed my relationship with their eggs. It has also changed my relationship with all other eggs. I see the grocery store egg quite differently than before. I’m less inclined to waste those eggs than I was before. The act of doing it myself, understanding how it works on a deeper level, has changed my relationship with eggs and with how I eat them and everything I make from them. 

I think that’s true of almost anything we undertake to do ourselves. Getting your hands into the process changes your understanding of it, and with it your connection to that little part of the world. This simple act of understanding feels like a spiritual one, and in part, I’m hoping this project will be one way of finding my fellow worshipers.

So that, loosely, is what I hope this project will be. I also know a few things I don’t want it to be. I don’t want it to be “aspirational” - I don’t want anyone reading this to ever think they need to do more / consume more / be more after they read something on this site. I want to meet you wherever you are, embracing whatever you are bringing to the table right now, today. Many of you reading are not in a position to just go start raising chickens, or have the particular desire to do so. But hopefully if you’ve been drawn here, you do have the things you want to build a connection to. It may be a patio garden, or some specific crafts you want to undertake. Everyone can explore these connections in ways that fit within the boundaries of their lives. 

The main point is that you should give yourself permission to explore within the boundaries that work for you. Some days you’ll have the will and wherewithal to organically natural-dye some Easter eggs and save the shells for your rose-bushes. Other days it’s going to be PAAS and stickers and those eggs will be GLORIOUS. Some days you’ll make your own creme fraiche for the first course of the French-inspired menu for the dinner party and other days the dinner party’s going to be chili with sour cream from a tub, and it’s going to be delicious. Some days you’ll remember your reusable grocery bags when you go into the store and other days you will leave them in the trunk and only remember you have them when you’re already in line for the check-out and you’ve been waiting 20 minutes already and you’ll sigh and say “paper”. And you may feel badly about that, but you should definitely forgive yourself for that. I’ve been in each of those situations, many many times. If you have been there too, you are one of my people.

I hope this blog will be an antidote to the idea that the instagram version of these experiences has more inherent value than any other experiences. Natural-dying some Easter eggs is in no way more virtuous than dying them in any other way; but it can be incredibly fun. It’s a grand science experience - you get to play around with pH values and figure out how to get all different kinds of colors out of all different kinds of plants. And even though it looks like it, it doesn’t have to be more expensive. It is definitely more messy, though. And yet no picture of natural dye Easter eggs is going to show you that part. I will, though. I promise you that. 

I have no interest in starting a blog about more virtuous living, or adding one more thing to the list that people will feel they should aspire to. Generally speaking, we are all doing our best and our best doesn’t have to be perfect on every front of our lives. Or even a single front. But I do think there’s inherent value in the discovery and sense of connection to be found in different ways of doing things. I want to share some ideas from my own messy little corner of the world that may spark your curiosity or be the right idea for wherever you are today.

My fingernails will not be manicured, my messes will be in frame, my mistakes will be aired. Anything I have learned that is worth sharing has been learned through trial and error. Lots and lots of error. Hopefully you can save yourself some time and trouble by learning from my mistakes. But sometimes you won’t! And it’s totally okay.