I quit chicken today.
I began reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals a couple of weeks ago. He repeatedly hits you in the gut with grotesque images of the forty-two day life span of a chicken in a factory farm - from genetic mutations that render them weak from the start, a living space the size of this page, broken bones, terror and paralyzed but conscious slaughtering…he goes on. Yet, I still wasn’t convinced. “What else am I supposed to eat?” I had Thai Chicken Curry that night.
Then, Eating Animals changed my diet forever: It appealed to my sense of disgust and self-preservation. We have seen it in many forms in the last decade alone – people are willing to overlook or ignore acts of torture if you put enough distance between them and the victim or are sufficiently convincing of its necessity, but if you put the nasty on their plate, people will go apeshit.
All these years my mother has spent haranguing me with PETA pamphlets and all she had to do was tell me this:
The chickens “are inspected by a USDA official, whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, both the carcass and the organs, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 birds a day. Journalist Scott Bronstein…conducted interviews with nearly a hundred USDA poultry inspectors from thirty-seven plants. ‘Every week,’ he reports, ‘millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.’”
That is so gross. The sight of chicken in the day market now turns my stomach in a way previously reserved for llama fetuses and marshmallow Jell-O. Read this. Please. But only when you’re prepared to give up roast chicken.
