For fear of her magic, the monks worked hard to keep Koria ignorant of the secular world. She never learned about feeding chickens or broken bridges, never heard a merchant’s hawking cry after a stolen pie. In the end, they raised a vapid child to rule them. --- ## ANALYSIS I've always wanted to be the kind of person who kept chickens and goats. Not because I have some sort of idealized notion about farm life — I grew up friends with a farming family and spent some time picking peppers on a commercial farm as a kid. I know it can be brutally hard work. I also know that despite certain survivalist dreams that manifest themselves in shows like The Walking Dead, it's basically impossible to live a completely self-sufficient "off-the-grid" lifestyle. Still, chickens seem cool. Some of my friends have chickens, and I think it's neat that you can basically feed them table scraps and get eggs in return. When I hear [Ursula Vernon talk about her chickens and their personalities](https://www.redwombatstudio.com/2018/09/05/its-very-muggy-here-that-is-all/), it seems so wholesome — eminently practical. I like to think of myself as a practical person, and there's something appealing about "growing" eggs the way I grow sage and spinach and ghost peppers right outside my door. Learning about baking bread and how yeast works is fun. I'm proud that I finally figured out how to keep eggs from sticking when cooking with cast iron (the trick is to use low heat and let the pan heat up before you put anything on it). But leaving aside worries about foxes, and maintaining a henhouse, and needing to collect the eggs, and not knowing whether a chicken will peck my hands off, I don't _know_ anything about chickens. No one ever taught me growing up how to take care of chickens — I've never seen one outside of farm visits, or along the side of the road driving through the West Virginia mountains on the way to visit families. Unlike my parents, I've never gone hunting — I don't know how to slaughter a bird, I don't know how to pluck one, and I'm not certain that I have the nerve to do either. Given my ignorance, it would be irresponsible of me to get a chicken. Plus, it would probably inconvenience my family a lot. I imagine it's tricky to find someone to watch a chicken for vacations, and that you can't take the day off to sleep in when the chickens expect to be fed, and you have to collect their eggs. If I ignore my garden for a few weeks and things die or don't die, it's not really a big deal. I forgot to harvest the basil before this year's frost, it died, it's not a crisis. So, I'll probably stick with plants. That said, chickens are pretty cool — and represent a surprisingly modern part of our diet. In Caesar's time, British chickens were kept mostly for blood sport, not meals. He wrote about how 'the Britons regard it as unlawful to eat the cock, but they breed them for amusement and pleasure.' The rest of Europe seems mostly to have eaten pheasant and geese, at least until the Benedictine Reform around 500 CE. One of the rules prohibited eating four-legged animals during fasting periods, which meant no beef or goat or mutton. Fish, by contrast, was allowed — and so was bird meat. I'm somewhat shaky on the details, but around this time, the archaeological records show a huge uptick in chicken consumption... alongside the sudden spread of a "plumpness" gene in chickens. It wasn't the last time that chickens were bred to have more meat, either. Chickens as we know them now were bred in the 1900s as part of a national contest hosted by an American agriculture company. It's weird how knowing that makes me feel better about not having a chicken coop in my backyard. I wonder how Koria feels about her ignorance... --- Do you have anything that you're embarrassed about not knowing how to do? Let me know in [the comments](https://eleanorkonik.com/vapid/#further-reading) %% ( [[2021-11-10 Vapid (DRAFT)]] ) %%. The link should work this time — sorry about last week! --- ## Further Reading - I learned a lot about chickens from [Tamed: Ten Species that Changed our World](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1112946/tamed/9781786090010.html) by Alice Roberts. You can [check out my review on my blog](https://eleanorkonik.com/book-review-tamed/) %% ( [[Review of Tamed by Alice Roberts]] ) %%.