Thursday, April 08, 2010

Icky But Apt Simile of the Day

On a factory farm, when hens start laying fewer eggs, they are "force-molted"--starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life's work is done. After 2004, when many qualified borrowers had already refinanced and houses were so expensive they could only be bought with exotic mortgages, the real estate and finance industries launched an all out effort to get people into new houses and squeeze out a few last years of golden eggs.
--Simon Johnson and James Kwak, Thirteen Bankers (2009)

1 comment:

red said...

some of our free ranging hens lay their eggs wherever they want to, insotead of the nests in the old barn. one almost every day goes across the yard, and across the new barn narnyard, to the new barn, where we have hay bales stacked almost to the barn roof. she lays her egg at the very top of the bales. so every day i climb up there over the mountain of hay bales to retrieve the egg. while i'm there i also check out the sheep and goats in the pasture around the new barn -- well over 100 with lambs and baby goats. day before yesterday, i spotted another egg in a stall. so i climbed in there to get it and while i was in there i saw where hens had burrowed a nest sideways in a bale and there were eight eggs in it. i carried them back to the house in my hat. didn't lose one. some of the eggs are a bluish green because of south american breeding in some of the hens. they all taste the same -- real good. thurday was my birthday -- 83.