Unplated: An Interview with Tove Danovich
Raising chickens can transform your world in the most unexpected ways
This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.
This Friday, I’ll be sharing some thoughts on reconnecting to fun, playful writing, and making a very special announcement.
I can’t wait to share it with you!
I eagerly anticipated Tove Danovich’s Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them. Having kept, and fallen in love with, chickens in my own backyard, I know the magic of waking up and going out to visit your bird friends, watching their personalities unfold, and building real, lasting bonds just as you would with any other critter in my care (until recently that is: If you know me offline you know the story of the developer taking my coops).
I approached Danovich’s writing as something bittersweet, no longer having chickens myself, but also seeing so much about her love of chickens that resonates deeply with my experience. It really is a beautifully written and insightful book, and since Danovich is not only author of Under the Henfluence but also a journalist, I was eager to talk with her about how keeping chickens, and writing this book, has influenced her understanding of and participation in food systems that tend to strip down everything (including living creatures) into input/output, product/consumer models. Here, we talk about the transformative love of chickens, which may just make you fall in love with them too (if you aren’t already, that is).
JS: First of all, tell me a bit about yourself. What is your background, and what inspired you to start keeping chickens?
TD: I was a food and culture writer who focused a lot on the sustainable food movement so the hens, initially, were just going to be food producers who I cared for. I’d known about how industrial farming treats chickens and other animals so knowing I’d have eggs from hens with better lives was a big selling point. So I was surprised to fall in love with them. I did not think chickens were going to become such a focus of my life and work at all.
JS: I appreciate your work because you dive into the joy of keeping chickens, but you don't shy away from the heartache that can come from chicken tending too. Your work resonates with me because it really gets at the nuanced and deep connections we can build with our flocks. What is it about our relationship to chickens that is so special?
TD: Thank you so much! I don't know if this is a particularly human trait but we seem to really feel a deep need to connect with members of other species. Pet keeping is such a fascinating phenomenon and I don't know that the capacity of our relationship with chickens is more complex than any other species.
I think a major point I try to make in the book is that chickens are just as much intelligent creatures with an inner life as any other animal. What makes it interesting is that they can both be pets who we name and care for and grieve and we can kill 60 billion of them for food a year and raise them in terrible conditions where they never see the light of day. So people are surprised to find out how much chicken keepers like me can love these animals and, even more so, that our connection with these birds is not a twenty-first century phenomenon at all.
JS: I'd love to hear about your flock! How many birds do you have, and how long have you been keeping chickens?
TD: I got my first three chicks in 2018 and they almost immediately became all I thought about. In some ways, five years is not a very long time but I feel like I packed a full PhD worth of study in them during those years. I currently have eight hens and they're all different breeds or color variations. Right now all of them are fancy breeds that lay colorful eggs or look especially cute versus hens bred to lay a lot of eggs. Even so, we're getting six eggs a day this time of year and it's more than our two-person household can handle!
JS: It's hard to pick favorites, but do you have any breeds of chickens you gravitate towards?
TD: I absolutely love bearded chickens. I don't know what it is about them but I find their fluffy cheeks utterly charming. There's one breed of chicken called the Modern Game that I don't have but would love to even though they're on the extreme opposite of the spectrum, like the greyhound of the chicken world.
JS: As a longtime chicken keeper, I really resonated with your writing, and can see how it's different than other chicken books I've come across. But I'm curious to hear from you, what does this book share or do that hasn't been done before?
TD: There are books that looked at chickens as food producers (though they mostly stuck to the meat industry) and ones that told the story of someone's relationship with their flock but I couldn't really find anything that did both.
When I was getting into chickens and reading a lot about them, I really wanted a book that would look at who chickens were on their own and who they are in their relationship with us. (As a domesticated animal, they are very much a human creation!) I didn't find it on the shelves so that's what I set out to write in Under the Henfluence.
JS: Backyard chicken-keeping is interesting to me, because as a culture we tend to primarily see chickens as food, and/or food sources that produce eggs. Keeping them as pets requires us to see chickens as individuals, not products.
How do you think the growing movement of backyard chicken keeping might shift our perception of animals we tend to consider food?
TD: Your point about it making us see them as individuals is a great one. The UK for many years has had these programs where people rescue "spent hens" from the egg industry and rehome them.
Instead of being killed around 18 months old, the hens get to have homes for the first time. I talk about this a bit in the book. It's much more popular overseas than here even though it is becoming more popular.
But during that same time there's been a wealth of new legislation and consumer demand for better treatment of egg laying hens. I can't give these programs all the credit, and I'm sure there are some cultural differences that helped this along.
But I also can't help but think that so many households getting these hens, seeing what they look like at their rescue, and the change afterward is a major part of this story too.
JS: I'm curious, too, about your ideas on the intersection of backyard chicken tending and our food systems.
What relationship do you think backyard chicken caring can have on our food systems? Could you see backyard/community chicken keeping as a way to assist with food security or community care?
TD: We have a lot of neighbors where we live and there's one in particular where we hardly spoke until one day I had too many eggs, dropped off a carton with a note, and now we're very neighborly. I regularly text them to come to the fence for eggs and they give us seasonal produce that they grow in return (and some watermelon or other scraps for the hardworking ladies)!
I was just in Ann Arbor on book tour and a friend showed me her neighbor who has chickens in the front yard. All the kids in the neighborhood know the chickens and their keeper as well. They can be a really amazing bridge toward making a community. We give away eggs all the time and sometimes donate them to a local food bank type program that will accept them. I think that's all lovely.
I don't think backyard chickens can ever replace the egg industry with our current rates of egg consumption but I think if we cut back on animal products, there's maybe a balance we could reach between smaller, better farms for the animals, workers, and environment and backyard food production.
JS: We've talked about how chickens relate to other folks' food decisions, but I'm curious how keeping chickens has shaped your personal relationship with food: Either in terms of what you eat, how you view food (or chickens as food), how you view/repurpose food waste?
TD: Well I stopped eating chicken soon after I got my hens and then cut out all poultry. A lot of people aren't eating beef because it has the highest climate impact--and switching to chicken instead--but you'd do the opposite if you care about how animals are treated. It's hard to be an individual up against somewhat systemic problems.
I know people will make different choices and have different priorities than I do. I just want them to have the information they need to make an informed choice about what their ethics look like when it comes to eating and what they are able to do. It's a lot of work to feed yourself three times a day even when you're not food insecure.
I am constantly striving to get closer to a vegetarian or vegan diet because I do think there's so much wrong with how animals, people, and the planet is treated in industrial animal agriculture. That said, I haven't been able to find a way that I feel healthy going 100% on either diet.
But I do think reduction should be the goal for all of us. Our current production and consumption of animals and animal products is just not sustainable. That said, the goal doesn't have to be "everyone is vegan tomorrow." If someone is going from eating ten pounds a week of meat to seven and another is going from three to zero, that's still great. And it's even better if they're still doing that two or three years later instead of going vegetarian for a month, getting frustrated, and then going right back to that ten pounds of meat a week.
When I was trying to shift my diet, I started with easy things like never eating meat when what I really wanted was the sauce that went with it. (Veggie "chicken" nuggets taste just as good and even better if you just want something dipped in ketchup!) Today every time I go to the grocery store or order a meal, I'm making a choice about whether I can do with less today or not.
JS: Anything else you want to tell me?
TD: Just thanks so much for reading my book and asking me about chickens! If anyone is an audiobook fan, there's an audio version of Under the Henfluence that I narrate.
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