The average American eats about 279 eggs each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and that’s no surprise. Eggs are cheap and available everywhere, and sandwiches featuring them are a staple of fast-food restaurant value menus. They also have a reputation for being healthy, thanks to decades of advertising campaigns by agricultural lobbyists. (Though, as with many “healthy” things, that claim has come under scrutiny.) For years, people seemed content with their limited supermarket options, but as terms like “free range,” “organic,” and “animal welfare” have entered the common lexicon, there’s been a growing awareness of where our food comes from. If you’re spending two bucks for a dozen eggs at your local supermarket, the hens that produced them aren’t living their best lives frolicking in open fields.
That sad fact has long fascinated Austin author Deb Olin Unferth, who wrote a deep-dive Harper’s feature on industrial chicken farming in 2014. The horrors she uncovered partly inspired Barn 8, a wildly inventive novel about the factory farms that produce eggs and the animal-rights activists who are determined to change the industry. It’s a powerful book and a dazzling feat of imagination from one of the country’s most exciting authors.
Barn 8 begins with Janey, a 15-year-old girl raised by a single mother in New York, taking a bus to the Midwest in search of the father she’s just learned she had. (Her mother had lied to her for years, claiming her dad was an anonymous sperm donor.) The girl “peeled off from her former self, left the old Janey behind,” determined to punish her mother for her yearslong deceit.
