Neighborhood Nourishment
What's a Free-Range, Cage-Free Chicken Anyway?
Chicken is a simple food, but its labels are anything but. Here are some tips to navigating the world of mass-produced poultry.
The night I butchered my first and only chicken, its body still warm from the summer sun, I told my friend how much it had meant to me to be able to see the other side of dinner. He nodded in agreement: "That's why I do this," he said simply, his waving arm taking in the garden, the chicken run, the wall of homeschooling materials. "We can study chickens all day long, but in the end, what matters is that my children understand -- this animal was sitting over there eating bugs, and now it's sitting on the table and we're eating it. It gives them a healthy respect for life and death." This healthy respect recently led Salon's Francis Lam to eschew chicken, not altogether, but the kind that are crammed into tiny wire cages and fed until …
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