Last week while vacationing with my family at my mother's cabin in the desert for the holiday, Jon woke up early every morning as usual and passed those quiet hours reading news and various websites on his laptop. On Thanksgiving morning he startled me awake when he couldn't contain his laughter at this entry by Matt Haughey about organic free range chicken broth. Read that again: organic free range chicken broth. You know how that happened, right? On the 14th floor of some boxy office building there was a marketing exec dressed in pleated dress pants standing at the head of a large conference table screaming, "How can we make consumers feel better about their choice of chicken broth?! HOW!" Because, seriously? Can I be honest here? I was feeling pretty insecure about my chicken broth.

I saw a box of free range chicken broth for the first time while visiting Maggie in California. I was with her when she bought a box of it for a dinner she was cooking, and I remember thinking, whatever, she cannot be serious, obviously she has been living in San Francisco too long. She assured me that organic free range chicken broth really does make a difference, that it enhances the taste and consistency of meals unlike broth made from heroin-addicted hooker chickens with herpes. Which makes a lot of sense if you think about it that way, except maybe those chickens were out hooking in the first place because you outsourced their jobs to the organic free range chickens. Did you ever think about that? Just try going to sleep tonight with those hooker birds on your conscience.

Jon and I laughed about the notion of organic free range chicken broth for most of the morning until my mother finally snapped at us to stop, it's just not that funny. And I can see her point, but I ignored her point, and continued to have a hearty chuckle especially after she tried explaining how broth works. I guess you boil chicken parts or bones in water, and afterward you've got broth, which is very cute and all, but the organic free range part? Do you really expect me to believe that it can be transferred to the water? Or that it would matter? It's still just the drippings from a chicken carcass. Would the fact that it came from an organic free range chicken make me feel like a more benevolent human being for having cared about the living conditions in which those chickens were raised? Shouldn't I just stop eating chickens?

I made all these points to my mother who continued to insist that organic free range chicken broth is a noble and valid product, and that is when I told her that I was going to write about this and emphasize the fact that she was taking up for the hippies.

And if you've ever wondered how it might be possible to melt the face off an Avon World Sales Leader, you might want to start by telling her that she's taking sides with a group of people who don't wear make-up.