Susan Orlean of The New Yorker writes about the rise of personal poultry, sourcing its popularity to Martha Stewart’s seminal 1982 work, Entertaining: “She made chickens seem less like livestock and more like useful and companionable creatures.” People have backyard coops for several reasons — locavorism, cheap eggs, that “back-to-the-land feeling” — but McMurray Hatchery, which provides many of the country’s birds, finds that uncertainty breeds poultry farmers. “When times are tough, people want chickens,” the company’s president tells Orlean. Watch the video to to meet her chickens.
The It Bird [NYer]
Related: My Empire of Dirt [NYM]
