Sometimes, in the course of my writing life, I interview chefs, talk to government officials, and even visit Indy Race car drivers at their homes, all in the name of food journalism. I’ve eaten biscuits five ways, learned about school lunch requirements, and eaten avocados shipped from the family farm for articles I’ve written. And once, because I was just lucky enough, I met a flock of chickens owned by a former NFL player.
Of course the chickens weren’t nearly as impressed as I was by their owner’s record of tackles and interceptions. They were, however, delighted by their expansive coop, with its brightly painted hen house, and the opportunity to eat freely the worms and grubs in their owners’ lawn. As far as chicken lives go, these hens really had it all. And the proof was in the laying boxes, with 13 layers producing as many eggs almost every day.
In Chapter 3 of Farmacology, physician and author Daphne Miller talks about two much bigger egg operations owned by one family: Heartland Egg and Arkansas Egg. Both businesses have moved beyond conventional caged-chicken egg operations, but the differences are still stark.
Arkansas Egg raises cage-free organic chickens, in five hen houses filled with 15,000 hens each. In conventional operations, a hen house might have 75,000 chickens living in cages from floor to ceiling, but at Arkansas Egg, the chickens are free to roam around. Of course, that might sound more verdant than it actually is. Restricted to the henhouse, the 15,000 hens move around on the packed floor pecking at whatever they can find. According to Miller, the stench of ammonia was so strong in the barn it made her eyes water, and the sound was “a continuous high-pitched cackle.” A low-lying electrified wire gave the hens a constant buzz to keep them from laying eggs on the floor, and most had their beaks trimmed to keep them from pecking each others’ eyes out.
Meanwhile, at Heartland Egg, about five thousand hens share the same space that 15,000 do at Arkansas Egg, and then only overnight. Around 8 a.m. each morning, the doors are opened and the hens head out into the green pastures where they spend their days playing tag, dust bathing, rooting for worms and seeds, and clucking to each other. Like the small flock of hens I recently met, these chickens seemed happier and healthier than their cage-free but overcrowded counterparts. But even free-range chickens are not without their risks. At least two hens from the flock I visited had been killed by hawks. At Heartland Egg, a bobcat had eaten two hundred hens in the course of a month. Then there are the risks of thunderstorms, parasites, even falls for hens that roost and roam so freely.
Miller used the word stress to talk about the two flocks: one experienced a state of continuous low-level stress that came with living in a packed hen house, while the other was mostly subjected to occasional but intense levels of stress that arose from living a mostly free-range life. The two flocks reminded Miller of two patients who came to her about the same time in 2009, both diagnosed with swine flu.
Mike told Miller he thought he was dying, the flu had struck him so hard. When Miller began to look deeper into Mike’s life, she discovered why: he lived with the same kind of continuous low-level stress that the Arkansas chickens did. He worked a high-stress, low-satisfaction job. When he wasn’t stuck behind his desk, he traveled a lot, rarely exercising and usually eating at his desk. He felt his position was constantly threatened by younger executives coming up behind him, and even his home life, with a wife who always wanted him to do something and a teenage daughter with a newly formed bad attitude, left much to be desired. Under the hum of constant stress, Mike’s like sounded a lot like the Arkansas Egg chickens, crammed together in the giant hen house.
Carl, on the other hand, received the same diagnosis, but didn’t feel the effects of the flu nearly as badly. He also worked in a high stakes job, but his stress came and went depending on an important client meeting or a public speaking opportunity. Generally, he felt valued by his team and could leave work behind at the end of the day when he went home to his family. He and his boss had a mutually supportive relationship and even worked out together over lunch some days. Carl’s life sounded more like the hens at Heartland.
To try to understand the connection between the two flocks of chickens and her two patients, Miller talked with Bruce McEwen, a stress researcher and senior scientist at Rockefeller University in New York City. He talked about the process of allostasis in our bodies that allow us to adapt physiologically to stress, the ability to “achieve stability through change.” He used the example of cortisol response, which according to Miller, “can change radically through the day depending on whether the individual is sitting or standing, thinking about a problem, running, or sleeping.”
McEwen explained that allostatic response is supposed to periodically turn on and off, “without leaving a trace” on the body, as in the case of pasture-raised chickens, who have occasional but intense encounters with a thunderstorm, or Carl, who feels the occasional but intense pressure of public speaking. But when the allostatic process occurs “too frequently or [is] not turned on or off efficiently, well, then you have something called ‘allostatic overload.’” Which sounds a lot like the lives of our confined chickens above, or even Mike.
The great thing about stress and its effects on the body, even chicken bodies, is that once the stress is over and the allostatic response can return to normal, the body and its systems, including the brain, can recover. For Mike, things got worse before they got better, but eventually, he stood up for himself at work and began to travel less and take more time off. He started eating better and exercising more, which led to better sleep and even some unexpected weight loss. Even though he was working less, he told Dr. Miller he’d never felt as productive. The same is true for the chickens. Generally, after 63 weeks in a henhouse, the layers are considered “spent” and are sent off to be processed as pet food. But when these hens are instead transferred to a pasture setting like Heartland Egg, something miraculous happens.
“With a little sunshine, outdoor play, and socializing, these hens can get back up to 80 percent productivity for at least another thirty weeks,” said Matt Ohayer, of Vital Farms Egg Cooperative, which Heartland Eggs is part of.
When the constant stress of modern life leaves us feeling the allostatic overload of a crowded henhouse, how do we transform our lives to mimic the benefits of a free range life, like the hens at Heartland Egg, or better yet, like the chickens I met in the backyard of a former NFL player? Miller has a few suggestions: develop meaningful relationships, exercise, eat a healthy diet, and get a good night’s sleep. But the option I like the best is this: take charge of your life.
“Even in the most toxic environment there are steps you can take to optimize your situation,” Miller writes. “Set realistic goals for yourself and communicate them to others, exercise daily, and take time to care for and pamper yourself.”
Write It Out
What areas of your life feel most stressful? Does stress come to you in occasional spurts that feel manageable, like the free-range chickens we talked about? Or do you feel the constant strain of continual stress? Write about what’s been stressing you out lately.
Which of Miller’s suggestions feel most in reach for you? Which feel out of reach? In what ways can you exert some control over your own life, even on a small scale? Jot down a few ideas to get a handle on your stress.
Now think about your writing life? Where’s the stress there? What’s one step you could take to exert a little control there?
Read With Us
This month, we’re reading Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up together.
Photo by brianna.lehman, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Charity Singleton Craig.
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L.L. Barkat says
I do so love when you bring out your humorous side in your writing, Charity. 🙂 Also, I appreciate your summary of the book material, that gets right to the heart of things.
Indeed, I’ve thought about things like this in the past (the way we care for the animals who provide our food), but you’ve renewed my sense of it. That info about the chickens amazed me. But even without knowing such info, I do believe one could know some very important things about the chickens (and therefore one’s own health) simply by the difference in actual product…
Eggs produced in the 75,000-caged manner have such incredibly fragile shells. Compare this to the eggs I’ve been getting from where Sara is volunteering at Fable Farms, for instance. The shells are so thick it takes some real effort to crack them. Plus, the eggs feel incredibly heavy in contrast, when you hold them in your hand.
I’m thinking that it’s kind of like what I was just learning from Sonia (who’s taking an animal toxicology class at the moment) the other day about bioaccumulation and biomagnification (that’s really about the way toxic things accumulate and are magnified in individual organisms but then also up the food chain more and more, eventually affecting the health of those at the “top,” like large animals, fish, and people). Might it not also work the same with nutritional profile and stress markers embedded in something like eggs? In other words, if we are eating fragile eggs produced under stress conditions, do we expect them to make us as strong as a hardy egg? (I’m guessing that Miller’s answer is no, though I’m not sure she puts it that way?)
It’s perhaps less easy to see this regarding a fruit or a vegetable grown under stressed-soil conditions. They all sort of look and feel the same (though the rich-soil fruits and veggies taste worlds better). But with eggs, it’s more obvious. (Sonia was also telling me, btw, that one of the ways biologists can tell that songbirds are being exposed to toxic elements is that their eggs become so fragile that they break if the bird sits on them. Similarly, it seems to me that Miller is talking about a form of “breaking,” when she discusses poor health.)
Charity Singleton Craig says
Laura — Thanks for your thoughtful comment. The difference in productivity and quality of the eggs between the two types of chickens was something I wish I could have discussed more in the article. This was what was so interesting about these two environments: things weren’t always as good and bad as even Miller wanted them to be. For instance, the “free-range” chickens in the 15,000 per barn situation actually produced more and bigger eggs than the pasture-raised chickens, in the same 63-week period. But in addition to more fragile shells and less nutritious content. the eggs and actually the chickens themselves had so many more issues. Plus, they found the pasture raised chickens could lay eggs for more than 63 weeks. And when they took the stressed out chickens and put them in a pasture setting, they also could continue to produce eggs for longer as just a slightly lower volume.
To apply this back to our health, I think that those of us get so stressed out by producing large volumes of work in a short amount of time might do better if we paced ourselves. We might end up having a longer and more satisfying writing life (or whatever our work life might be) by giving ourselves “a little sunshine, outdoor play, and socializing,” like they do for the “retired” laying hens to keep them producing.
I wonder how the principles in this chapter might also apply to physician burnout, which is a big problem in healthcare right now.
And can I say how cool it is that Sara is volunteering at a farm and Sonia is taking animal toxicology? I was just thinking this week that I need to beef up my knowledge of science, particularly biology, botany, ecology, and limnology.
Thanks, as always, for engaging with me on this important content.
L.L. Barkat says
I think it’s the “more and bigger” that’s the most deceiving, with fruits and veggies as well. And then we don’t realize what’s actually missing (nutrients!), which ultimately impacts our health.
When my girls were rooming at college, they told me that even though they “ate the same foods” as they did at home, they were always, always hungry. My theory was that the foods only looked “the same” and that they must have been lacking in nutrients.
Related, then: I believe, from observation and personal experience that one of the reasons we may overeat is when we are eating foods with lower nutritional content; I think the body pushes us to keep eating, at whatever volume is necessary, until we get some kind of threshold nutrient needs met. I know that eating has mostly been looked at through the lens of calorie intake, but I’m thinking that’s not the full picture when it comes to how hunger works.
Charity Singleton Craig says
I just wanted to say “yes!” to all of this. I think you’re really onto something when it comes to calories and nutrients. Maybe for healthful eating, and even weight loss, we should count nutrients instead of calories.
Megan Willome says
Love this, Charity. I am fascinated that the Heartland eggs/chickens were so much healthier despite the very real stress of hawks and bobcats. It makes me think that we need to talk about stress differently. The solution is not a stress-free life (how could any of us ever even attempt such a thing?) but the kind of stress and the duration and intensity of it are things we often can affect.
Incidentally, my daughter once worked at in a nursery greenhouse at a small farm, and I’ll link to an essay about it for the book club on your “The Art of the Essay.” Hawks and bobcats were an issue, as was the occasional snake, but oh, those eggs!
Charity Singleton Craig says
I really like this, Megan, and I agree that we should talk about stress differently. I had some of the same thoughts reading about the chickens and also about the two men. They both had stress, but that constant low-grade stress which “seems” like it should be more manageable is actually the more damaging.
And yes, free range, pasture-raised chickens lay the very best eggs!
Will Willingham says
So, a colleague has chickens, and regularly brings dozens of eggs in to share with the rest of us. I’m not going to admit how long it was before the idea no longer made me uncomfortable, that somehow factory farm eggs were in some way going to be better (in every possible respect). I think it actually has a lot to do with not knowing what happens from the time the hen deposits the egg to when it shows up on my desk (how many days ago was the egg laid, who all has touched it, did it sit in the car for a while, etc.), where I might have convinced myself I understand the process, and its regulations, better when it has been commercially moved from hen-to-table—that is, the part that was more difficult for me was where the egg had been not the chicken. But even so. It’s interesting to consider the things we are willing to acknowledge and the things we are not, when it comes to recognizing which will be inherently better.
Like Megan, I was also really intrigued about the different stress reactions, and that the normal life-of-a-chicken threats had a totally different effect than the much more damaging threats resulting from the man-made-for-chickens environment, and wonder about the implications for us humans trying to survive.
Will Willingham says
I should add… I take all the eggs I can get from her now. 🙂 Sometimes I do manage to get over myself.
Charity Singleton Craig says
Will — Your comment was really interesting … how the process of how the egg made its way to your table kept you from accepting eggs from someone who raised the hens themselves. Sometimes I feel the same about a locally owned restaurant: since I don’t know their processes, they somehow feel less trustworthy than a chain, whose processes seem to be vetted by the fact that they have multiple locations. I wonder if we’d be more open to lots of more natural food experiences if we understood the process more?
The information about stress in this chapter was also so intriguing to me. It definitely feels like principles we can transfer to our own lives.
Jennifer Searls says
I’ve got a variety of entry points when it comes to chicken talk 🙂 and really enjoyed reading this chapter + the discussion here. My son regularly lobbies for us to get some chickens for our backyard and I keep reminding him that we live at the edge of downtown Anchorage – there are some problems to solve. The conversation remains open.
I spent a few days on my uncle’s hazelnut farm in Oregon this past summer and couldn’t help but feel like I was pulling some kind of magic trick every time I reached behind a warm clucking body of feathers to pull out a breakfast egg.
I am listening to the audible version of Farmacology and laughed when I heard the reader state the heading: “The Stress Reduction Toolbox, or, How to Become a Pasture-Based Human.”
A Pasture – Based Human! so good!!!! Her bullet points (tools) for reducing/managing stressors resonated with my lived experiences and I am grateful to have had resources in my life to help/allow me to implement them at various/necessary times. But that makes me think about the ways in which tools and opportunities for stress management/reduction may be the stuff of a privileged life?
One last bit of trivia for now – I’ve had some drama and trauma to my body over the years and my go-to recovery food – the first thing I ask for when I start eating again – is always an egg.
Charity Singleton Craig says
Hi Jennifer — Loved reading your own chicken connections, and do hope you’ll keep us posted on whether you get some chickens!
I really resonated with the concept of being a pasture-based human, too. Like you, I found a lot of the things on her list are already part of my life, and it made me wonder how to move toward a world where more of us have access to them.
Thanks so much for joining us for book club!