Chicken ‘Dupe’ for the Soul?

Last Thanksgiving I had a go at the Turkey industry with my rant on the inhumane cost of raising the lean, super-chested birds we like on our platters. Next up: their feathered friends, our beloved chickens.

A century ago, your typical chicken was a scraggy crater. It took about four months to grow to a weight of 3 pounds. Consequently, it wasn’t a popular dish with most Americans.

Today, the typical broiler (meat chicken) converts feed into meat at a dazzling rate. Compared to its scrawny predecessors, it grows to twice the size in half the time. Now many animal welfare advocates are lobbying the poultry industry to turn back the clock. Modern meat chickens are growing so fast, they say, that they are suffering.

How? As reported on the Compassion in World Farming site:

Modern broiler breeds have been selected for exceptionally fast growth. As a result of growing so big so quickly, broilers spend much of their time lying down and many suffer from lameness. Rapid growth also puts additional strain on the birds’ hearts and lungs.

William Muir, a poultry geneticist at Purdue University, says this transformation was mainly a triumph of chicken breeding. “This is what genetics does. We can actually make more from less,” he says — more chicken meat from less feed, in less time.

Right . . . How about this trajectory: less feed ➥ more chicken meat ➥happier consumers ➥richer poultry industry ➥unhealthier chickens ➥dead chicken ➥less soul sensitivity to the inhumanity (and insanity) of it all because, well we like our chickens FAST.

So the next time you’re handed a plate of chicken wings at KFC, ask your server if she/he knows whether the broiled bird on your plate was on the fast or slow track to the slaughter house. Or does it really matter to the average consumer?

Well it does to me. Why? Because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of the species I belong to and wonder how the heck we ended up here.

And where we’ve ended up, at least in the western world, is in an industrial, TV commercial driven culture in which we expect to walk into a store and purchase any food we desire, all packaged and available, regardless of whether it’s in or out of season, or even imported from a far corner of the world.

The wholesale industrial slaughter of conscious living beings is more than I can bear. So these days I lean to a more vegetarian, organic foods diet; and I try to be as cognizant as I can of the origins and production of the food I consume.

The value that we’ve severely compromised (or lost) in the consumer age is our primal and fundamental connection to the earth and the soil that generously grows everything we could ever need.

Whether it’s monkeying with the climate, or engineering the food on our plates, it’s only a matter of time before our misguided arrogance and experimentation for profit, come back to bite us on our fat derrières.

So what do you think? Comments welcome!

Bon appetit!

Cover Photo: Pixabay

Image Insert: ciwf.com