On another related note, I wrote a short essay soon after I began to raise chickens that has some relevance to the discussion. It is archived in the Christianity Today library but since full access requires payment, I’ll reproduce the whole thing here (warning: Thoreau is cited favorably and please, don’t send me emails telling me that he carted his laundry home to his mother, I know).

About a month ago, my family and I got chickens for the first time. I sheltered them and fed them, and they began to thrive. How elegantly simple, I thought. Dinner (and breakfast) simmering slowly, very slowly, just outside my back door. Of course, it has turned out not to be simple at all. There’s the daily watering and feeding and the intermittent cleaning and moving the pen to fertilize a different patch of ground. And the weather and foxes have taken on new significance, both threatening to end my quest for sustenance in a fit of violence.

It is fascinating to be responsible for—to care for—my food weeks and even months before I will eat it. In doing so I am clumsily taking up the intricate dance steps performed by most of those who have gone before me. And by repeating and renewing the motions my ancestors knew by heart, I begin to rebuild old ways of knowing. These ways of knowing teach me about this place, this patch of ground; and they teach me about my connections to those who went before me and those who will come after. I have begun, ever so slightly, to think differently about the world. There is epistemology in everything we do. If raising chickens can change the way one thinks about the world, other methods of finding food can have a similar effect. Our culture’s dominant way of knowing, when it comes to chickens, is the supermarket. The supermarket sells a highly refined and mediated kind of knowing, just the opposite of what the chicken coop has to offer. The knowledge one gets at the supermarket is sterile, chilled, sliced, and packaged.

The supermarket is the Windows operating system of the family table, user friendly to a fault. The guts of the program are hidden beneath the surface. The seamless web of knowledge from egg to chicken to omelet or pot-pie is processed and reduced to its most consumable parts.

How does the epistemology of the supermarket affect the rest of our lives? I’m beginning to think that its effect is more dramatic than we realize. After all, we will only find things to love from the spectrum of what we know.

Henry David Thoreau wrote of his experience with beans: “It was a singular experience[,] that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them—the last was the hardest of all—and I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans.” Those who buy chicken meat at the supermarket (I among them for the time being) can eat chicken to their hearts’ content (and most do), but they will never know chickens. And because they will never know chickens, they will never be capable of loving the surprising things revealed by such knowledge.