From Coop to Soup: A Dinner Story

Boy am I grateful for homegrown food. The most recent batch of roosters to hit the chopping block weren’t even ours but we’re glad to take them. Store-bought food is either frighteningly cheap (in every single way) or crazy expensive and maybe a little more worth it. I stand there in the grocery store staring at the chicken and I wonder what has gone terribly wrong in that chicken’s life for it to cost a fraction of the value I’d put on these roosters we butchered at home.

Maybe it’s because we haven’t grown a lot of our own food, or maybe it’s all the failing we’ve done in the process, but that stuff seems impossibly cheap. Then again, you don’t see golden fat globules when you make stock from the store-bought stuff.

I wonder, too, about the time involved in such tasks as butchering and rearing animals. These tasks are more than hours on a punch card and that food is something that’s almost impossible to buy these days. Some things can’t be quantified, like standing next to your children and showing them how to butcher a rooster, or deep nourishment that money and supplements can’t buy.

It’s a drop in the bucket of our food needs, to butcher some roosters when they need culling. But you’ve got to start somewhere.