Food, Self, and Society

Last week while we watched “Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the all-American Meal” I was eating a chicken sandwich. I soon realized that this was not a very good idea! The film discussed the industrialization of the food specifically the meat and poultry industry. While the imagery of dozens of chicken carcasses rolling along on a conveyor belt was enough to make someone lose his/her appetite, what did it for me was the dark little shacks that the chickens were grown in. Seeing as I am a firm believer in the healing and overall good qualities of the sun I thought that this was the most inhumane thing that you could do to a living being. But, the realities of the things going on inside of the dark little bungalow turned out to be worse. A chicken farmer spoke out about how the way she was asked to tend to the chickens had ultimately affected her health. On account of the hormones and antibiotics that she was required to administer to the chickens, she was now allergic to most antibiotics. She explained that the purpose of the hormones is to quickly grow the chickens. Accordingly, the chickens develop from the size of a chick to a full-sized chicken in a matter of weeks and their bones can’t support that so many of them have fractures or are unable to move around. I’m not a chicken farmer so I don’t know what chickens need to grow and live on, but I do know that in some karmic way whatever the chicken’s body has experienced in those couple of weeks of torture that it is kept alive before it is slaughtered for food will manifest in the substance of that juicy chicken sandwich that I was eating at the time, so I threw it out.