More Good Press for Eastside Eggs!

Portland is truly an amazing place. People here are just plain unwilling to accept the status quo, and as a result innovation becomes a part of the daily routine, be it in technology, art, music, or especially, food... As regular readers of this blog know, since last summer I've been volunteering with Eastside Eggs, a community egg co-operative which was organized by Patrick Barber and Holly McGuire over at Henwaller.com, in conjunction with a local agricultural park called Zenger Farm. We maintain a flock of nearly fifty free-ranging barred rock hens and collect their eggs to sell to 47th Avenue Farm CSA subscribers, as well as at the Lents Farmers' Market in the summer (and yes, the volunteers do get free eggs out of the deal, lest you think we're doing this for purely altruistic reasons). This would have been considered a somewhat radical idea back in my hometown of Saginaw, MI, but to me the idea of having a hand in producing the food that nourishes me, and more importantly, my community seems perfectly logical, and it's been an immensely rewarding experience. And others are taking notice as well. Eastside Eggs just got a write-up in the Spring 2008 edition of Edible Portland, and was the subjuct of a short video produced by the folks over at Cooking Up a Story, which I've posted above. Have a look!

While it's easy for those of us who live in places like Portland to assume that we inhabit a tiny bubble of progressive values surrounded by a darker, uglier, meaner nation, the fact of the matter is that this sort of thing is happening all over America. People are shelving their TVs, getting out and meeting their neighbors, embracing crazy new ideas and generally flipping the metaphorical bird to what I'll call, for lack of a better way of putting it, the machine; in short, Americans are learning to live like human beings again. And I for one find that very exciting indeed!