Viewpoint: Lily’s Chickens

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Or we did, that is, until Lily got her chickens. The next time a roasted bird showed up on our table she grew wide-eyed, set down her fork, and asked, “Mama ... is that ... Mr.oodle?”

I reassured her a dozen times that I would never cook Mr.oodle; this was just some chicken we didn’t know. But a lesson had come home to, well, roost. All of us sooner or later must learn to look our food in the face. If we’re willing to eat an animal, it’s probably only responsible to accept the truth of its living provenance rather than pretending it’s a “product” from a frozen foods shelf with its gizzard in a paper envelope. I’ve been straight with my kids ever since the first one leveled me with her eye and said, “Mom, no offense, but I think you’re the Tooth Fairy.” So at dinner that night we talked about the biology, ethics and occasional heartbreaks of eating food. I told Lily that when I was a girl growing up among creatures I would someday have to eat, my mother had promised we would never butcher anything that had a first name. Thereafter I was always told from the outset which animals I could name. I offered Lily the same deal.

So she made her peace with the consumption of her beloveds’ nameless relatives. We still weren’t sure, though, how we’d fare when it came to eating their direct descendants. We’d allowed that next spring she might let a hen incubate and hatch out a few new chicks (Lily quickly decided on the precise number she wanted and, significantly, their names), but we stressed that we weren’t in this business to raise 10,000 pets. Understood, said Lily. So we waited a week, then two, while Jess, Bess and company worked through their putative emotional trauma and settled in to laying. We wondered, how will it go? When our darling 5-year-old pantheist, who believes that even stuffed animals have souls, goes out there with the egg basket one day and comes back with eggs, how will we explain to her that she can’t name those babes, because we’re going to scramble them?

Here is how it went: She returned triumphantly that morning with one unbelievably small brown egg in her basket, planted her feet on the kitchen tile, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Attention, everybody. I have an announcement: FREE BREAKFAST.”

We agreed that the first one was hers. I cooked it to her very exact specifications, and she ate it with gusto. We admired the deep red-orange color of the yolk, from the beta carotenes in those tasty green weeds. Lily could hardly wait for the day when all of us would sit down to a free breakfast, courtesy of her friends. I wish that every child could feel so proud, and every family could share the grace of our table.

Barbara Kingsolver’s 11 books include essay collections, short stories, poetry, an oral history, and many well-known novels including The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. She and her husband, Steven Hopp, and their two daughters grow most of their own food on a farm in the southern Appalachian Mountains.Visit her Web site, www.kingsolver.com.

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