Today I ponder chickens and their eggs.

When I first came to Sterling, I got my eggs from Hannah's Hens up on Tuttle Road.  But only because it was convenient.  My travels often took me up near the Heywood Reservoir (a beautiful place of public recreation, for those of you who haven't been there - just ask, I'll relay directions).

Now, alas, I don't go that way so often.  I did without fresh eggs for a time, then chased a few people who had chickens in order to get their eggs, but there was something erratic and difficult about that as well.  It just doesn't work to travel a 12 mile round trip for nothing besides eggs.

Now, I get eggs from my neighbor down the street, and if I forget to pick them up, he drops them off.  You can't really get much more convenience than that.

The neighbor raises chickens in a cage.  It is a big cage, with a house attached, and lots of indoor leg room and roosting options as well as outdoor space.  The chickens follow each other into the hen house and back out into the court yard from which they have plucked every blade of grass.  My neighbor tried to leave the birds loose, but foxes and coyotes in the neighborhood significantly shorten the life span of a chicken. 


At my neighbor's house, I watched a hen snatch a dragonfly out of the air.  The insect was so huge that the wings hung out on each side of the hen's beak, and the head stuck out in front.  The clever bird who had captured the unfortunate odonata was unable to open its beak to reposition for fear of the dragonfly escaping into the mouths of her avian sisters who were chasing her around the pen trying to get a piece of that goodness.  Eventually, the first bird found a private place to figure out how to swallow her lunch, and all the rest went back to scratching around for worms and snacks.  This is what I imagine happy chickens to look like.

The eggs from these birds are huge, come in three colors and are rich-looking and very, very fresh.

Back at the Harvest Grille, we had to work to find eggs in a different way.  Eventually, we stocked up on cage free eggs from Maine. Kind of local, but kind of far as well.

My discussions with people as we renovated the restaurant suggested that egg quality was an important issue.  My partner groused at the cost of the eggs, and said we would not survive for very long if we priced the eggs fairly.  So we decided that we would leave it to the customers to decide what we carried.   We put both on the menu and priced them just under what they should cost.

It proved surprising, then, when not so many folks came out for the eggs from the happy chicken.

We have had some customers applaud the presence of the happy eggs, but mostly, people prefer to pay for conventionally raised chicken eggs. On the other hand, there is great interest in the teriaki-marinated, antibiotic-free, free-range grilled chicken breast (is that a Tari-mari-free-free bird?)

One month in a new menu isn't really enough time to fully test my theory, but it seems already clear that the chicken is more important than the egg to most consumers.

And this makes my life easy, because we will of course continue to provide happy-chicken eggs to our customers who want them - even if they are few.   And that means my dragonfly-eating neighboring chicken will be doing the work.

How much more local can you get?