The Wall Street Journal article on Salem’s urban chicken debate that I’ve talked about on this blog finally appeared in the paper’s issue today. Dude must have been working on that piece for a while, or the paper’s time line must be on someone else’s news cycle — it’s been months since I first heard of the interviews being conducted here.
Sadly, if you’ve been following the news here in town — and if you haven’t, you must be living under a rock (urban slugs?) — you will already be familiar with the story lines and personalities in the WSJ piece. The difference, of course, is that Salem’s drawn-out discussion on chickens has now entered the national debate.
Yes, Salem is still a little late to the chicken dance. Articles about backyard chickens have been coming out for months, even years at this point. One Slate.com columnist, Jack Schafer, even went so far as to hail the issue as a “Bogus Trend of the Week,” arguing that media organizations had fabricated the existence of the trend to drive a good story.
And what a story it is. Chickens! In your Backyard! In a time when we can buy eggs and completely skinned chicken breasts in the market! It’s the perfect Depression 2.0 meets D.I.Y. culture story!
As I’ve argued before, keeping chickens in no longer a twee agri-fad to shrug off after the 6 o’clock news. I don’t know what’s going on in Jack Schafer’s community, but here in Salem, chickens were all random strangers were talking about to me last spring. Everybody has an opinion. But most of the most opinionated tend to be the people who haven’t really engaged with the studies presented by our own chicken keepers, C.I.T.Y., Chickens in the Yard.
The Wall Street Journal does add one little wrinkle to Salem’s chicken story, one that I knew about when I wrote my own story on the issue last March, but which Ms. Palermo wasn’t ready to reveal at the time. It reveals that Barbara Palermo, leader of the group, had chickens herself before her neighbor complained to the city, forcing her to usher her hens to a safe haven out in the country just four months after she got them (if you’ve seen her coop, you might wish we all lived as well as her chickens).
If we have anyone to thank for this local kerfuffle making national headlines, it is this neighbor who first called the cops on Ms. Palermo. I’m surprised his house hasn’t been egged.
All politics are local? Well, they may start that way…
What I especially liked about the story was Terry Frohnmeyer — who, the story explains, is not a Salem resident — dictating what we should do if we want to keep some hens. I hope that the collapse of the real estate market leads her to be a little less dictatorial towards others someday.
I was kind of underwhelmed by that story. I don’t really think it represents the actual tenor of the discussion here. But yes, that is rather irritating, quoting people who don’t live here. I think it is a case of false balancing — having to get someone to go on record and actually share an opinion. Honestly, people in Salem are a little nice — too nice, sometimes, for quotable quotes.