Dinner and a Movie: A 92 Year Old Changes Her Chicken

I once had a great aunt whose malapropisms and general verbal gymnastics knew no bounds. She would say, usually in the midst of great hyperbole, “I’m telling you, if your grandfather was alive, he would turn over in his grave.”

It’s hard to parse a sentence like that, and so I never bothered to try. Much in the same way I didn’t bother to correct my 92-year-old mother in law when she announced recently that she was giving up factory-farmed chicken.

“I’m only buying Bell & Howell chickens from here on in.”

Oh good, I thought: Dinner and a movie.

I wanted to say something, but really, why confuse her? The fact is that this woman—an absolute creature of culinary habit—actually gave some thought and consideration to whether or not she wanted a cheaper bird, or a (reasonably) better bird for which she’d spend a lot more per pound.

She was incredulous. “Do you know that they cut their beaks off? Who would do such a horrible thing? And those factory farming people keep their chickens inside all the time? They never have the chance to even eat a bug, or to see the sun. They’re not allowed to just run around and be chickens.”

She actually got a little teary, and with good reason: Helen knows chickens. She grew up on a small family farm in Burlington, Connecticut, the youngest of eleven children, exactly three miles from where she’s lived her entire adult life. She can’t drive to the next town without passing her family’s homestead. One day when she was in her seventies, she and her sister Sophie drove up to the old place, went out into the woods, dug up something like 37 one-dimensional little trees, put them in the Buick, drove them back to her house, and in one afternoon, planted what is now a 3-sided, 3-foot-high hedge extending the full width of the backyard.  She wanted a little piece of home to look at every day, and to protect her from the outside world, and she got it. Illegally, but, whatever.

So Helen is deeply rooted, as it were, in her farming past, and all it took to make her re-consider the industrial brand of poultry that she’s bought in the supermarket since Eisenhower was in office was a little bit of knowledge; we have no idea where she got it (and it really doesn’t matter) but it wasn’t us—we wrongly assumed that factory farming wouldn’t matter to her, or that she couldn’t change her ways.  She said that her decision was partly based on the issue of chemicals and antibiotics, but those were not the primary reasons for her switch, given the contents of her refrigerator (corn oil margarine, low fat this, low sodium that, tonic that still has its fizz after three years). The bigger reason, she told me and Susan, is that she just can no longer accept the way chickens are treated on factory farms. This, from a 92-year-old woman who so loathes snakes in her garden that she dispassionately beheads them before getting on with her planting. (Of course, they keep coming back season after season, in what appears to be a private joke between St. Francis and Buddha, and Helen is just not getting the message.)

Anyway, this whole Bell & Howell chicken-switching thing has been a fairly big deal, because Helen–who has Yankee frugality coursing through her veins along with her daily Coumadin–is now actively choosing to buy a smaller bird for more money than the larger, day-glo yellow, corn-fed fryers that she used to buy at least once a week. And even if Bell & Evans is just marginally better than, say, Perdue, in the broad scheme of things, it’s still nothing short of immensely symbolic.

If Helen, at 92 years old, can make a major lifestyle change like this because she resents and is effectively boycotting Big Chicken on humanitarian grounds, then, we all can.