Behind the Scenes Minis: Goose and Chicken

Tracy talks about the likely wrap up of the Mother Goose series. Holly shares a story about growing up with chickens.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson
and I'm Holly Friday. We did our third installment of
six Impossible episodes Mother Goose Rhymes today. These are so fun.

(00:24):
I enjoy them. I think we may be nearing the
end of them, just because I felt like with this
one there were fewer poems to talk about that we
had not already talked about, that there is some sort

(00:45):
of purported historical explanation to talk about, and also I
felt like the purported historical explanations being offered there was
like even less back up than in earlier It just
feels like we may be coming to a natural end
of this particular series. One question that people have asked

(01:08):
the last couple times we've done this or slash suggestion
is that we do one that is about like, not
English language nursery rhymes, And in particular, wouldn't it be
nice to have one that was like, not even about
languages from Europe nursery rhymes. And while I agree that

(01:28):
is a cool idea, the thing that makes these episodes
possible is having been so steeped in all of these
poems since before I could read that I they are
there in my mind immediately, And that is not trying
to like number one, find nursery rhymes to talk about

(01:48):
for a language that we don't speak, and then to
be able to get to the possible cultural context of
them for a culture we're not part of. Like that
is just so far from our experience and knowledge that
I'm like, I don't think it's really gonna work out
for this show. Yeah, I feel like that's the kind
of thing you get a grant for and you go

(02:09):
take six or eight months to do. Yeah that would yeah,
which should be amazing, but like not really plausible on
a right weekly episode show. Yeah yeah, we uh, people
know this if they listen to us all the time.
We do two new episodes of the show each week,

(02:29):
with each of us writing one, which means we can't
take six months to research something or totally get the
foundational knowledge for something that is like so far outside
of our experience, which is a frustration sometimes, Like sometimes
I wish I could just like magically have all of

(02:51):
the knowledge to talk about something that's totally outside the
realm of anything we have ever covered before. But that
can be just not feasible in the time it's allowed,
which is why sometimes we have authors on the show
who have different knowledge and experience than we do. Yes,
but then that requires preparation a whole different other way us.

(03:13):
Two things came up in this research that caused me
to question whether maybe I had accidentally fallen into some
kind of alternate universe in sort of like a Berenstein
Bear's situation. Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook, Yes, I have one

(03:36):
hundred percent for sure called it Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook
in previous episodes, and I thought that was the name
of it. I thought it was Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook.
And the first time I saw Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook
when doing research for this, I was like, is that right?
And then not only is it right, like there's nowhere

(03:57):
that it's written as Tom Thumb's and I'm just like
I I it was solidified in my brain as Tom
Thumb's Pretty Songbook, not Tommy Thumbs. The other thing is
Tommy Thumbs sounds like a character that got written out
of Goodfellas kind of Tommy Thumbs. He got pretty songs.

(04:20):
The other thing is I have read some of ts
Eliot's work. I studied some of it in college in
literature classes. I have always associated ts Eliot with British poetry.
Hello me too, because he did I mean, he moved

(04:42):
to the UK, became a British citizenship, renounced his US
citizenship all the time. Like I had never really studied
his biography in any way, but like always in my
head he's been a British poet. No. Uh. When I

(05:03):
got to the part about how he learned here we go,
here we go around the mulberry bush, uh, and that
for him it was a prickly pair apparently, and that
he had grown up in Saint Louis, Missouri, I was like,
that cannot be right. And then I looked it up
and yes, T. S. Eliot grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri.

(05:23):
And I was just like, am I am I having
a break with I've fallen into the wasteland? Yeah, Like
it's is there a glitch in the matrix? What is happening?
So yeah, both of those two things. I just had
a weird existential hall. It's tom Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook

(05:46):
and T. S. Eliot was not raised in the UK. Once,
I love it. I had a moment when I was
first reading You're outline where I was right out of
the gate, I was like, wait, there's some I mean,
I remember hearing the Cannon story about Humpty Dumpty. Uh huh,

(06:08):
but I was like, yeah, but everybody knows it's an egg,
Like it never occurred to me that it could not
have been an egg, might have not been an egg. Yeah.
I was like, that's what broke my little brain. Uh what.
I don't remember which which bit of research it was
that I was reading, but they were talking about Humpty Dumpty,

(06:29):
and they were talking about how this only really makes
sense as a riddle if there's a reason for an
egg to be on a wall in the first place,
like why is the egg on the wall? And I
was like as, And then I was trying to think
through various riddles that I know, and like whether there

(06:51):
are weird details like that that could really be considered
some kind of a strange red herring. But yeah, uh,
that chicken had a couple of drinks. Yeah. I Also,
I think I have always sort of imagined Humpty Dumpty
in my head as like an egg but with arms
and legs and a crown on his head is an egg? Yeah,

(07:14):
crown optional for me, but her person. Yeah. The end
got around on the same pape as that. My brain
also made a very silly association, and then I was like, oh,
somebody study that. Which is that? Towards the end, when
we were talking about the opies, kind of noting that

(07:39):
there are these very similar person waiting for a thing,
I was like, somebody write a paper about how this
relates to Samuel Beckett's waiting for GOODO, please, somebody write
that paper? Please? That sounds yeah? Do it? I mean
I love me some Beckett, so yeah, and did. My

(08:00):
senior project in college was about Samuel Beckett. But I
had never I actually Gido is probably the least studied
of his pieces for me. Yeah, but I just loved
the idea of it suddenly being a really weird extrapolation
of a nursery run and how that could be a
completely different interpretation of what that is. Yeah. That sounds interesting, though,

(08:26):
somebody else do it. I'm lazy. I have seeded the
plant and now it can grow in someone else's brain. Yeah.
My my senior thesis in literature was about the poetry
of Audrey and Rich and Muriel Rockeiser and with like

(08:49):
just a weird Now, in hindsight many years later, focus
on sort of a pop psychology. But it was a
whole weird thing. It did not make a lot of sense.
And sometimes it's one of the weird things that I
occasional occasionally will look back on it and go, Huh,
how did I come up with this weird thing that

(09:09):
I did for two poets whose worked that I really loved.
It took a really strange angle. Anyway, That's more than
anyone needed to know about my bachelor's degree. We talked

(09:32):
about the Chicken of Tomorrow contest this week, as well
as a lot of background about chickens in general. Yeah,
this gave me many flashbacks because my parents used to
raise chickens when I was a kid. We did not
raise chickens ourselves, but we had neighbors who raised chickens.
We had chickens. A lot of chickens. I don't mean

(09:53):
like we had four chickens. I mean we had hundreds
of chickens. Oh wow, that's a lot. It was a lot.
We had a little like mini farm situation going on.
And I will tell you what might be the most
disturbing fact about me, okay, which is that on chicken
slaughtering day, I would drag my little holly hobby table

(10:14):
and chair set out to just outside the chicken yard
and I would do Howard Cosell play by play of
the whole event. I I kind of loved this. Some
of it was really grizzly, and I was at the
time pretty comfortable with this stuff. But as I've gotten older,
I'm too I'm soft. I couldn't well and I do

(10:34):
that again. One of the things as I was researching this,
While a lot of what I was focused on was
like the what actually happened with this contest, and like
the historical context for the contest, of course, there were
many things that I also read as part of this
that were more written from an animal rights perspective more recently,

(10:59):
that were about, in one way or another, the state
of chicken farming today. And one of the arguments that
I saw somebody make was that if a person wants
to eat animal meat in any way, they should be
required to like participate in the raising and slaughtering process

(11:24):
to see what it's actually like. And you're your anecdote
just reminded me of that. Yeah, I mean, I know
what it's actually like. I know, every time we say
we love animals on the show, someone writes to us
to say, but you're not vegan and you might be
a monster, And I'm like, but I have participated, and

(11:45):
I have seen humane farms versus any we Yeah, Like,
I have also done trips to industrial slaughterhouses and they're
horrifying and haunt me, right, which is why I try
to always source anything I eat from not that. Yeah,
most of the meat that we eat in our household
we are getting directly from a farmer. We have a

(12:08):
meat share. It was specifically a poultry share for a
couple of years, and then the farmer that we were
working with decided they needed to kind of retool what
they were, like how their chicken process was working, and
they had a couple of unfortunate that time. This is
a sad story. You might want to like skip ahead

(12:31):
maybe thirty seconds if you're going to be really bummed
out by a sad story about chickens. During that time,
in the early pandemic months when there was just a
total backlog at the postal service and mail was delayed
by our really long time. They had whole shipments of
chickens that didn't arrive on time and were dead when
they got there. Yeah, and of course that was like

(12:52):
upsetting and horrifying to everybody involved. But we know that
this farmer is working with all of their animals in
like a respectful way. In addition to feeling like we
are getting, we're supporting a farmer who is taking these
steps and who is you know, trying to be thoughtful

(13:12):
and compassionate and how they raise them care for these animals.
The variety of the eggs that we get from them
delights me because there are It's not like from the
grocery store most of the time where you open the
box and it's like a dozen identical eggs. They are
different colors and different sizes and different. I love them.

(13:33):
It's great. So anyway, I know that for a lot
of folks like that is not enough and they do
not want to eat any animal product at all, and
I respect that decision. At my house, it is more
we try to get all of our meat from like
sources that are working as humanly as possible, and also
to eat less meat, like the majority of my meals

(13:56):
don't actually include any meat. So meat is mostly a
dinner food at my house for me and not the
rest of the meals food. Yeah. I mean, I will
say this too. As meatless options have become more varied
and more delectable, like, it's so much easier to cut

(14:19):
back on. Yeah. I remember a time when one of
my dearest friends was traveling with me to theme parks
I love very much and was vegetarian, and at one
point she looked at me and said, I cannot eat
another roasted vegetable flat bread. Yeah. And now that is
not really a problem because everywhere has something yummy and
delicious that is a true, actual, like right right entree

(14:44):
option that is not just a I don't know what
can we throw together that does not include these thyas.
I think I've told this story on the show before,
but I'm going to tell it again. I know there
are cuisines all over the world that are rich in
plant based options, like I'm aware of this, but growing
up in northwest North Carolina in the nineteen eighties and nineties,

(15:04):
there were not a lot of options, and so when
I stopped eating meat in high school, there were like
there were Chinese restaurants that we could go to that
had like a vegetable it was just like vegetables and
a sauce with rice that was an option. But there
was this one restaurant called Rainbow News and Cafe, which
was a restaurant slash bookstore, and they had, as I recall,

(15:28):
two vegetarian options on the menu, and that was a big,
big deal, Like it was the only like specifically vegetarian
thing on any restaurant in the area that I knew of.
One of the things was a vegetarian chili, which would
have been more accurately described as a vegetable stew. It
bore no resemblance to chili of any sort. And then

(15:51):
the other thing was a barbecue tofu sandwich, which was
like a bun with the fixens that you would expect
on a burger, with just a slab of tofu that
had been sort of slathered in barbecue sauce. You would
bide into it, and like the barbecue sauce, plus the
tofu slab was really slippery, so the tofu would just
shoot out the other end. I loved that bookstore restaurant

(16:14):
so much, I really really did. In hindsight, that was
a terrible sandwich but it gave you an option, which
is probably why it felt amazing. Yes, there was also
my standard of caesar salad and french fries from McDonald's,
not understanding that caesar salad dressing had anchovies in it,
and not knowing that at that time McDonald's was using

(16:34):
beef flavoring beef french fries. I don't know if that's
still the case, because I remember when like that became news,
there was beef beef flavor in the McDonald's French fries
and vegetarians were horrified. So anyway, I'm so glad there
are so many more options now, and so many more
options at the regular grocery store. I know there's a

(16:56):
lot to think about in terms of like foods like quinoa,
and how the communities that have raised quinoa are being
in a lot of ways disadvantaged by like the popularity
of foods like quinoa among Americans. Like that's the whole
other thing. But it's really hard the ethics of food
and what you consume and what you're comfortable with one.

(17:17):
I mean, I think it's very individual in terms of
where anybody's gonna sit. But also it there are so
many layers right where it's like, okay, but like this
solution solves this problem, but oh wait, it has its
own mess of yuckiness and problem that we haven't thought
about yet. But if we fix that, then another thing.
It's like whack a mole of trying to do the

(17:37):
right thing and it's hard. Yeah, there's also just the converse,
the totally converse part of like, like, indigenous peoples that
live in the very far North have historically had a
very like meat based diet, and I've seen a lot
of people talking about being like judged and vilified for

(17:59):
continuing to eat foods that are part of their traditional
food ways. And it's like, there's but I can't just
like grow a bunch of wheat here the ground is frozen.
Like there's there's a lot to think about, and a
lot of times I think people try to offer very
easy solutions, and those very easy solutions have a lot

(18:20):
of complexities that are not but are not really evident
until you really start thinking about stuff. I didn't know
until researching this that broiler chick like commercially farmed broiler chickens,
these hybrids that have been developed today, they are so
big and they grow so fast, and they convert their

(18:40):
feed into meat so efficiently that they just they can't
live outside of this environment, and they probably wouldn't live
long beyond their slaughter date because of the way their
bodies develop. I didn't know any of that at all,
and that was more surprising to me than the fact

(19:02):
that a grocery store and the USDA teamed up to
have a contest, which was the thing that sparked my
attention in the first place. Whatever's coming up for you
this weekend, I hope it's great. Hope it's great. Whatever
you're gonna eat this weekend, I hope that's great. If
you would like to send us a note or a

(19:23):
history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and we'll be back
with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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(19:44):
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