Jennifer Murtoff’s best marketing device is her rubber chicken purse. People always ask about the rubber chicken purse. That gives her an in to talk about chickens, about how she started raising them in the 4th grade in rural Pennsylvania, about how she has loved them ever since and now loves helping other people figure out how to raise them, too.
Then she pulls out her business card. It’s got a photo of her holding a chicken on one side and this quote from Frank Lloyd Wright on the back: “Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.” When she hands it to people, she introduces herself as Jennifer Murtoff, urban chicken consultant.
“And then they usually say ‘That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard! How do you make any money at that?’” Murtoff laughs.
This may be the best (or at least, our favorite) indication yet that food-conscious city-dwellers are increasingly bypassing the supermarket for the back-yard urban farmstead: There is someone in Chicago who works as an urban chicken consultant.
Granted, the gig isn’t full-time (although Murtoff would like it to be). The 36-year-old works as a freelance editor, writer, and translator by day. But demand is growing for her chicken seminars, chicken house calls, and chicken hand-holding. Murtoff's bundle of services include teaching clients how to set up a chicken coop, how to identify a sick chicken, and what to do about the ones you want to eat. She will not, however, do the killing. “I point them to a butcher shop,” she says.
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