Urban Eggs

Backyard Chickens are the new status symbol in hipster neighborhoods and upscale suburbs, a way to have pretty feathered pets and go green with local, fresh organic eggs. What’s not to like? Okay, aside from the noise and the odors and the expense and the cats and the authorities and the parasites and the thieves and  Avian Flu?

Plenty.

Those fresh backyard eggs can be a great source of fresh salmonella. But it’s not just the chickens that are problematic, it’s the backyards:

“Henry M. Spliethoff, a research scientist in the Bureau of Toxic Substance Assessment for the environmental health center of the State Health Department, tested 58 eggs from chickens living in New York City gardens and found that 28 of them contained lead in amounts of 10 to 73 parts per billion, with one egg having more than 100 parts per billion.

How to regard those results is a complicated question. If anything, they show how, as the locavorism gospel has spread, so, too, have questions about the safety of food cultivated in neighborhoods where previous revolutions were industrial, not epicurean.”

— “High Lead Found in City-Sourced Eggs,” Julie Scelfo, New York Times

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Short link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-fx8

Image (“Urban Eggs, after Herbert Bayer”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Tags: backyard chickens, chickens, eggs, food, food safety, fowl, lead, lead poisoning, locovores, poultry, urban agriculture, urban chickens