Getting the Lead Out: Urban Chicken Keeping as Transformative Neo-Agrarianism

• Main Author: Sydney Giacalone
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dalhousie University Libraries 2017-09-01
• Series: The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography
• Online Access: https://ojs.library.dal.ca/JUE/article/view/8414

This ethnographic study explores how the discovery of lead contamination in urban chicken flocks in the Boston area unsettles postindustrial optimism and neo-agrarian romanticism, producing new openings for multispecies relationships. Within rising popular and political attention to food systems, urban chicken keeping stands as a uniquely positioned subset of urban agriculture. Through ethnography with chicken keepers, policy makers and businesses in Boston and Somerville, Massachusetts in the summer of 2016, my research investigated how urban chicken keeping might transform keepers’ thinking about food systems and animal relationships. The unexpected discovery of lead in chickens’ blood and eggs revealed keepers’ increasingly entangled relationships with the history of the soil they and their birds live upon, exposing what Marx (1981) termed the “metabolic rift” at the heart of industrial capitalist approaches to subsistence. With lead breaking the imagined simplicity of urban agriculture and the linear progression of modern cities, responses in urban chicken keeping reveal space for new ways of thinking about collective metabolism, multispecies living, food politics, and the bodies wrapped up in these material legacies.