The Chicken Boom

All aspects of any complex society - information technology, heart surgery, rock concerts etc - is only able to exist because of agricultural surplus that frees human beings from having to be dependent on subsistence food production...

Reposted in full from Sydney Morning Herald, 28 December 2009

'We think the society around us is solid but there is an old political aphorism: the difference between social order and disorder is 36 hours without food. Think about that for even a moment and you know it's true. Food security is the basis of everything we call civilised. This is the perfect time of year to consider the subject because at this time of abundance, we need to know that Australia's food security is declining.

With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 came a chicken boom. The humble, productive backyard chook helped America, and Australia, get through the greatest financial crisis and highest unemployment of the last hundred years.

Eighty years later, in an era of factory farming, cheap food and pervasive obesity, this boom in backyard chicken-raising in America is a telling detail because the levels of unemployment, debt, foreclosure and political anger are all far higher in the United States than in Australia.

The world's largest mail-order poultry operation, Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa, is shipping almost 2 million live birds a year and has been unable to expand production in pace with demand. (McMurray sells about 170 breeds of birds, including black swans.) The online forum BackyardChickens.com has 40,000 members and is only one of several big chicken online communities in the US. When the American writer Susan Orlean decided to buy a chicken coop and keep a few hens, she stumbled into a social phenomena: ''The chicken movement seems to be expanding exponentially.''

Even the White House has been caught up in acknowledging the long and damaging decline of home-grown food. In March, the first lady, Michelle Obama, became the first occupant of the White House since the Depression to have a working vegetable garden, the last being Eleanor Roosevelt.

Note the symmetry between economic hardship and backyard food.

The Obama plot is producing vegetables on the South Lawn, a site chosen for its visibility to outside visitors. Michelle Obama wants to educate her daughters and the general public about the need for healthy, local, seasonal food at a time when obesity has become America's No.1 health problem. She expects every member of the family to participate in the necessary weeding, including the President, although out of deference to the Commander-in-Chief, she is not growing beetroot because he doesn't like it.

There has even been talk of a chicken coop, which would be a wonderful symbol because every chicken in a backyard is at least one less bird subjected to the grotesque cruelty of factory farming, which we pretend is not the real cost behind every cheap chicken breast, wing and pale egg.

The hidden costs of our food system are high. There is the obvious cost in health as our diets have an abundance of bulk and taste but an increasing paucity of nutritional value. The energy cost is extremely high, with a mass-distribution system built on transportation, packaging, refrigeration, storage and preservation. The moral cost is also high as food animals, especially chickens, live out their lives in an abject state of constriction.

The solution is partly within our grasp. One of Australia's sustainability visionaries, Michael Mobbs, whose famous inner-city house is completely self-sufficient in energy and water, has developed the embryo of a system of urban street gardens - communal food production in the spare space on our footpaths.

His street, Myrtle Street, Chippendale, has multiple but unobtrusive fruit and vegetable patches, and communal composting bins. If you didn't know, you might not even realise it. You'd just think the street was unusually bushy. His scheme has had no problems from City of Sydney council, quite the contrary. ''The council has taken what we've done in Myrtle Street and made it draft policy for the whole council area,'' he says. ''That's a real win.

''I know of a dozen streets that I'm directly involved with that are doing street gardens,'' Mobbs said. ''I think there must be hundreds more. Food transcends party politics. Food is the future of politics.''

The council is even considering setting up an urban farm on one of its green spaces to grow vegetables and produce eggs.

A more advanced variation on this grassroots theme is the Landshare program set up by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the Devon-based TV chef and organic food producer. As a food and media impresario, Fearnley-Whittingstall has not wasted his celebrity on mere fame but championed self-sufficiency, organic food, and the consumption of local, seasonal produce.

Landshare uses the internet to match people with spare land and those who want to grow vegetables. It has become nationwide, with 1300 landowners, 3500 gardeners and 500 helpers across Britain.

Australia, in contrast, is going in the opposite direction. Much of the rich farmland surrounding Sydney and Melbourne has been replaced by urban spread. There are just 1050 surviving market gardens around Sydney and half are in the sights of the developer-dominated NSW Labor Government.

Australia's food security is going backwards. Our lax food-labelling laws are being exploited by the giant retail chains to import cheap food from abroad, mix it with Australian product and, if more than 50 per cent of the value of the mix is Australian, to label it ''Made in Australia''. The consumer is being duped and the practice is sending some local farmers broke.

If Australia's population keeps growing at a rate of 1.2 million people every three years, and the Murray-Darling Basin continues to degrade, and the arid zone continues to expand, and cheap imported food continues to out-compete local product, Australia will become a net importer of food sooner rather than later. Hard to imagine, but inevitable on present trends.

Food for thought.'