Urban Chicken Farmers, the Europeans are laughing at you - you know that right?

           In countless times in movies and TV shows, an American finds himself or herself in a developing nation.  Every director has the same device for showing that this red-blooded American is definitely somewhere foreign, somewhere still developing, somewhere you don’t drink the tap water.  The American gets on a bus or a train, and one of the locals is carrying a live chicken.  Mark my words.  Every.  Single. Time.

            I have a feeling some film student is going to write a paper about this “chicken on the bus” motif at the University of Southern California in 2075, and her teacher isn’t going to give her an A because it’s just too obvious.  I am currently in a German immersion class with several people from all over Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.  Only two or three of them have ever been to the United States, and their impression of America is very much shaped by what they see in American movies and what they learned about America in school.  Needless to say, they think America is the kind of place where you don’t have a chicken on a bus.  Little did they know that American hipsters have gone through the looking glass and actually started having chickens at home.

            Last week in class, the instructor asked us what kind of pets we had as children.  People mentioned the typical beloved cats and dogs, the ridiculously good looking gay Spanish hairdresser mentioned his pet iguana, and two of my classmates revealed they had grown up on poultry farms.  Since I hadn’t spoke up in awhile, I mentioned that urban chicken farming was becoming very popular in the United States.  I told them that there were even lots of chickens in New York City.  It was the only time in my life I thought I’d ever see a large, international group of people crap their pants from laughing. 

            A European friend explained to me that many of my classmates come from towns where they only recently convinced the old timers to finally stop having chickens at home.  Now they hear that New York of all places has city chickens – no wonder they thought it was hilarious.  Time to get real, America.  It’s time we let the Europeans know, it’s no longer Sex in the City, it’s chickens in the city.