00:07:16.260I would just take my book in the yard and read.
00:07:19.100So I think chickens sneak up on you for a lot of different reasons,
00:07:23.220no matter which direction you come to henkeeping from.
00:07:27.040girl i'm a little nervous that by the end of this call i'm gonna i'm gonna be ordering myself some
00:07:31.720chickens i mean they're great with kids no very cute time no time for these chickens i don't i
00:07:40.400don't i won't even let charlie get a fish let's see what you can do let's see if you can let's
00:07:44.580see if you can convince me i'll influence you you'll influence me you'll hen yeah you'll hen0.99
00:07:49.860influence me is what you're gonna do you know little did i know what's gonna bring god damn0.99
00:07:54.520it. Now I'm going to have like five silkies on order. They're going to show up in the Catskills0.96
00:07:57.820when I get there on Monday. Yeah. Okay. So let's back up a little bit. Tell me how you
00:08:03.520got involved in all of this. You started doing it as a food source. You know, you're writing about
00:08:07.760food and, but how did you get involved in the world of henfluence in talking about this
00:08:13.920on the internet and diving into this world on social media? Yeah, kind of by accident. So I,
00:08:21.740I was doing a lot of like food culture and history journalism when I lived in New York City.
00:08:27.000And then I moved to Portland, Oregon, where I had this big yard and I was never really into gardening.
00:08:34.500It's a lot of work. Like if you love that work, it's great. I don't. It's a chore for me, but I love animals.
00:08:40.700And I was like, I can keep some little ladies and a cute little coop in my backyard and have eggs where I know that they're treated well.
00:08:48.140the scent's fantastic um and so i got these chickens i ordered them in the mail um and they
00:08:54.920come as little like day old fluffy cute chicks that are still egg shaped i i have that question
00:09:02.200how how do i've heard this before from other people you're gonna you're not just gonna answer
00:09:07.560all my hen fluencing questions you're gonna answer all of my chicken questions i've ever had for all
00:09:11.380time how how can you how can you put the babies how can they go in the mail how do you package
00:09:16.080them yeah so it's controversial um they've been doing it for a hundred years which is crazy um
00:09:23.860like the usps opened up package shipping in 1919 and people were like great let's send chickens
00:09:30.920in in boxes in the mail um so chicks when they're born their first meal is the egg yolk um and that
00:09:40.000helps because they don't all hatch at the same time and the mom still has to keep sitting on
00:09:44.940the eggs until everyone is ready to go out into the world. So that kind of first meal can last0.99
00:09:51.960them 48 to 72 hours. So people were like, great, maybe we can capitalize on this for money. And
00:10:01.700these incubators came out where suddenly you could hatch like hundreds of chicks at a time versus a
00:10:07.980who can only sit on you know 10 maybe eggs um and people started shipping baby chickens all over
00:10:15.940the place so basically you do it in a time of year when they're not going to get too cold
00:10:19.860you pack them together so they can keep each other warm you do it quickly and that makes it
00:10:26.960possible to ship baby chicks through the mail is it good for them to do it is it kind are there
00:10:33.020mail delays that sometimes results in bad things happening to these chicks like yes and a lot of
00:10:38.800people are very against this practice but it is still quite common in the united states in other
00:10:44.700countries people are like what are you doing over there that's insane they're shipping animals
00:10:49.900you're shipping live animals you can also ship bees it's crazy out there i mean i also know
00:10:55.020about bees i think that i maybe i don't know if you know the answer to this i'm assuming there's
00:11:00.360a world of bee fluencers too oh yes yeah there was that person um texas bee works a couple years ago
00:11:07.480who really blew up everywhere because she did these very calming videos where she was rescuing
00:11:14.000the bees that were stuck inside of someone's trailer and then there was bee drama it's there's
00:11:20.580an influencer for everything i say this all the time i say that much much like there is porn for
00:11:25.460everyone's king yeah there is an influencer for everything my friends everything wow okay well
00:11:33.540so i mean obviously be fluence comes comes next after that yeah yeah i will i want to take a quick
00:11:38.420break and then we are going to dive more into your book under the hen fluence i want to know
00:11:43.480everything about this world i've got to know everything about this world i do great i do
00:11:46.440all right we we are back we're we're very soon to be under the hen fluence all of us
00:12:00.160your new book is fascinating to me uh and it's a deep dive into our fascinating and often fraught
00:12:09.320relationship with the chicken. But besides dogs, I actually can't think of any animal that has
00:12:18.820such an intimate relationship and has had such an intimate relationship with human beings for so
00:12:24.640long. I was recently in Sicily visiting the house where my great-great-grandmother lived
00:12:30.480and visiting a lot of these old houses in this ancient village. And there's chicken coops,
00:12:36.680like just kind of chicken corners built into some of these stone structures because the chickens
00:12:41.520lived in the house with people. They, like during the winters when it was cold and especially in an
00:12:46.880urban area where you didn't have a farm, where you didn't have a barn, the chickens just lived
00:12:50.740with you. It was, it's a very intimate relationship. You weren't expecting to, to have, have these
00:12:57.540chickens change your life in the way that they did, uh, but they have. So talk to me about that.
00:13:04.060yeah it's fascinating um one of the interesting things that i also learned when i embarked on my
00:13:11.280chicken keeping journey is just everyone's family has a chicken story you know maybe you have to go
00:13:17.620back a couple generations but like someone's grandma was keeping chickens um for me it was
00:13:24.140my relatives in north dakota where they had a farm um and so i i got started keeping chickens
00:13:31.640You know, I wanted to keep them for food. I had these adorable baby chicks. And I'm a journalist. I love research. And the first thing that I did when I was getting ready to have these chickens come out to live with me is I read every single book that the Portland Library System had on chicken keeping, which was a lot of them.
00:13:53.500um most of them are how-to books and you know there are these adorable baby chickens that were
00:14:00.740in the bathroom like right across from my office and I would just take these long long breaks and
00:14:06.060go go to watch them because they're cute and it's fun and it's so much nicer than working
00:14:11.800um and I had all these questions about like why they're doing the things that they're doing and
00:14:18.720why am I so obsessed with chickens? And I would talk to my grandma about them who we never had
00:14:25.480like a whole lot in common. And suddenly I got chickens and she was like, let me tell you about
00:14:31.380growing up and taking care of the chickens that my mom used to keep. And all these family stories
00:14:37.020I had never heard of started coming out. And so that kind of started me down the road that led
00:14:43.540to writing a book about chickens is despite so many books about raising chickens, no one had
00:14:50.300really written about this relationship that chickens have with people. And often with women
00:14:56.900specifically, especially in the United States, keeping chickens was mostly done for quote unquote0.99
00:15:04.420egg money. So if you were a farm couple, you know, the man would be doing all of like the dairy cows,
00:15:12.240the crops in the field and the women, because they had to stay close to home for all the kids,0.80
00:15:17.740they would get to raise the chicken. And that idea of egg money, you know, it makes you think
00:15:23.060of like, oh, they're going to buy like a nice dress, something for their hair, you know,
00:15:27.960little treats. But that egg money paid for everything on the farm, like all the food,
00:15:33.780all of the educational expenses, all of the clothing for everyone, but was really devalued
00:15:39.340because it was women's work of course um so just so many stories about chickens and no one had
00:15:46.480really put them down in this way um so i kind of got influenced by having chickens which led me to
00:15:54.420want to influence other people about them i guess one chicken leads to another chicken
00:16:01.000leads to hopping hopping on on the interwebs to know everything there is to know about chickens
00:16:09.140Well, I also think that we have this kind of false nostalgia for farming in our country. We are a nation that has been built on farming. In addition, we are a country that has treated our farmers terribly. And farming is such hard work.
00:16:31.020I have seen a fetishization of farm work and chicken raising on Instagram.
00:16:42.340And there's so many people where it's kind of become like their dream to leave, you know, the quote unquote rat race and like go back, back to the land, like back to the way things used to be.
00:16:54.500have this slower pace of life. I think it's always how it is marketed or how people talk
00:17:00.480about it. But the reality is that keeping any animals is a lot of work and all the time,
00:17:07.380you know, just for me and I had at most, I think, 11 chickens at one time. I hired a chicken sitter
00:17:15.500when I went out of town. You know, there are people that do farm sitting for you, but my
00:17:20.140relatives that are still farmers out in North Dakota, like they don't take time off when it's
00:17:26.340crop season. Like all their weddings happen in the middle of winter because that's the only time
00:17:31.960that people have time, even today. So it's kind of this fetishization of the look of it, of all
00:17:39.480of the benefits of like knowing where your food comes from. But I think most people don't really
00:17:45.320like to talk about all of the work and how tied down you are to this land that you are trying to
00:17:51.880cultivate. Well, that's one of my concerns is, and this is my concern about everything on social
00:17:57.560media, is the flattening of the labor. So if we're just seeing all of the good parts of it,
00:18:03.400if we're not seeing the hard work that goes into it, then you wouldn't know, right? And it
00:18:10.200it makes me scared that more and more people might be ordering baby chickens through the mail
00:18:15.980because it looks so pretty on the Instagram. Is that a thing that's been happening?
00:18:21.780It definitely is. And, you know, there have been a couple booms in chicken keeping over the last
00:18:27.480few decades. The first was when this big, like, Michael Pollan, know your food thing was happening
00:18:35.040and everyone was like, I have to garden. I have to raise chickens. Like maybe we'll get some goats
00:18:40.620and start doing goat milk. Like that was really big around 2010. And then it kind of fell off a
00:18:46.880little bit. And then with the pandemic, when everyone was in lockdown, chicken keeping exploded.
00:18:54.180This was right around the time that I was finishing the proposal for my book. And I wrote a piece for
00:18:59.740the New York Times about how hatcheries, these places that are still like raising baby chicks
00:19:06.420so they can send them all over the country, they were actually running out of chickens because the
00:19:11.620demand was so big out of nowhere. And I think some of those people are still keeping chickens,
00:19:18.380but there were a lot of people who realized like, oh, wait, we're not at home anymore.
00:19:22.460And this is an animal that like maybe they lay eggs regularly for three years, but they live for
00:19:28.68010 in some cases like this is maybe a little bit more than we bargained for that's something i
00:19:34.360didn't know until i read your book that they lay for 10 years and or that they lay that they're
00:19:40.940alive yeah and they're alive for 10 years so then i it brought up so many emotions in me
00:19:49.200as a perimenopausal woman thinking about being finished with my egg bearing years
00:19:55.860Yeah. Would I be sent to the processing plant now that I have hit the ripe age of 44?
00:20:03.960I know. Certainly in this country. Certainly in this country.
00:20:08.080Yeah. And chickens do like they don't have official menopause, but I refer to it as henopause and a lot of other people do where it's like their egg laying does become more irregular.
00:20:18.620It slows. You know, you can get like a six to eight year old chicken that will still pop out an egg sometimes.
00:20:24.760but that like getting 200 eggs a year that goes away right right exactly and so what do a lot of
00:20:33.720people process their hens at that point it's really difficult and that's again where that
00:20:39.180divide in the type of chicken keeper really starts to show um one of the interesting and
00:20:46.880sad and complicated things about industrial agriculture today is animals are so specialized
00:20:53.560um like if you look at the hens on these giant farms that are being raised to lay eggs and
00:21:00.840raised to lay meat they look like a completely different bird um like those meat laying chickens
00:21:07.540reach slaughter weight at six weeks old now oh my god those hens yeah those hens that are bred
00:21:16.040specifically so they lay eggs um and we don't need the the males at all um all of their energy
00:21:22.680goes toward egg laying and they can lay upwards of 300 eggs every year, but they stop being able
00:21:29.740to do that at two. They have a lot of reproductive issues because that's such a problem. Chickens
00:21:36.060have actually been used as like ovarian cancer models because they get so many ovarian issues
00:21:42.160that are very similar to what humans get. So yeah, those hens are actually so useless in terms of
00:21:51.120meat because they take so long, they take so much food that we don't even use them for meat on an
00:21:57.780industrial scale. They're actually landfilled a lot of the time. They're not even worth it to go
00:22:02.320into pet food, which is crazy. It's like 300 million plus hens every year that are just kind
00:22:08.820of we don't need you anymore. So on farms, people do often get more like dual purpose breeds where
00:22:16.060they're a little bit good at everything um but that's when you get chicken meat at prices that
00:22:22.040is just astronomically high compared to what we've gotten used to in this country
00:22:26.740wow wow yeah chicken chickens chickens i mean i don't know how we're going to cram this all
00:22:35.620into one episode because there's so much to talk about when it comes to chickens there really there
00:22:44.740You know, on other sections of social media and the Internet, we're constantly being sold things.
00:22:54.240Has a market developed around the world of henfluencing to sell people these $20,000 coupes to target henfluencer adjacent people or aspirational henfluencers with the kinds of things that people can make money off of?
00:23:12.280A hundred and ten percent. And I actually kind of accidentally found myself becoming a henfluencer through the process of having chickens. So I know both sides of this. When I first got my chickens, you know, I was fascinated by them. They were cute.
00:23:30.760my instagram suddenly was just entirely pictures of chickens um and i sent out a poll like should
00:23:38.000i start a chicken account so my my like personal feed isn't only chickens and like sometimes me
00:23:45.040um everyone said yes and so i started this account at best little hen house um which i don't currently
00:23:52.560have chickens but i think it is around today like 136 000 followers which in the world of
00:24:00.060Influencing is a smaller account, but I have been paid more than I have as a best-selling author,
00:24:06.720my friend, way more than I have. Yes. And I was paid by some companies to promote like chicken
00:24:13.340feed, you know, asked by people to do that. But for me, the chicken account, because I consider
00:24:19.800myself a writer first and foremost, was mostly a means to an end of promoting this stuff that I
00:24:26.020knew I was working on. But there are certainly companies, there is a company called Carolina
00:24:31.560Coops that sells these beautiful kind of like pre-made, you just have to put it together
00:24:37.460coops that can easily, I think they start at like 13,000. I've seen some influencers like Lisa
00:24:44.520Steele is a really big one and she writes a lot of chicken books too. A lot of these people do
00:24:50.940some variation on writing these how-to guides of raising chickens. They do a lot of classes
00:24:57.820about, you know, raising them, how to spot chicken diseases, things like that. They're
00:25:03.380marketing products from companies. They're speaking at conferences to people who might
00:25:09.100be interested in having chickens. There is a whole multi-pronged ecosystem of homesteading0.51
00:25:17.400influencer where chicken people are a really big name this is amazing to me this is just yeah you're
00:25:25.560blowing my mind you're blowing my mind okay we we are going to take one more quick break uh and and
00:25:31.160when we when we get back i want to talk about how you have divested yourself of chickens
00:25:36.040okay we are back we are talking about under the henfluence which is a fascinating book uh not
00:25:51.860just about the world of henfluencing as it stands today but the history of of chickens and people
00:26:00.060and their relationships some of which are very loving and beautiful and some of which
00:26:05.000are are incredibly fraught and there's so many so many different different rabbit holes to go down
00:26:11.360when it comes to human beings and chickens particularly on on the internet who should i
00:26:17.340be which what what are who are the big hen fluencers that i should be following right now
00:26:22.060so lisa steel is probably one of the biggest hen fluencers um there's a person tilly's nest i
00:26:29.960believe is her social media um she was one of the like early henfluencers i believe she started0.92
00:26:36.920because she set up a live web feed inside of her chicken coop like pre-social media days um and
00:26:44.520people would go to like her website and blog to watch her chickens in the coop and she became
00:26:50.340kind of a big name for that um one of my personal favorites is drinking with chickens um she's0.77
00:26:57.560definitely less on the homestead side and she's really interesting because she actually does more1.00
00:27:04.000with like alcohol and drink promotion um and like lifestyle but she has these chickens in this like1.00
00:27:11.240beautiful coop there's a wallpaper inside of it she's always making like beautiful cocktails and1.00
00:27:17.200putting her chickens in the promotional like reels for whatever company she's working with
00:27:22.360um and i i've loved her content for a really long time it's just delightful when she posts it
00:27:28.120um so those are definitely some of my favorite big names that are out there um but they're
00:27:33.180important we're all the time now there's this tiktok account i can't remember the name of but
00:27:37.900it's just this person who lifts their chickens up and they just dance to the beat of whatever
00:27:43.600like little reels music clip is playing and those get just like millions of views
00:27:49.280oh you've convinced the marketing monster in me to get chickens just to sell more copies of the
00:27:56.060sicilian inheritance i mean it's not a bad idea they definitely have there's a chicken breed
00:28:00.460called the sicilian buttercup might i recommend oh my god beautiful stop it stop it maybe i could
00:28:06.860just find some chickens i think i could find some chickens and rent them for the afternoon rent them
00:28:13.120i just want to rent a chicken and i'll make i'll make like a month of chicken content great of
00:32:07.580And yet you love my chicken so much. Like you are nothing but kind when talking about my chickens. And I find that just like sociologically fascinating.
00:32:20.560So chickens can not only sell copies of the Sicilian inheritance, get ready for it, people, but they could also bring us all together politically, perhaps.
00:32:26.900They can. It's true. Yeah, I write about that in a chapter of my book when I went to the biggest chicken show in the United States. Yeah, it's just like kind of incredible the way that they bring people together as common ground. So I don't know.
00:32:41.300I love I love it's 2024. Twick chicken chickens 2024. I tell us. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about
00:32:48.320about when when you did go there and your realizations about about, you know, people
00:32:53.720with very, very different values and views on the world. I mean, are there any great anecdotes from
00:32:58.680that? Yeah, I mean, there are so many. And I think I got all the best moments and put them
00:33:06.260into the chapter of the book but I think I was there in maybe 2019 something like that I think
00:33:13.860it was just before lockdown happened but you know it was like the beginning of what has been now
00:33:21.580just so much fraught time in America and there's a whole like vendor area of it and so you have
00:33:30.080the people selling cute little chicken merchandise like you can bring your chicken and they'll take
00:33:35.120a little picture in this photo booth that they've set up. And then you also have people selling like
00:33:39.860the mega merchandise in the same place and people wearing it. One of the people that I spoke with
00:33:46.600is the children's book author, Jan Brett, who is a huge chicken person, very talented. She has won
00:33:53.340like a ton of accolades for her chicken breeding. But, you know, she has a special custom trailer0.85
00:34:00.380that she uses to bring her chickens across the country like there are a lot of money going into0.95
00:34:05.680some of these chickens other people are driving from like the south and staying in their trailer
00:34:11.580because they just like love love hanging out with these chickens and doing it so you're really
00:34:16.900getting a huge class like sampling at this chicken show you're getting a huge money sampling a
00:34:24.500political sampling and at that time even which was only a few years into this it was already
00:34:30.960striking being in a place that just had so many people who you just see fighting on the internet
00:34:38.760constantly but like we're getting along we're talking about chickens um like you don't need
00:34:43.680to know anything else about the people there other than that they like chickens and you have a great
00:34:49.460time. Chickens 2024. Tell me a little bit about how how you divested yourself of chickens. Where
00:34:59.380are you in your in your chicken journey right now? Hopefully just on a pause. My story, which
00:35:05.780I think is very common for a lot of people who have a lot of animals is I was married and then
00:35:10.980I got divorced. And so this, you know, house with a half acre that we had, I could not afford to
00:35:19.880keep on on my own anymore. And so the chickens are now living at this beautiful, actually,
00:35:28.100winery and B&B that's like 45 minutes away from me. I spent months looking for a place where I
00:35:34.500could keep the flock together and I might go visit them actually next month. So it's this
00:35:40.240lovely place they're almost as spoiled as they are staying with me when I went to visit the people
00:35:44.840to check it out um they were like they will get kitchen scraps every day you know people come to
00:35:50.780visit and they they hang out with the chickens I was like lovely I will allow you to take these
00:35:55.840chickens on um but they're they're just lovely people and they're like if you ever want the
00:36:02.100chickens back you you can come in and take them and that will be fine so fingers crossed I just
00:36:08.460sell my next book for so much money that I get all of my chickens back again because they're
00:36:14.400they're lovely little ladies and they're getting old and I want them to just be able to live out
00:36:20.320their years in a lovely environment which maybe it will be with me and maybe it will be at this
00:36:25.440this lovely winery out of the country so I mean I want to go there now I know yeah you can go there
00:36:32.020you can pick up my tiny chicken who fits in your hand um it's it's lovely so i'm coming
00:36:38.560i'm coming to portland i'll show you a great chicken time great come to portland i'll show
00:36:44.260you a great chicken time that should be the city's tourist slogan it should be really should be yeah
00:36:49.640uh i love everything about it let's manifest you selling your next book for a shit ton of money
00:36:54.340to get these chickens back we gotta get the chickens i know how to get the chickens i mean
00:36:59.760I feel like the Henfluencer community will really rally around this cause for you.0.68
00:37:05.640Well, I want everyone to buy Under the Henfluence.
00:37:07.940It's just such a lovely read for so many reasons, with the history, with the anecdotes, with really dropping you into a world that you did not know existed, but now you are never going to stop thinking about, my friends.