My 14-year-old sister, Courtney, and her friends decided to do something novel the other day when the exhibition came to town. Instead of spending the day blowing money at the fair, they went to my parent's acreage.
They were getting a little bored, so they invited some of the guys over.
Not sure what to do, they chased chickens.
One of the guys commented, "You have chickens?!?"
"Yeah," Courtney responded.
The boy was a little scared, because he had never seen a chicken before in his life. Courtney caught a chicken and offered it to him to hold. He said, "No thanks," and stepped away.
This boy had never seen where an egg came from until this day.
"Oh my God, it's warm," they commented as Courtney pulled an egg out from under the chicken sitting in its nest.
These are not the chickens you get at the local supermarket. These are the real deal - free range chickens that get let out of their pen each day, feed on grass and bugs, walk around the yard, and are herded back into their pen at night. My stepdad shows more love to these chickens than some parents show their children.
They get an average of 27 eggs a day, which means each time I see my parents, I get more eggs than I can eat in a month.
When it comes time to butcher them, these chickens weigh in at eight pounds or more. They make store turkeys look small. A roasted chicken is enough to feed the family for three days.
So, as I was saying, the boys were impressed with these chickens.
They also thought it was really cool that my sister had an honest-to-God tractor at her place. Maybe they thought her tractor was sexy.
These kids have apparently lived in the city all their lives, in rural Saskatchewan, and had no connection to where their food came from. This is despite the fact there's a substantial meat packing plant in town, a chicken farm south of town and grain and cattle farms as far as the eye can see.
I always view life through the lens of someone who spent their early days on the farm. Like Courtney, I fed the chickens, and collected eggs. We never had beef, but I spent my fair share of time shovelling grain and eating dust while harrowing on an old tractor.
It's the disconnect with agrarian society that has led to the unrealistic views many people have about food. All those animal rights PETA types really seem to think food just falls out of the sky like manna from heaven. If you've never seen a chicken until you were 14, then it's no wonder you might get freaky views when it comes to food.
Every year we seem to lose another five to 10 per cent of farmers. It's to the point where there are so few farmers left, those who remain and are profitable are so large they have to be run as large scale commercial enterprises. The days of raising a few cluckers in the chicken coop in the back of the yard are long gone.
Indeed, even if you wanted to take kids on a field trip these days, there are few farms like this remaining where the chickens are not kept in cages from day one until butchering.
As a result, we're going to see more PETA types, running around in bikinis on -30 Regina streets, preaching their philosophy of veganism.
Maybe they need to chase a real chicken some time, and hold a warm egg.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
