Raising Chickens Quotes

And so I wait. I wait for time to heal the pain and raise me to me feet once again - so that I can start a new path, my own path, the one that will make me whole again.

Secret to what?" "Secret to shutting you up," he said. "I just have to beat you till you're half-dead, then give you chicken soup and"--he raised his hands--"blessed silence.

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

Grandpa had a good life, up until the day we slaughtered him and ate him. Honestly, he raised chickens, so he should have seen it coming.


Once there was a bunny. This bunny had a birthday party. It was the bestest birthday party ever. Because that was the day the bunny got a bazooka. THe bunny loved his bazooka. He blew up all sorts of things on the farm. He blew up the stable of Henrietta the Horse. He blew up the pen of Pugsly the Pig. He blew up the coop of Chuck the Chicken. "I have the bestest bazooka ever," the bunny said. Then the farm friends proceeded to beat him senseless and steal his bazooka. It was the happiest day of his life. The end. Epilogue: Pugsly the Pig, now without a pen, was quite annoyed. When none of the others were looking, he stole the bazooka. He tied a bandana on his head and swore vengeance for what had been done to him. "From this day on," he whispered, raising the bazooka, "I shall be known as Hambo.

Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It's like I was raising chickens inside me. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I've got going, I have to wonder. Sure, I get by. But in the end, that's not the question, is it?

Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would not take the garbage out! She'd scour the pots and scrape the pans, Candy the yams and spice the hams, And though her daddy would scream and shout, She simply would not take the garbage out. And so it piled up to the ceilings: Coffee grounds, potato peelings, Brown bananas, rotten peas, Chunks of sour cottage cheese. It filled the can, it covered the floor, It cracked the window and blocked the door With bacon rinds and chicken bones, Drippy ends of ice cream cones, Prune pits, peach pits, orange peel, Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal, Pizza crusts and withered greens, Soggy beans and tangerines, Crusts of black burned buttered toast, Gristly bits of beefy roasts. . . The garbage rolled on down the hall, It raised the roof, it broke the wall. . . Greasy napkins, cookie crumbs, Globs of gooey bubble gum, Cellophane from green baloney, Rubbery blubbery macaroni, Peanut butter, caked and dry, Curdled milk and crusts of pie, Moldy melons, dried-up mustard, Eggshells mixed with lemon custard, Cold french fried and rancid meat, Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat. At last the garbage reached so high That it finally touched the sky. And all the neighbors moved away, And none of her friends would come to play. And finally Sarah Cynthia Stout said, "OK, I'll take the garbage out!" But then, of course, it was too late. . . The garbage reached across the state, From New York to the Golden Gate. And there, in the garbage she did hate, Poor Sarah met an awful fate, That I cannot now relate Because the hour is much too late. But children, remember Sarah Stout And always take the garbage out!

Keep your elbows in!" Sturmhond berated Mal. "Stop flapping them like some kind of chicken." Mal let out a disturbingly convincing cluck. Tamar raised a brow. "Your friend seems to be enjoying himself." I shrugged. "Mal's always been like that. You could drop him in a camp full of Fjerdan assassins, and he'd come out carried on their shoulders. He just blooms wherever he's planted." "And you?" "I'm more of a weed," I said drily. Tamar grinned. In combat, she was cold and silent fire, but when she wasn't fighting, her smiles came easily. "I like weeds," said said, pushing herself off from the railing and gathering her scattered lengths of rope. "They're survivors." I caught myself returning her smile and quickly went back to working on the knot that I was trying to tie. The problem was that I liked being aboard Sturmhond's ship. I liked Tolya and Tamar and the rest of the crew. I like sitting at meals with them, and the sound of Privyet's lilting tenor. I liked the afternoon when we took target practice, lining up empty wine bottles to shoot off the fantail and making harmless wagers.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Goldman Sachs doesn't care if you raise chickens.

Catherine. " She swept by me without a hug. Okay, that was familiar, too. "You really should wear something warmer, it's freezing out. " Hello to you, too, Mom. Or whoever the hell you are, because you sure don't look like the woman who raised me. 123 "You should talk, " I managed. "I can see all the way up to your thigh. My God, if Grandma saw you now, she'd come right out of her grave!" My mother opened her mouth, paused, and then smiled. "I won't tell if you won't. " I was going directly to the kitchen to fall to my knees in awe before Rodney. Lo and behold, he'd managed to give her a sense of humor, and here I'd figured that would take voodoo, several headless chickens, and a lot of gris-gris.

He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.

My mother didn’t raise no fool. She raised a chicken.

Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.

Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently... PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford. HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn't know what a logarithm was. He's read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And despite what everyone who's met him seems to fear, he doesn't want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god. HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding. DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father. PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what's going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time. DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken. DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while. Presenting: HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY You ain't guessin' where this one's going.

As the theologian Alan Jones has said: One of our problems is that very few of us have developed any distinctive personal life. Everything about us seems secondhand, even our emotions. In many cases we have to rely on secondhand information in order to function. I accept the word of a physician, a scientist, a farmer, on trust. I do not like to do this. I have to because they possess vital knowledge of living of which I am ignorant. Secondhand information concerning the state of my kidneys, the effects of cholesterol, and the raising of chickens, I can live with. But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.

Um, what's cooking in that sadistic brain of yours?" Jen asked nervously. Sally's eyes snapped open. "I was just thinking that maybe if you met someone else then you could get past your furry problem." "My furry problem? Really? You make it sound like I have abnormal leg hair growth or something." Jen rolled her eyes. "Look." Sally stopped Jen before she could walk out of the room. "Let's just give it a go. You, me, and Jacque – tonight. We'll get Sorin to take us somewhere where there are going to be guys. Then you can do your thing." "My thing?" Jen asked, raising her eyebrows. "Yeah. You know, your thing. The hottie hunting thing." Jen laughed. "Man, it sounded like such a good idea at the time." Sally groaned. "Oh, come on, Jen." Jen interrupted her before Sally could continue. "Don’t. Don't do that whiny voice." "Then say you will go tonight," Sally challenged. "Or are you chicken?" "You really like living on the edge, don't you, Thelma?" "Hey, I'm just calling it how I see it.

Father, I am from a different egg than your other children. Think of me as a duckling raised by hens. I am not a domestic bird destined to spend his life in a chicken coop. The water that scares you rejuvenates me. For unlike you I can swim, and swim I shall. The ocean is my homeland. If you are with me, come to the ocean. If not, stop interfering with me and go back to the chicken coop.

Keep your elbows in!" Sturmhond berated Mal. "Stop flapping them like some kind of chicken." Mal let out a disturbingly convincing cluck. Tamar raised a brow. "Your friend seems to be enjoying himself." I shrugged. "Mal's always been like that. You could drop him in a camp full of Fjerdan assassins, and he'd come out carried on their shoulders. He just blooms wherever he's planted." "And you?" "I'm more of a weed," I said drily. Tamar grinned. In combat, she was cold and silent fire, but when she wasn't fighting, her smiles came easily. "I like weeds," said said, pushing herself off from the railing and gathering her scattered lengths of rope. "They're survivors.

Turn that worthless lawn into a beautiful garden of food whose seeds are stories sown, whose foods are living origins. Grow a garden on the flat roof of your apartment building, raise bees on the roof of your garage, grow onions in the iris bed, plant fruit and nut trees that bear, don't plant 'ornamentals', and for God's sake don't complain about the ripe fruit staining your carpet and your driveway; rip out the carpet, trade food to someone who raises sheep for wool, learn to weave carpets that can be washed, tear out your driveway, plant the nine kinds of sacred berries of your ancestors, raise chickens and feed them from your garden, use your fruit in the grandest of ways, grow grapevines, make dolmas, wine, invite your fascist neighbors over to feast, get to know their ancestral grief that made them prefer a narrow mind, start gardening together, turn both your griefs into food; instead of converting them, convert their garage into a wine, root, honey, and cheese cellar--who knows, peace might break out, but if not you still have all that beautiful food to feed the rest and the sense of humor the Holy gave you to know you're not worthless because you can feed both the people and the Holy with your two little able fists.

But I was raised in the United States, and I won't allow any one-horse chicken of the Land of Ev to run over me and put on airs, as long as I can lift a claw in self-defense.

I remembered talking with a writer friend who lived in Otisfield and supported his wife and two kids by raising chickens and turning out one paperback original a year — spy stories. We had gotten talking about the bulge in popularity of books concerning themselves with the supernatural. Gault pointed out that in the forties Weird Tales had only been able to pay a pittance, and then in the fifties it went broke. When the machines fail, he had said (while his wife candled eggs and roosters crowed querulously outside), when the technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.

Animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm- 99.9% of chickens raised for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs, and 78% of cattle.

Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life.

We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! "This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico ... They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them." "No, no, no, no," [Carlos replies] "This is absurd don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone." "Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you? ... You haven't heard all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal." "'But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don Juan] was saying. "'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?" "'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now." "I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuvre is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear." "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat." "There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.

Who are you?” asked the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.” “I am a fox,” said the fox. “Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince. “I am so unhappy.” “I cannot play with you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.” “Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince. But, after some thought, he added: “What does that mean– ‘tame’?” “You do not live here,” said the fox. “What is it that you are looking for?” “I am looking for men,” said the little prince. “What does that mean– ‘tame’?” “Men,” said the fox. “They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?” “No,” said the little prince. “I am looking for friends. What does that mean– ‘tame’?” “It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.” “ ‘To establish ties’?” “Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world. . .

People are eating our oceans to death. No fish is safe. What most people don't realize, however, is that meat-eating also greatly diminishes the oceans, because 40% of the fish taken from the sea is fed to pigs, chickens, cowls, domestic cats, and farm-raised fish. In fact, pigs are eating more fish than sharks, chickens are eating more fish than puffins, and cats are eating more fish than seals. So really, when you eat bacon, you're eating the sea.

At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time-and still bothers ours-is that he showed this bone crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.

The more ardently I see humanity as a glorious abstract that must conform to my ideal of how the world should be, the harder it is for me to love the person on the other side of the picket line who is holding up progress. I can love the downtrodden in the abstract, but as I shivered under the bridge that night with Jorge, I realized that it's harder to love the illegal immigrant with the bottle-slashed face and the body unwashed for weeks, the workers gathering to eat day-old bread and chicken and rice out of foam containers, the crowd of thousands clamoring for bread and fish and healing, the unclean woman hoping to touch the hem of the Savior's robe.

- "Surely you have considered terrorist activity?" There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours." -- The BBC interviews a nuclear spokesperson (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)

If most urban meat-eaters were to visit an industrial broiler house, to see how the birds are raised, and could see the birds being “harvested” and then being “processed” in a poultry processing plant, some, perhaps many of them, would swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat. For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.3513

Darlin'," he drawled, "go when you are invited. Bring good boots, drive slow, take blankets, carry your own salt, but by all means... go where the light is. That's not bad advice, wherever you live. Darlin'.

So that’s the secret,” the Beast Lord said. I froze with the spoon halfway to my mouth. That was it. He had figured out what I was and now he was playing with me. “You okay?” he asked. “Gone a bit pale there.” In a moment he would drop the charade and rip me to pieces. If I was lucky. “Secret to what?” “Secret to shutting you up,” he said. “I just have to beat you till you’re half-dead, then give you chicken soup and”—he raised his hands—“blessed silence.” I went back to the soup. Ha-ha. Very funny. “What did you think I meant?” “I don’t know,” I mumbled. “The ways of the Beast Lord are a mystery to a humble merc like me.” “You don’t do humble.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

raising chickens. It was almost as hard for Eisman to imagine himself raising chickens as it was for people who knew him, but he’d agreed. “The idea of it was so unbelievably unappealing to him,” says his wife, “that he started to work harder.” Eisman traveled all over Europe and the United States searching for people willing to invest with him and found exactly one: an insurance company, which staked him to $50 million. It wasn’t enough to create a sustainable equity fund, but it was a start. Instead of money, Eisman

Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying.

There are distinct health benefits to choosing farm fresh eggs over store bought too. The fresh eggs have as much as a third less of the bad cholesterol than store bought. They are lower in saturated fats and had more vitamin A and E and contained more beta carotene and omega-3 fatty acids.

Bear with me a moment, now. Chicken-sexing. Since hens have a far greater commercial value than males, cocks, roosters, it is apparently vital to determine the sex of a newly hatched chick. In order to know whether to expend capital on raising it or not, you see. A cock is nearly worthless, apparently, on the open market. The sex characteristics of newly hatched chicks, however, are entirely internal, and it is impossible with the naked eye to tell whether a given chick is a hen or a cock. This is what I have been told, at any rate. A professional chicken-sexer, however, can nevertheless tell. The sex. He can go through a brood of freshly hatched chicks, examining each one entirely by eye, and tell the poultry farmer which chicks to keep and which are cocks. The cocks are to be allowed to perish. “Hen, hen, cock, cock, hen,” and so on and so forth. This is apparently in Australia. The profession. And they are nearly always right. Correct. The fowl determined to be hens do in fact grow up to be hens and return the poultry farmer’s investment. What the chicken-sexer cannot do, however, is explain how he knows. The sex. It’s apparently often a patrilineal profession, handed down from father to son. Australia, New Zealand. Have him hold up a new-hatched chick, a young cock shall we say, and ask him how he can tell that it is a cock, and the professional chicken-sexer will apparently shrug his shoulders and say “Looks like a cock to me.” Doubtless adding “mate,” much the way you or I would add “my friend” or “sir.

neither of my boys were convinced, and they spent that spring either running after or running from an imaginary threat. If they collected eggs, they dropped them, or couldn’t resist throwing one at a tree. They couldn’t reach the feeders or carry the waterers. When I told them, “We are getting a new batch of baby chicks!” they barely reacted. On the other hand, Cecelia seemed to have benefited wildly from the chickens. After we moved them to the coop, she got a brand new floor in her bedroom, the nicest in our house. The chickens were raised in her baby-room while I was pregnant. They kept escaping from the brooder and no amount of scrubbing could clean her carpet. “Chicken” was her third word.

Eat carbohydrates and blood sugar rises. Every first-year medical student knows this, every nurse or diabetes educator knows this, every person with diabetes who performs finger-stick blood sugars before and after meals knows this. Eat any food with more than just a few grams of carbohydrates and blood sugar will rise; the more carbohydrates you eat, the higher blood sugar will rise. Everyone also knows that foods like butter do not raise blood sugar, nor will a fatty cut of meat, olives, green bell peppers, broccoli, or chicken liver. And since the 1980s, when the sharp upward climb in type 2 diabetes (and obesity) began, the only component of diet that has increased is carbohydrates, not fat or proteins.4

[The Khmer Rogue soldier] screams a loud, shrill cry, that piercing my heart like a stake, and I imagine that this, maybe, is how Pa died. The soldier's head hangs, bobbing up and down like a chicken's... The woman raises her hammer again. I almost feel pity for him. But it is too late to let him go, it is too late to go back. It is too late for my parents and my country.

The house had a small galley kitchen where my mother performed daily miracles, stretching a handful into a potful, making the most of what we raised. Cooking mostly from memory and instinct, she took a packet of meat, a bunch of greens or a bag of peas, a couple of potatoes, a bowl of flour, a cup of cornmeal, a few tablespoons of sugar, added a smattering of this and a smidgeon of that, and produced meals of rich and complementary flavors and textures. Delicious fried chicken, pork chops, and steak, sometimes smothered with hearty gravy, the meat so tender that it fell from the bone. Cob-scraped corn pan-fried in bacon drippings, served with black-eyed peas and garnished with thick slices of fresh tomato, a handful of diced onion, and a tablespoon of sweet pickle relish. A mess of overcooked turnips simmering in neck-bone-seasoned pot liquor, nearly black—tender and delectable. The greens were minced on the plate, doused with hot pepper sauce, and served with a couple sticks of green onions and palm-sized pieces of hot-water cornbread, fried golden brown, covered with ridges from the hand that formed them, crispy shell, crumbly soft beneath.

The top-five sources of arachidonic acid in the American diet are chicken, eggs, beef, pork, and fish, although chicken and eggs alone contribute more than the other top sources combined.17 Just a single egg’s worth of arachidonic acid a day may significantly raise arachidonic acid levels in the blood.18 Overall, omnivores appear to consume about nine times more arachidonic acid than those eating plant-based diets.

It's been over a year since they've visited their son's market. As they walk through the parking lot they take in a number of improvements. Brian admires the raised garden beds made of cedar planks that flank the sides of the lot. There are stalks of tomatoes, staked beans, baskets of green herbs- oregano, lavender, fragrant blades of lemongrass and pointed curry leaf. The planter of baby lettuces has a chalkboard hung from its side: "Just add fork." A wheelbarrow parked by the door is heaped with bright coronas of sunflowers, white daisies, jagged red ginger and birds-of-paradise. Avis feels a leap of pride as they enter the market: the floor of polished bamboo, the sky-blue ceiling, the wooden shelves- like bookshelves in a library. And the smells. Warm, round billows of baking bread, roasting garlic and onions and chicken.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

A chicken tractor, also known as a chicken ark, is a mobile coop that can be moved around to different places in your yard. It allows you to reap the benefits of letting your chickens roam free, while keeping them safe from most predators. They're a good option for areas where there are too many predators to completely free range chickens, but you don't want to keep your birds cooped up in a single area. You can place the tractor in an area for a couple days until the chickens have picked

TYMPANI: Well, things happen fast down here. You gotta' be prepared. One day you're raising chickens, the next day you're buying up half of Mexico. RABBIT: I don't want half of Mexico! TYMPANI: Then you'll want something else. Sooner or later you'll want something else, and they'll find out what it is. RABBIT: What do you mean? TYMPANI: Some little fantasy. Some dream. Some tiny little delusion that you've got tucked away. They'll pry it out of you. RABBIT: What do they care? TYMPANI: Because then they've got you. They'll feed off your hunger. They'll keep you jumping at carrots. And you'll keep jumping. And you'll keep thinking you're not jumping all the time you're jumping. RABBIT: Is that what's happened to you? TYMPANI: What does it look like? RABBIT: Well, how can you know it and still keep doing it? TYMPANI: What else is there to do? RABBIT: Are you crazy? They've got you kidnapped in here and you like it. TYMPANI: So will you. You'd be surprised how fast it happens.

You could see the future right away here,” Hu Renzhong, a pig and poultry producer, told me. “Food was expensive and people didn’t have enough meat to eat. They couldn’t afford it. The land was good, though, and back then it was still cheap.” Hu received me one morning at his mansion farmhouse on the outskirts of Lusaka, offering me a seat in the marble chill of his enormous living room, before taking me on a long walking tour of his acres and acres of hog-breeding pens and sprawling, temperature-controlled chicken hatcheries, all impressively modern and minutely organized. He had come to Zambia from China’s Jiangxi province in 1995 as a twenty-two-year-old simple laborer, but soon got into business for himself, raising chickens at first with another Chinese immigrant. It wasn’t long before the two had struck it rich, buying land and building ever-bigger houses. “Things had started developing really fast back home, and a lot of people tried to tell me I’d made a mistake,” he said. “But I’ve never really looked back.” I

The real secret, though, is that nobody belongs, whether they are natives or not. After expulsion from paradise all humans are in exile. You can be a Colonel Sanders chicken, born, raised and fried in one quarter of a square foot and you'll still be an outsider. The thing we call reality is a holding tank for people who must worry about belonging -- it's a worrier prison. Don't worry people! You'll soon be fried and eaten. A few of us are writers, hence double-alienated, but happier (because we are busy) If it's true that many of us go through life feeling like we don’t belong, could digression (geographical and otherwise) be our way of trying to forget, or to escape, that feeling? Bad news: there are no digressions. Everything is connected in the whole darn ball of yarn: start pulling at any end and you'll get to the same place. On the other hand, most normal people dislike digression because they have to lose themselves to follow you. The surest way to drive your dear ones crazy is to digress. In private, it's an offense. In public it's "art," "performance.

I always liked your piety, Jack.” “I’m a lot cuter than the women of your generation,” Betsy said, playing up to Capers and Mike. “Wrong, junior Leaguer.” I could feel myself turning mean. The cognac was doing its work and I felt the thrilling disquiet that had come into the room. I took Betsy’s measure, and went for her throat. “The women of my generation were the smartest, sexiest, most fascinating women ever to grow up in America. They started the women’s liberation movement, took to the streets in the sixties to stop the unbearably stupid Vietnam War. They fought their asses off for equal rights in the workplace, went to law school, became doctors, fought the corporate fight, and managed to raise children in a much nicer way than our mothers did.” “Chill out, Jack,” Mike said. “Betsy’s a kid.” “She’s a dimwit,” I said. I turned to Betsy. “The women of my generation make men like me and Mike and your chicken-hearted husband look puny and uninteresting by comparison. Don’t talk about those women, Betsy, unless you’re on your fucking knees genuflecting out of admiration

And just last week, amid the panic and feathers of a kosher slaughterhouse on Zhitlovsky Avenue, a chicken turned on the shochet as he raised his ritual knife and announced, in Aramaic, the imminent advent of Messiah. According to the Tog, the miraculous chicken offered a number of startling predictions, though it neglected to mention the soup in which, having once more fallen silent as God Himself, it afterward featured. Even the most casual study of the record, Landsman thinks, would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken

Can you promise he’s not going to split the planet open like an egg?” “Oh,” Arthur said. “I highly doubt it. You see, he’s still learning how to crack chicken eggs properly, so I expect it’ll be quite some time before he’s ready for planetary destruction.” Every dace stared up at him in shock. “Remember what I told you about your sense of humor?” Linus hissed at him. “Now is not the time to try and be funny!” “Try,” Arthur huffed. “Ouch.” He raised his voice once more. “That was a poor attempt at humor. My apologies. To answer your question, Earth will not be destroyed today.” “Or anytime in the future,” Linus added loudly.

Harlow provided another important lesson, thanks to another study painful to contemplate. Infant monkeys were raised with chicken-wire surrogates with air jets in the middle of their torsos. When an infant clung, she’d receive an aversive blast of air. What would a behaviorist predict that the monkey would do when faced with such punishment? Flee. But, as in the world of abused children and battered partners, infants held harder. Why do we often become attached to a source of negative reinforcement, seek solace when distressed from the cause of that distress? Why do we ever love the wrong person, get abused, and return for more?

I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chile, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn’t ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn’t difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation’s chickens and sends them as far away as Japan, The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by PACCAR. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.

There was a guy in prison named Jackson,” said Shadow, as he ate, “worked in the prison library. He told me that they changed the name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC because they don’t serve real chicken any more. It’s become this genetically modified mutant thing, like a giant centipede with no head, just segment after segment of legs and breasts and wings. It’s fed through nutrient tubes. This guy said the government wouldn’t let them use the word chicken.” Mr. Ibis raised his eyebrows. “You think that’s true?” “Nope. Now, my old cellmate, Low Key, he said they changed the name because the word fried had become a bad word. Maybe they wanted people to think that the chicken cooked itself.

Altogether about 200,000 wild wolves still roam the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs.1 The world contains 40,000 lions compared to 600 million house cats; 900,000 African buffalo versus 1.5 billion domesticated cows; 50 million penguins and 20 billion chickens.2 Since 1970, despite growing ecological awareness, wildlife populations have halved (not that they were prospering in 1970).3 In 1980 there were 2 billion wild birds in Europe. In 2009 only 1.6 billion were left. In the same year, Europeans raised 1.9 billion chickens for meat and eggs.4 At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world (i.e., those weighing more than a few pounds) are either humans or domesticated animals.

One of our problems is that very few of us have developed any distinctive personal life. Everything about us seems secondhand, even our emotions. In many cases we have to rely on secondhand information in order to function. I accept the word of a physician, a scientist, a farmer, on trust. I do not like to do this. I have to because they possess vital knowledge of living of which I am ignorant. Secondhand information concerning the state of my kidneys, the effects of cholesterol, and the raising of chickens, I can live with. But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.

Church is important to most folks in the South. So the most important thing going is basically ruled by men as decreed by the Big Man himself. Not only that, but the church puts pressures on women that it does not put on men. Young women are expected to be chaste, moral, and pure, whereas young men are given way more leeway, ’cause, ya know, boys will be boys. Girls are expected to marry young and have kids, be a helpmate to their husbands (who are basically like having another child), and, of course, raise perfect little Christian babies to make this world a better place. So while it’s the preacher man who controls the church, it’s the women—those helpmates—who keep that shit going. They keep the pews tidy and wash the windows; type up the bulletins; volunteer for Sunday school, the nursery, youth group, and Vacation Bible School; fry the chicken for the postchurch dinners; organize the monthly potluck dinners, the spaghetti supper to raise money for a new roof, and the church fund drive; plant flowers in the front of the church, make food for sick parishioners, serve food after funerals, put together the Christmas pageant, get Easter lilies for Easter, wash the choir robes, organize the church trip, bake cookies for the bake sale to fund the church trip, pray unceasingly for their husband and their pastor and their kids and never complain, and then make sure their skirts are ironed for Sunday mornin’ service. All this while in most churches not being allowed to speak with any authority on the direction or doctrine of the church. No, no, ladies, the heavy lifting—thinkin’ up shit to say, standing up at the lectern telling people what to do, counting the money—that ain’t for yuns. So sorry.

Men," said the fox. "They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. these are their only interests. Are you looking fir chickens?" "No," said the little prince. "I am looking for friends. What does that mean-- 'tame'?" "It is an act to often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties." "'To establish ties'?" "Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys, And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..." "I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "there is a flower... I think that she has tamed me...

Whenever possible, avoid animal protein that has been raised with hormones or antibiotics. Europe won’t accept hormone-laden U.S. beef because of the health risks. Look for grass-fed, hormone-free, antibiotic-free organic beef and chicken, which is richer in omega-3 fatty acids and will therefore act to reduce inflammation and help your hormone receptors to function properly. Also, eat organic vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, and grains. Pesticides are known to cause hormonal imbalances and some pesticides have been shown to act as “endocrine (hormone) disrupters,” interfering with the body’s natural hormone systems and causing an array of health problems. While the Environmental Protection Agency began looking at this issue in 1999, little change has yet occurred in the marketplace, and women are well served by educating themselves on this important issue. (I’ll discuss this more later in this chapter.)

There is no part of this country where one cannot find a source of fresh, organic meat and produce. I’m not talking about Whole Foods, I’m referring to farmers’ markets and local butchers and fishermen and -women. If you can’t find a source for fresh produce and eggs and/or chicken, bacon, and/or dairy products, by Christ, become the source! What more noble pursuit than supplying your community with breakfast foods?! If you want to read more about this notion, by actual smart and informed writers, pick up some Michael Pollan and some Wendell Berry. I have no intention of ever ceasing to enjoy red meat. However, I firmly believe that we can choose how and where our meat is raised, and I’m all for a grass-fed, happy steer finding its way to my grill long before a factory-farmed, filthy, corn-fed lab creation. It’s up to us to choose farm-to-table fare as much as possible until it becomes our society’s norm once again.

She insisted that they focus their energies on raising a little girl who was, by nature, a tangle of mischief and motion and curiosity. Each day, Luna’s ability to break rules in new and creative ways was an astonishment to all who knew her. She tried to ride the goats, tried to roll boulders down the mountain and into the side of the barn (for decoration, she explained), tried to teach the chickens to fly, and once almost drowned in the swamp. (Glerk saved her. Thank goodness.) She gave ale to the geese to see if it made them walk funny (it did) and put peppercorns in the goat’s feed to see if it would make them jump (they didn’t jump; they just destroyed the fence). Every day she goaded Fyrian into making atrocious choices or she played tricks on the poor dragon, making him cry. She climbed, hid, built, broke, wrote on the walls, and spoiled dresses when they had only just been finished. Her hair ratted, her nose smudged, and she left handprints wherever she went.

This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders. For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

Physically, Manya was both appealing and aristocratic in her bearing. It wasn't her copious white hair that attracted men, her flawless white skin, her billowing breasts, but the innate womanliness that emanated from her. Even when she wore her cooking clothes- a mammoth Hoover apron that she slipped on over her head and tied around a baggy dress or her cardigan sweater, a dull brown thing appropriate for shopping- she exuded a sympathetic femininity. Many didn't give much thought to her appearance. More often than not she washed her face and body with the brown kosher soap that contained no fat from forbidden animals, and wrapped her hair in a haphazard bun held together with several large imitation-turquoise hairpins. Her cooking shoes were splattered with chicken and goose fat, bits and oddments of duck, salmon roe, even calves' brains. Because she had been raised on the Black Sea, she loved caviar, so every now and then a glistening bead would fall upon her well-fed shoes. The smell of food on her body made her no less alluring.

When we came out of the cookhouse, we found the boy's father, the Indian man who had been grazing the horses in the pasture, waiting for us. He wanted someone to tell his troubles to. He looked about guardedly, afraid that the Señora might overhear him. 'Take a look at me' he said. I don't even know how old I am. When I was young, the Señor brought me here. He promised to pay me and give me a plot of my own. 'Look at my clothes' he said, pointing to the patches covering his body. 'I can't remember how many years I've been wearing them. I have no others. I live in a mud hut with my wife and sons. They all work for the Señor like me. They don't go to school. They don't know how to read or write; they don't even speak Spanish. We work for the master, raise his cattle and work his fields. We only get rice and plantains to eat. Nobody takes care of us when we are sick. The women here have their babies in these filthy huts.' 'Why don't you eat meat or at least milk the cows?' I asked. 'We aren't allowed to slaughter a cow. And the milk goes to the calves. We can't even have chicken or pork - only if an animal gets sick and dies. Once I raised a pig in my yard' he went on. 'She had a litter of three. When the Señor came back he told the foreman to shoot them. That's the only time we ever had good meat.' 'I don't mind working for the Señor but I want him to keep his promise. I want a piece of land of my own so I can grow rice and yucca and raise a few chickens and pigs. That's all.' 'Doesn't he pay you anything?' Kevin asked. 'He says he pays us but he uses our money to buy our food. We never get any cash. Kind sirs, maybe you can help me to persuade the master . Just one little plot is all I want. The master has land, much land.' We were shocked by his tale. Marcus took out a notebook and pen. 'What's his name?'. He wrote down the name. The man didn't know the address. He only knew that the Señor lived in La Paz. Marcus was infuriated. 'When I find the owner of the ranch, I'll spit right in his eye. What a lousy bastard! I mean, it's really incredible'. 'That's just the way things are,' Karl said. 'It's sad but there's nothing we can do about it.

Suddenly, a loud popping and banging shattered the quiet. Almost hidden in a cloud of dust, a car roared along the road below us. Cattle lumbered to their feet, horses raised their heads and galloped away, a flock of chickens scattered in all directions. Hannah gasped. “Oh, my Lord, it’s John Larkin in his father’s motorcar. If he catches me looking like this, he’ll think I’m a common hoyden.” Her bare foot plunged toward me. The tree swayed violently, my head swam. Afraid to move, I clung to a branch. “For heaven’s sake, Andrew, hurry. He’ll be here any moment!” With Hannah pushing me, I slid from limb to limb, down, down, faster and faster. By the time I hit the ground, my legs were shaking so hard I could barley stand. Without so much as a thought for me, Hannah grabbed her shoes and ran across the lawn. Her feet were bare, her shirtwaist untucked, her skirt dusty. Twigs and leaves clung to her hair. As quick as she was, the Model T was quicker. Pursued by Buster, it rolled to a noisy stop under a tree. Without pausing to say hello, Hannah darted past John, scurried up the steps, and vanished into the house.

What Dr. Price's work teaches us is that the absolute fundamental requirement of healthy diets cannot be found in pasta, nor vegetable juices, nor oat bran, nor olive oil, but only in certain types of animal fats. These fats come from animals who consume green, growing organisms (such as grass and plankton), or who consume other animals that have consumed green, growing organisms (such as insects). What is tragic is the difficulty in finding such foods today. Most of our dairy cows spend their entire lives in confinement and never see green grass; chickens are kept in pens and fed mostly grains; pigs are raised in factories and never see sunlight; even fish are now raised in fish farms and given inappropriate feed, like soy pellets. Even worse, most people avoid these foods today because medical spokesmen claim they cause cancer, heart disease or weight gain, even though a number of highly qualified scientists have admirably refuted these charges. Suffice it to say that the patient who is afraid of consuming foods containing animal fats and cholesterol will make no headway in his efforts to improve his diet as these foods are absolutely vital for good health.

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year. The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home. He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street. They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then. The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips. Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites. The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra. “Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?” He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him. By the time they freed him, he was a different man.  

Mahabharata states: “What we eat in this life, eats us in the life after death.” We must not forget the chain of karma: Compassion and non-cruelty toward animals are linked morally and spiritually to world peace. Killing an animal for food, even one that we raise ourselves or hunted, is a violent act, which we forget in consuming its flesh. Today, cruelty extends beyond the mass killing of animals to the systematic, anti-life, anti-humane treatment of animals, from the time they are born to the time they are “harvested,” as if they were a cash crop. Animals are deprived of their natural habitat and life cycle for the expediency of the meat industry. Individual killing of animals for food is the first step in the cruelty process. The profit-motivated nature of industrializing animals, as if they are inanimate objects and void of any rights, feelings, or soul is the next step in the expansion of cruelty. The way animals, chicken, and fish are treated today is at a level of cruelty that staggers the imagination. When eating these animals, we take the vibration of this cruelty and death into our consciousness, often without even thinking of what we are bringing into our own bodies and encouraging in our own environment.

Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently… PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford. HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn’t know what a logarithm was. He’s read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And despite what everyone who’s met him seems to fear, he doesn’t want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god. HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding. DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father. PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what’s going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time. DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken. DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while. Presenting: HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY You ain’t guessin’ where this one’s going.

I was here. I was fine. It was a beautiful day, and I was around people who gave me more love and happiness in a month than I’d had for seventeen years. I would never have to see those jerks again. And today was going to be a good day, damn it. So I got it together and finally looked back down at my best friend to ask, “Did I tell you I stole a bottle of Visine once because I wanted to put a few drops into my dad’s coffee, but I always chickened out?” Lenny snickered. “No. Psycho. Did I tell you that one time I asked Santa to bring my mom back?” I made a face. “That’s sad, Lenny.” I blinked. “I pretty much did the same thing.” “Uh-huh.” I raised my eyebrows at her. “Did I ever tell you that I wanted to have like ten kids when I was younger?” The laugh that came out of her wasn’t as strong as it usually was, but I was glad she let it out anyway. It sounded just like her, loud and direct and so full of happiness it was literally infectious. “Ten? Jesus, why?” I wrinkled my nose at her. “It sounded like a good number.” The scoff that came out of her right then was a little louder. “You’re fucking nuts, Luna. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten-ten?” “That’s what ten means.” I grinned at her. “I said that was back when I was younger, not any time recently. I can’t afford ten kids.” “Still. How about… none?” I glanced down the table again when I heard Thea’s sharp laugh. “Okay, Only Child.” I laughed. “I think four’s a good number now.” My friend beside me groaned before reaching forward to grab a chip, dipping it into the tiny bowl of guacamole beside it. “Look, Grandpa Gus was basically my brother, my dad, my uncle, and my grandpa all rolled into one, and I had a bunch of kids to play with,” she claimed. “Whatever makes you happy, but I think I’m fine with zero kids in my future.” I reached over and grabbed one of the pieces of fajita from her plate and plopped it into my mouth. “Watch, you’ll end up with two,” I told her, covering my mouth while I chewed the meat. “You’ve already got that ‘mom’ vibe going on better than anyone I know.” That had her rolling her eyes, but she didn’t argue that she didn’t, because we both knew it was true. She was a twenty-seven-year-old who dealt with full-grown man babies daily. She had it down. I was friends with my coworkers. Lenny was a babysitter for the ones she was surrounded with regularly. “Like you’re one to talk, bish,” she threw out in a grumpy voice that said she knew she couldn’t deny it. She had a point there. She picked up a piece of fajita and tossed it into her mouth before mumbling, “For the record, you should probably get started on lucky number four soon. You aren’t getting any younger.” I rolled my eyes, still chewing. “Bish.” “Bish.

The only garnish for the noodles was sesame and spring onions. The two perfect squares of butter on top were already beginning to lose their shape in the clear broth, their outlines blurring messily. Beneath them floated the crinkled noodles with their strong yellow hue. Dissolved in the soup, the butter formed golden circles on its surface. Rika deliberately passed the noodles through those circles on their way to her mouth. The taste of lye water was a little strong, but they weren't badly cooked, and retained their bite. She sipped the soup. Against the faint chicken base of the stock she could detect the flavor of bonito. The broth was hot but it slipped down easily, lubricating her painfully dry throat. Alone, the cheap butter had an overly milky tang, but in combination with the noodles and the soup, its flavor grew golden and staked its territory, with a kind of violence. A certain depth of flavor began to assert itself, and as the droplets plummeted to the centre of her body, its arc of influence expanded. The back of her nose grew hot, and she reached for the tissue box on the counter. Feeling the moisture flowing, she blew her nose loudly. A film of butter was forming across her insides. The hot broth and the hot noodles were more assertive, more forceful than Makoto's warmth and smell. As she raised them to her mouth alternately, Rika's body regained more and more of its heat and softness. She was already warmer than she had been back in the hotel room.

I admired him. He was the kind of man, the kind of friend, who made you feel like a better human being, just for knowing him. Strangely, stupidly, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that. I wanted to do it. I started to do it a few times, but wouldn’t let myself speak the words. My exile heart at that time was all doubt and reluctance and scepticism. I gave my heart to Khaderbhai, and he used me as a pawn. I gave my heart to Karla, the only woman I’ve ever been in love with, and she used me to serve the same man, the man we both called father, Khaderbhai. Since then I’d been on the streets for two years, and I’d seen the town come to the circus, the rich beg paupers, and the crime fit the punishment. I was older than I should’ve been, and too far from people who loved me. I let a few, not many, come close, but I never reached out to them as they did to me. I wouldn’t commit, as they did, because I knew that sooner or later I’d have to let go. ‘Let it go, Johnny,’ I said softly. He sighed again, pocketed the money, and led the way outside the hut. ‘Why are Jewish people putting penicillin in their chickens?’ he asked me as we gazed at the lowering sky. ‘It was a joke, Johnny.’ ‘No, but those Jewish people are pretty smart, yaar. If they’re putting penicillin in their chickens, they must have a damn good –’ ‘Johnny,’ I interrupted, with a raised hand, ‘I love you.’ ‘I love you, too, man,’ he grinned. He wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug that woke every one of the wounds and bruises on my arms and shoulders.

Hardy reinforces his narrative with stories of heroes who didn’t have the right education, the right connections, and who could have been counted out early as not having the DNA for success: “Richard Branson has dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student. Steve Jobs was born to two college students who didn’t want to raise him and gave him up for adoption. Mark Cuban was born to an automobile upholsterer. He started as a bartender, then got a job in software sales from which he was fired.”8 The list goes on. Hardy reminds his readers that “Suze Orman’s dad was a chicken farmer. Retired General Colin Powell was a solid C student. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, was born in a housing authority in the Bronx … Barbara Corcoran started as a waitress and admits to being fired from more jobs than most people hold in a lifetime. Pete Cashmore, the CEO of Mashable, was sickly as a child and finished high school two years late due to medical complications. He never went to college.” What do each of these inspiring leaders and storytellers have in common? They rewrote their own internal narratives and found great success. “The biographies of all heroes contain common elements. Becoming one is the most important,”9 writes Chris Matthews in Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero. Matthews reminds his readers that young John F. Kennedy was a sickly child and bedridden for much of his youth. And what did he do while setting school records for being in the infirmary? He read voraciously. He read the stories of heroes in the pages of books by Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. He read, and dreamed of playing the hero in the story of his life. When the time came to take the stage, Jack was ready.

The cuisine of Northern Iran, overlooked and underrated, is unlike most Persian food in that it's unfussy and lighthearted as the people from that region. The fertile seaside villages of Mazandaran and Rasht, where Soli grew up before moving to the congested capital, were lush with orchards and rice fields. His father had cultivated citrus trees and the family was raised on the fruits and grains they harvested. Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of fava beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.

With regard to other animals, humans have long since become gods. We don’t like to reflect on this too deeply, because we have not been particularly just or merciful gods. If you watch the National Geographic channel, go to a Disney film or read a book of fairy tales, you might easily get the impression that planet Earth is populated mainly by lions, wolves and tigers who are an equal match for us humans. Simba the lion king holds sway over the forest animals; Little Red Riding Hood tries to evade the Big Bad Wolf; and little Mowgli bravely confronts Shere Khan the tiger. But in reality, they are no longer there. Our televisions, books, fantasies and nightmares are still full of them, but the Simbas, Shere Khans and Big Bad Wolves of our planet are disappearing. The world is populated mainly by humans and their domesticated animals. How many wolves live today in Germany, the land of the Grimm brothers, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf? Less than a hundred. (And even these are mostly Polish wolves that stole over the border in recent years.) In contrast, Germany is home to 5 million domesticated dogs. Altogether about 200,000 wild wolves still roam the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs.1 The world contains 40,000 lions compared to 600 million house cats; 900,000 African buffalo versus 1.5 billion domesticated cows; 50 million penguins and 20 billion chickens.2 Since 1970, despite growing ecological awareness, wildlife populations have halved (not that they were prospering in 1970).3 In 1980 there were 2 billion wild birds in Europe. In 2009 only 1.6 billion were left. In the same year, Europeans raised 1.9 billion chickens for meat and eggs.4 At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world (i.e., those weighing more than a few pounds) are either humans or domesticated animals.

Celeste was finally looking at Victor—at the beast he had become—and I could see the terror and disbelief on her face. “No,” she breathed as he lifted her, his scarlet animal eyes glaring into hers. “No, it can’t be. The curse—it’s not true. It’s all superstition and nonsense!” Victor raised her higher and growled, deep in his throat. Celeste screamed and tried to break his grip but she couldn’t get free. She looked like a doll in his massive hands, a tiny blonde doll that kicked and shrieked as he brought her closer and closer to his gaping jaws. “Get back! Get away!” Celeste reached out with one hand and clawed at his eyes. She got the side of his face instead—the side she’d so recently branded. Victor’s beast snarled in pain and anger. He grabbed her arm and I heard a low popping sound as her shoulder disconnected from the socket. Then he simply yanked the arm off, like a hungry man twisting off a chicken drumstick. Celeste shrieked in mingled pain and disbelief, staring at the bloody socket where her arm had been. I understood her confusion—Victor shouldn’t have been able to tear her apart like this. She was a three-star vampire—one of the strongest beings on the planet. But clearly the beast inside him was stronger. “You can’t do this to me!” she screamed, lashing out with her other arm and baring her fangs. “I have lived for centuries and soon I will have the power to—” The beast’s jaws opened wide and I saw teeth as long as my hand glitter in the moonlight. He clamped down hard and bit into the slender white column of her throat. Celeste shrieked again, a high, terrified sound that ended abruptly in a dull, crunching—the bones of her neck being crushed, I realized. As I watched, the beast’s jaws met completely and I saw that he had bitten clean through her throat and spinal column. Her eyes were still wide with horror as her head toppled off and rolled to the ground at his feet.

Would it trouble you if I remained?” “No,” she replied, around a mouthful of chicken. He took his accustomed seat to her left, but said nothing. “Do you want any of this?” “No,” he answered gravely. “I do not normally eat this mortal fare.” “You should try it.” She stopped, trying to remember if she had ever seen the Lady of Elliath eat anything. Her memory wasn’t up to it. She doubted if anyone’s was—with the possible exception of Latham or Belfas. Stefanos watched as the fork fell slowly away from her mouth. He saw her face lengthen and felt his hand clenching once again into a fist. This time he felt he knew what he had done. “Sarillorn,” he said, almost quickly, “if you wish, I will try what you are eating.” She started and then looked up. “Pardon?” “I will have some—chicken?” The plate stared up at her as if it had become a living entity. Very slowly she cut a piece of her dinner and handed him her fork. Her hands were trembling. He looked at it, his expression no less grave than it was when he asked if he might remain each evening. Then he took it and raised it to his mouth. Erin watched as he chewed, each movement precise and almost meticulously timed. She counted to five and then watched him swallow. He turned to meet her wide stare. “It is—interesting,” he said, still grave. “Perhaps I will join you in more of this—” He gave a controlled gesture. “—at another time.” Erin laughed. The sound seemed to come from everywhere, enclosing him as her light had once done. “You, you’re the most powerful force the Enemy has—and you’ve never lifted a fork!” He was torn then, torn between pleasure at this strange laugh and anger at being the cause of it. No mortal had ever laughed at him before. But unlike other laughter, this held a sense of wonder in it. It puzzled him; he listened. “Tomorrow,” Erin said, a smile lingering, “we can try vegetables.” She began to laugh anew, but he did not ask why.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them. Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them. Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity. In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them. Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

It’s just a devilish odd coincidence. I shared a boat – and a carriage – with Balcourt’s sister and cousin." "I didn’t realise he had a sister." "Well, he does." Richard abruptly pushed away his empty bowl. "What a great stroke of luck! Could you use the acquaintance with the sister to discover more about Balcourt’s activities?" "That," Richard said grimly, "is not an option." Geoff eyed him quizzically. "I realise that any sister of Balcourt’s is most likely repugnant at best, but you don’t need to propose to the girl. Just flirt with her a bit. Take her for a drive, call on her at home, use her as an entrée into the house. You’ve done it before." "Miss Balcourt is not repugnant." Richard twisted in his chair, and stared at the door. "What the devil is keeping supper?" Geoff leant across the table. "Well, if she’s not repugnant, then-what’s the – ah." "Ah? Ah? What the deuce do you mean by ‘ah’? Of all the nonsensical…" "You" – Geoff pointed at him with fiendish glee – "are unsettled not because you find her repugnant, but because you find her not repugnant." Richard was about to deliver a baleful look in lieu of a response, when he was saved by the arrival of the footman bearing a large platter of something covered with sauce. Richard leant forward and speared what looked like it might once have been part of a chicken, as the footman whisked off with his soup dish. "Have some," Richard suggested to Geoff, ever so subtly diverting the conversation to culinary appreciation. "Thank you." Undiverted, Geoff continued, "Tell me about your Miss Balcourt." "Leaving aside the fact that she is by no means my Miss Balcourt" – Richard ignored the sardonic stare coming from across the table – "the girl is as complete an opposite to her brother as you can imagine. She was raised in England, somewhere out in the countryside. She’s read Homer in the original Greek—" "This is serious," murmured Geoff. "Is she comely?" "Comely?" "You know, nice hair, nice eyes, nice…" Geoff made a gesture that Richard would have expected more readily from Miles.

When we get closer, he pushes out both of the chairs across from him. He nods at them and says, “Take a seat.” I raise an eyebrow at him. “Am I going to have to woo you before I get my slice?” He smiles over the pizza that he’s about to bite into. “Yeah, I do believe you’re going to have to.” With zero self-respect, Amanda takes a seat and says, “That’s no problem with me.” Honestly. Does she not know how to avoid showing all her cards at once? When I take a seat, he holds out his hand. “I’m Aaron.” I take his hand and notice how rough it is. It’s a working hand, one that experiences strenuous hours on the jobsite, day in, day out. “Amelia, and this is my friend, Amanda.” Aaron nods at Amanda. “Nice to meet you.” “Pleasure is mine and just so you know, Amelia is single and definitely on the market. Want me to give you her number?” “Amanda, what the hell are you—?” “I would love it,” Aaron says, leaning back in his chair while sipping his drink. Slowly turning toward him, a little stunned, I ask, “You would?” He nods with all the confidence in the world. “I would.” “But you don’t know me. I could be a shovel-wielding rabbit killer.” He leans forward, his chest flexing under his shirt with the movement. “I’ll take my chances.” Now feeling a little skeptical, I fold my arms over my chest and ask, “Why do you want it?” He bites down on his straw and studies me for a second before saying, “Can’t let a girl walk out the door without getting her number who’s that passionate about Buffalo chicken pizza. It’s just not physically possible.” “Aw, he likes you for your crazy; he’s a keeper,” Amanda chimes in with her mouth full of pizza. “It’s 607—” “Amanda, just be quiet for a second.” Looking at Aaron, I say, “Three Buffalo chicken pizza slices in exchange for three veggie and my phone number.” “No way.” He shakes his head. “You can’t take all my Buffalo.” “But I thought you wanted my number.” “I do.” He leans forward some more, his fresh scent hitting me hard in the chest. “But we both know if I give you three slices, you will have zero respect for me because no man in his right mind would give up three Buffalo slices. No matter how hot the chick is.” Eeep, he thinks I’m hot. “But I will counter you with one and a half slices and a number.” I sit back now, watching how his smile starts to spread. God, he’s just so . . . yum. He looks like he’s quite a few years older than me. Not just because of his face, but there is something in his eyes that makes him seem older. He’s definitely not in his second year of college like me. Not wanting to fold so quickly, I counter. “Two slices, my number, and a guaranteed date this Friday.” He sits back, his eyes widen, and that smile gets even bigger. “Fucking deal.” He holds his hand out and we shake.

Both C.K. and Bieber are extremely gifted performers. Both climbed to the top of their industry, and in fact, both ultimately used the Internet to get big. But somehow Bieber “made it” in one-fifteenth of the time. How did he climb so much faster than the guy Rolling Stone calls the funniest man in America—and what does this have to do with Jimmy Fallon? The answer begins with a story from Homer’s Odyssey. When the Greek adventurer Odysseus embarked for war with Troy, he entrusted his son, Telemachus, to the care of a wise old friend named Mentor. Mentor raised and coached Telemachus in his father’s absence. But it was really the goddess Athena disguised as Mentor who counseled the young man through various important situations. Through Athena’s training and wisdom, Telemachus soon became a great hero. “Mentor” helped Telemachus shorten his ladder of success. The simple answer to the Bieber question is that the young singer shot to the top of pop with the help of two music industry mentors. And not just any run-of-the-mill coach, but R& B giant Usher Raymond and rising-star manager Scooter Braun. They reached from the top of the ladder where they were and pulled Bieber up, where his talent could be recognized by a wide audience. They helped him polish his performing skills, and in four years Bieber had sold 15 million records and been named by Forbes as the third most powerful celebrity in the world. Without Raymond’s and Braun’s mentorship, Biebs would probably still be playing acoustic guitar back home in Canada. He’d be hustling on his own just like Louis C.K., begging for attention amid a throng of hopeful entertainers. Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history. Socrates mentored young Plato, who in turn mentored Aristotle. Aristotle mentored a boy named Alexander, who went on to conquer the known world as Alexander the Great. From The Karate Kid to Star Wars to The Matrix, adventure stories often adhere to a template in which a protagonist forsakes humble beginnings and embarks on a great quest. Before the quest heats up, however, he or she receives training from a master: Obi Wan Kenobi. Mr. Miyagi. Mickey Goldmill. Haymitch. Morpheus. Quickly, the hero is ready to face overwhelming challenges. Much more quickly than if he’d gone to light-saber school. The mentor story is so common because it seems to work—especially when the mentor is not just a teacher, but someone who’s traveled the road herself. “A master can help you accelerate things,” explains Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and career coach behind the bestseller The Success Principles. He says that, like C.K., we can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.

growing meat chicken requires

Walter’s fortunes fluctuated wildly, but the Brennans did not wait to have a family. Arthur, “Mike,” was born on January 6, 1922, Walter Jr., “Andy,” on July 21, 1923, and baby Ruth “Ruthie” on September 22, 1924. By 1924, Walter’s mother and father had also moved to California, settling in Pasadena. With three children to feed, Ruth supplemented the family’s meager budget by growing her own vegetables and raising chickens. All three children would quickly learn two fundamental facts about their father: He worked almost all the time, and he expected them to carry their own weight. No Brennan child would be out on the road in a delivery wagon at the age of eleven, but every Brennan child would—certainly by the age of eleven—know what it cost to obtain the things he or she wanted.

They

however, the situation is reversed: a child can only achieve true happiness when she has successfully secured the happiness of her parents. And this has always been my ma’s position as a parent. It was also her position when she was a child. Ma’s parents weren’t particularly responsible or loving. They compromised her repeatedly. They were neglectful and unsupportive. And worse still, they showed no remorse. By Western standards, it would have been well within Ma’s rights to turn her back on her parents. To forsake them and not forgive. To abandon them without regret. But while Ma survived her ordeal and became stronger for it, finding her squawking chicken voice because of it, she continued to observe the principles of Filial Piety. She never spoke ill of her parents outside the home. She continued to play the part of dutiful first daughter. She continued to look after her five brothers and sisters without complaint. She handed over a majority of her earnings to her parents without resentment. When she married my father, she kneeled humbly before the village, in the presence of her ancestors, to thank her parents for raising her. And she kept bailing them out of trouble, over and over and over again, often at her own expense.

The tension in the room had reached breaking point when at last he swung his axe. It smashed into Mary’s head. Some thought they heard a cry. A second stroke almost severed the neck. The axe was then used like a cleaver on a chicken wing to cut it free. As the head fell the executioner raised it up, with the shout ‘God save the queen’, only to have it drop out of his hand leaving him clutching her chestnut wig. It had been severed from its moorings by the botched strike of the axe. As Shrewsbury wept, the executioners began to tear the dead queen’s stockings from her corpse. In was a perk of the job to be allowed to keep or sell their victim’s clothes. Their action disturbed her little dog, hidden under her skirts. Covered with blood, it rushed up and down the body, howling plaintively.16

The unfortunate animals raised for food are forced to eat large quantities of fish meal and rendered animal flesh and organs, which is totally unnatural for them, in order to fatten them quickly. Manure is also used to “enrich” their feed, and these additives concentrate toxins to an even higher extent than the plant foods the animals are fed. The toxins in the animal foods we eat include carcinogenic heavy metals, deadly PCBs, chemical residues, antibiotics, and the human-created nightmare we now call the prion. Prions are thought to cause mad cow disease and the other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies that have raged through both human cannibal populations (such as the cannibalistic Fore people of Papua New Guinea where a type of human spongiform encephalopathy, called by them “kuru,” was first documented in the 1950s) and animal cannibal populations (such as the farmed sheep and mink populations that developed scrapie and transmissible mink encephalopathy after being fed rendered animal flesh). Similar diseases such as Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (the human equivalent of mad cow) and, according to some researchers, certain forms of Alzheimer’s disease, now threaten human omnivore populations as well because of perverse industry standards that have dictated feeding cows to other cows, and that still feed pigs to other pigs, chickens to other chickens, and pigs and chickens to cows.30

verb \swon\ to swear, derivative of swannee I swan, raising kids is like being pecked to death by a chicken

Local, pasture-raised chickens deliver superior values of omega-3 and other nutrients than commercially raised chickens. Egg yolks are one of the planet’s most nutritionally-dense foods—enjoy!

Raising a young-un is sometimes like being pecked to death by a chicken. It takes a lot of work.

When he raises a brow in surprise, I give him a look that must be bordering on feral. “I’m craving a heaping bucket of crispy fried chicken with a side of biscuits like you wouldn’t believe.” “And she eats,” he says to the car. “A girl after my own heart.” “Just drive, Cupcake.” “Easy now, Special Sauce, I’ll get you your chicken.

Fifty years of research, from Diana Baumrind and Haim Ginott to Lynn Katz and John Gottman, have come to this conclusion. That’s why your child’s emotional life takes the central role, the chicken, in our metaphor. You won’t get any of the other benefits of the recipe unless you have placed the meat of the matter squarely in the center of your parenting behavior. The critical issue is your behavior when your children’s emotions become intense (Gottman would say “hot”) enough to push you out of your comfort zone. Here are the six spices that go into this parental dry rub:        •    a demanding but warm parenting style        •    comfort with your own emotions        •    tracking your child’s emotions        •    verbalizing emotions        •    running toward emotions        •    two tons of empathy

Are you murdering more eggs for breakfast?” Japhet raised his head as the sound of boiling water filled the small apartment. “Don't insult my eggs, Buchanan.” “You insulted my roasted chicken, Kappel, so I can insult your eggs all I want.

The only quantitative estimates of farmed animal welfare I’ve been able to find come from Bailey Norwood, an economist and agricultural expert. He rated the welfare of different animals on a scale of –10 to 10, where negative numbers indicate that it would be better, from the animal’s perspective, to be dead rather than alive. He rates beef cattle at 6 and dairy cows at 4. In contrast his average rating for broiler chickens is –1, and for pigs and caged hens is –5. In other words, cows raised for food live better lives than chicken, hens, or pigs, which suffer terribly.

Mom was very warm and loving. My favorite moments with her were spent in the kitchen, helping her make biscuits or chicken and dumplings. She would use our time together to share life lessons or talk about the Bible. She always had time for me. She used to take me with her to deliver food to some of the hungry people around our part of the river. “We’re all just people,” Mom would say. “Every race, every color, we all have the same blood.” We used to take garden vegetables to a woman who lived nearby. She’d had eighteen children but was older now and very poor. Mom knew I was still young, and she was worried about what I might say, so she tried to prepare me in advance. “Look, her stuff’s going to be different, so don’t make a big to-do about it.” When I walked into the older woman’s rickety house for the first time, I noticed she had a bed sheet hanging in the kitchen doorway instead of a door. “That’s pretty,” I said, pointing to the sheet-curtain. Mom looked at me, raising her eyebrows. I ran through it a couple of times, pretending I was a superhero busting through a wall. Next, I noticed her old-fashioned rotary dial phone. “I never saw a phone that color before,” I said. Mom held her breath, nervous. “That’s pretty,” I added. Mom gave the woman the food we had brought, and as we left, I didn’t want her to think we were going to forget her. “My mom’s going to bring more stuff. She’s got lots of it,” I volunteered. I think I made my mama proud and didn’t embarrass her too much. She always says I have a tender heart and that my oldest brother, Alan, and I are most like her.

They found that people began to feel happier after forcefully smiling for a period of time, which raises a chicken-and-egg issue: does happiness cause smiling or does smiling cause happiness?

give you props for that. I never liked how the state let this place fall apart. I’m glad you’re refurbishing it.” “Thanks, I guess,” I said, my internal danger alarm sounding. Why would Hemlock Cove’s police chief visit me on official business? “What’s going on?” “Well, we’ve had reports of local teenagers raising a ruckus out here,” Chief Terry said. “I want you to be on the lookout in case they try to break into the lighthouse or vandalize any of the construction.” “I’ve been living out here,” I pointed out. “I think I would’ve heard something like that.” “We’ve gotten four different reports from neighbors,” Chief Terry supplied. “I think the kids are partying out here from the sounds of it, but Lionel Strong claims that they’re out here sacrificing chickens,