Before moving to Tochigi Prefecture, buying food at the supermarket was a given. However, when I went to volunteer at the Asian Rural Institute in Tochigi, I experienced what it was like to be self-sufficient and was awaken to the idea of growing my own food with my own hands. Planting vegetables from seed and eating what you harvested from the field that day. Obtaining rice by planting and harvesting it yourself. Cooking eggs for breakfast that you gathered from the henhouse. Butchering a chicken yourself to eat its meat. Even now, I am sure that there are millions of people around the world who provide food for themselves in this way. Being self-sufficient is a given, not going to the supermarket. Still, regardless of whether we get our food from the supermarket or grow it ourselves, we must not forget the amount of labor and time that is necessary in order for us to be able to eat vegetables and rice, eggs and meat. As I wrote before, there is no such thing as “instant.” It is enough for me to want to say, if you don’t eat with thanksgiving, you shouldn’t eat at all.

When my husband and I began farming, we decided to start with vegetables, so we still need to buy our own rice and meat. However, we did decide to keep two chickens for personal use. Previously, we had been in a place where we kept hundreds of chickens (still small-scale compared to poultry farms that keep tens of thousands of chickens) so to only keep two chickens gave me a chance to think about the significance of being small scale. My first thought was that the smaller the scale the more the feeling of gratitude. When you have hundreds of chickens, it may not be the same as the supermarket, but you are guaranteed eggs every morning. But when you only have two chickens, you have to accept that there may not be any eggs that day. If we got one egg, we would rejoice. If we got two, it was a party! I gave serious consideration as to how to make use of that one precious egg. Should I divide it between the two of us? Should I save it so that we can each eat one the next day? Should I resist the urge to cook eggs and use it to make bread or sweets instead? Each egg was eaten with careful thought.

Being small scale not only increased my appreciation for being able to eat eggs, it also increased my appreciation towards the chickens who laid the eggs. When you keep hundreds of chickens, you don’t know which chickens laid and which didn’t. When you only have two, you know at least one of the two gave you the egg. I found myself thinking, “Hey ladies, thank you!” towards my chickens. I would be so happy I would want to give them a reward. By the way, at our house a reward for the chickens means crickets we caught inside our house or dried fish heads, and on special occasions, shrimp shells. Gratitude for being able to eat eggs! Gratitude to our chickens that laid the eggs! These are the feelings of joy that well up from living on a small scale.

And…I originally planned to end my article here on a happy note. However, as time passed, I became aware of a most unbelievable occurrence. Our adorable little hens had started to eat their own eggs. The whole things, shell and all! When I couldn’t get eggs for an entire week, I finally ended up buying them at the supermarket. My husband and I sat down for a strategy session to try to figure out where the problem was and how to solve it. In our henhouse, we have a little room where the chickens go to lay their eggs called the “laying box” which is designed with the bottom part open so that the eggs can roll out. However, when for some reason the eggs didn’t roll or rolled to a place that was still in reach of their beaks, the hens pecked the eggs and ate them. My husband re-designed the structure like a mousetrap so that the egg not only rolled out of the bottom but then down and away from the laying box and into a tin can. It took a few days, but amazingly, the contraption worked and the eggs actually started rolling into the can and we could eat eggs again. It isn’t a perfect system; even now the eggs sometimes don’t roll and get eaten, or they roll onto the ground instead, but we’ve still been getting an egg every other day or so.

Through this “incident,” I was struck by the perils of doing things on a small scale and was given an important realization. If I go to the supermarket, I can buy eggs whenever I want and eat them without a second thought. Even if one company happened to collapse, another one would be there to provide eggs. Both the chickens and the people who raise them are faceless; they are in a separate world from me and have no effect whatsoever on my emotions. If you keep several hundred chickens, there is responsibility that comes with it, to be sure. But it’s not much of a problem if one or two happen to not lay eggs or start eating theirs. In fact, in general, 70% is considered a good laying rate. And even if one or two don’t lay eggs, you can’t say, “It’s you!” because there are too many of them. (Unless each one is kept in a separate cage, but in that case, you have all kinds of other problems). What I’m trying to say is, when you only have two chickens, and those chickens have a problem, you are affected immediately. You start to feel upset, like “Why aren’t you laying!?” “Why in the world are you eating your own eggs?!” I was so angry, I told my husband, “If they keep eating their own eggs, I’m going to butcher them and eat them instead.” In other words, I realized that just as doing things small scale had the ability to produce deep gratitude in me, it also could produce deep anger.

If this was just a matter of emotions, I might be able to set it aside as a funny story, but the vulnerability that comes with doing things small scale or by yourself is no laughing matter. In our case, we may be aiming for self-sufficiency, but a ten-minute drive will take us to the nearest supermarket. If our chickens don’t lay eggs, or eat the eggs they do lay, we can go buy eggs from somewhere else. Even if the vegetables we are working so hard to grow were completely decimated by a natural disaster or a pest outbreak, we could still go to the supermarket to get more vegetables. We may have financial damage, but we won’t starve. I felt what a luxury it is to be able to practice agriculture without tension or fear. What about the many people around the world who are living hand to mouth? With no guarantee that they will have enough to eat that day, I’m sure they are thankful to be able to eat the food that they grow. Yet, they must be anxious having to rely on the weather and living creatures which are unpredictable. Perhaps they also grow angry like me when things don’t go according to plan. Maybe they long for food that is easily obtained and doesn’t require back-breaking work.

I have many doubts about the effect of large-scale agriculture and livestock rearing, international corporations, and supermarkets on the environment, labor practices, and the human heart. However, I know that the reality of small-scale self-sufficiency is more complicated than a shining ideal. The gratitude and anger that I feel towards my chickens shows me the contradictions that exist within my own heart. Do I wait for my one egg every two days or give up and go to the supermarket? Or do I look for a third option? I still haven’t made up my mind.