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At the risk of sounding like closet Aggies, we’ll confess: we dig the American pastoral.
After spending our summer crawling from one Berkeley farmer’s market to another, trash-talking maize and soy Michael Pollan style and scoring free samples of local produce, we understand the ups (and downs) of going organic.
But in the frenzy of the ideological thrust towards that Agriculture Renaissance California’s been waiting for, some argue that Berkeley foodies have gone too far with urban farming.
While the local trend of backyard chicken-rearing may seem like an innocent quest for high-caliber organic eggs, a host of bird disease epidemics have transformed otherwise cheerful coops into chicken sanatoriums.
Berkeley is one of the few Bay Area cities that endows its citizenry with the legal right to keep roosters, though some residents feel that crack-of-dawn cock-a-doodle-doo-ing should be reserved for the barnyard. Or cartoons.
These negative byproducts of this fad have driven frustrated neighbors to drastic, passive aggressive measures. One resident suspects her neighbor of first degree chicken slaughter, waking up one morning to find two of her chickens dead, necks snapped in half, the fence of her backyard coop mangled by what could only have been the foot of an angry human.
In the midst of this controversy, we can’t help but cling to our baby chicks with the kind of unabashed optimism only college students and The Lorax seem to possess in these unforgiving times. After all, so much of this state depends on a red wheelbarrow.
Image Source: zoomar under Creative Commons
When the Problems Come Home to Roost [NY Times]
Backyard Chickens [site]
Tags:backyard chickens, chicken homocides, Michael Pollan, unabashed optimism, William Carlos Williams
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