A Cook's Notebook: Oscar's Eggs

Oscar loves his chickens so when he reached under one them ? only to find a crushed egg ? the eleven year old with bent up wire rimmed glasses + farmer?s hands ? flung that bird out of its roost. In a flurry of feathers and a cacophony of squawking (which he ignored) Oscar scooped up the warm gooey mess ? dropped it onto the muck floor of the chicken coop and ground it in.

?Let me tell you something?, he said definitively, ?Chickens are carnivores ? you have to remember that?once a chicken gets a taste for egg that?s it. They?ll eat their own?. Truth ? spoken from a kid who learned how to count to ten sitting on a tractor tire while his mom dunked fresh-killed chickens in & out of scalding water. ?Slaughtering? she says, ?as with all the beasts, is part of the process ? the give + take-circle thing.?

Later ? that egg-eating bird got a string tied around its foot ? so it?ll be eas...
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