Locavores, unite! You have nothing to lose but your supermarket shopping carts, your produce trucked in from California, your beef fattened in feedlots, slaughtered, trucked and stuffed into Cryovac bags!

For quite awhile one of the smartest Coloradans I know, my wife, has longed to raise chickens in our backyard. Wouldn’t you know it, this lively drop-in about local food is produced by Julia King from Denver. I’m pretty sure that local ordinances in my Illinois suburban “village” forbid private chicken coops, but Denver doesn’t. The mile-high city in the Rocky Mountain State apparently has enough fresh air and deep abiding care for fresh eggs and poultry to give the green light to backyard Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds. No matter the hens’ puck-puck-pucks, not to mention their mess, Denverites are “flocking”—a pun used in King’s piece—to count their chickens before their eggs.

Seriously, the Great Recession has done wonders to shoppers no longer willing to pay top dollar for chickens raised on distant factory farms where they don’t see the light of day and are fattened so drastically they can barely stand on the three talons of their feet. King’s interviewees don’t talk about these things. Instead, they laud the simpler life of our forebears, farmers who cared about free-range fowl the way they cared about canning and baking and cooking meals from scratch.

Lately there’s been a lot of palaver about backyard chicken coops. King’s sound-rich piece is a significant addition to the lore about locavores that has finally hatched in America.