Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey

About author / Christine Gable

Culinary enthusiast; kids cuisine and slow cooking; magazine recipe developer; professional writer. Her simple recipes are great for family dinners.

Keeping chickens is not something I ever thought we would do. Ever. Isn’t life funny like that sometimes—especially when you have kids. We end up doing, saying and getting involved in things that were never envisioned before. That’s exactly how my “egg-ucation” began.

It all kicked off last year when daughter undertook egg incubation as part of a school project—one that concluded with her building an A-frame house with her grandfather. What began as an idea (“Let’s try that egg incubation thing again!”) ended up in a whole different way (“Hey, let’s keep those chickens!”). And now our home is home to four egg-laying hens.

I didn’t know the first thing about keeping chickens, much less raising and caring for them from the chick stage. You know, when they start to lose all that cuteness—all that fluffy, yellow down that makes them the star of the show at Easter. It’s when they start to eat more, grow more and get really curious—that’s when you need to know what you’re doing with chickens. Thanks to the library and online bookstores, it didn’t take much time or money to find the answers. We have relied some easy-to-find excellent books from the library and Amazon.

But the most influential and telling part of our education hasn’t been about caring for the chickens or figuring out what to feed them (they just love to free-range and eat any growing plants—and especially our compost scraps, most of all!).

No, the most influential part of this entire journey has been learning about how personable chickens are—and how today’s industrial factory-farming environments are a sad, sad reality of our modern society. The demand for chicken and eggs is huge—and to meet this need, huge conglomerates utilize inhumane factory-farming methods to keep millions of birds in cages in crowded, wire-caged houses.

It doesn’t take much time with chickens to see and understand first-hand how horrible a life this must be for these creatures. Not only unable to walk around freely, but unable to scratch in the dirt, hunt and peck for pebbles, bugs and untold goodies, but also crammed into tight cages with no chance of running free under the blue sky—it’s like a death sentence for these creatures. And it is, literally. While free-range birds often live 8-10 years (and often longer—up to 16 years), the lifespan of a factory-farmed egg layer is only 16 months.

Talk about the effects of stress. But it’s one that goes unnoticed by many folks who blindly pick up pristine white cartons of eggs, who select boneless chicken breasts, all cleaned and packaged and ready-to-use. Our society makes it (too) easy to be separate from the source of our food supply and to not fully realize the effect our choices have upon other beings and creatures in our world. Yet it doesn’t take a lot of effort or time—just intelligent consciousness—to start to make smarter choices.

Who could have known how much would change in our household from a mere egg incubation project? We recently went to hear Karen Davis, Ph.D., founder of United Poultry Concerns, speak. She has published several books and has brought the plight of factory-farmed poultry to light. Again, we learned so much—and my daughter came away with an even stronger belief in helping chickens live the life they were meant to. This may sound corny, but like I said, once you get to know chickens one-on-one, it really does change your view.

Karen has published a cookbook called Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless “Poultry” Potpourri. And you know how I am with cookbooks? Can’t pass one by! So we have now been enjoying this book tremendously and recently made the egg-free coffee cake below to share with some friends. It was a hit!

We still enjoy eggs from our free-range friends and tell everyone we know to buy cage-free, free-range eggs. Every egg counts! We can all help to set those poor creatures free—they deserve to delight in the scratchy earth below their feet and have the fresh air ruffle their feathers! But it’s up to us to make that happen.

Here’s a delightful vegan coffeecake from page 126 that won’t have you missing the eggs one bit—and I bet your kids will get a kick out of the title too.

Serves/Makes: 9

• 1/2 cup bran cereal
• 1 cup coffee
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1 1/2 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup dried coconut