Chicken - The Dangerous Transformation of America 's Favorite Food

Click Here to Read Margaret Setter's Interview with Steve Striffler

“I used to eat chicken without much thought about where it came from, or how and by whom it was raised and processed. Life was much easier then.” So states Steve Striffler at the beginning of his book Chicken, The Dangerous Transformation of America 's Favorite Food.

Similar thoughts are beginning to resonate in the minds of millions of people living in the developed world, who like Steve Striffler, have no particular interest in animal rights. In fact, Chicken, apparently the only recent book to deal exclusively with birds reared for the broiler industry, is just one response among many to the growing public interest in how their food is produced.

Striffler provides the reader with a fascinating account of today's broiler chicken industry. It lays bare the facts about how the highly processed, branded and elaborately packaged chicken products are produced and marketed as part of a fast food industry with an annual outlay of $33 billion to spend to promote its products.

In 1928 Herbert Hoover promised impoverished Americans “a chicken in every pot”. By the 1970s the health effects of eating red meat were coming under question. People were turning to chicken as a health food. With the development of chicken nuggets and other processed chicken products in the 1980s, chicken has become unhealthy for all concerned, whether they are workers, farmers or consumers. “Six chicken nuggets contain the same amount of fat (21 grams) as a fat-filled double cheeseburger with condiments and vegetables. Order a chicken fillet sandwich and you get about one-third more fat than that same burger.”

The result is a disaster of titanic proportions. “Nearly two out of every three Americans (130 million) are overweight, and almost one-third (60 million) are obese, an epidemic that has implications for heart disease, cancer, stress diabetes, and a wide range of other serious health problems”.

What seems most shameful (to me, as an ethical vegan) is the fact that Government, supposedly set up “by the people, for the people” also pumps $20-billion a year into promoting unhealthy products, with only a tiny portion of outlays going to promote grains, fresh fruits and vegetables.

Steve Striffler could be categorized as a subtle reformer. His book sets out the fundamentals of a system in which there are no villains or good guys, simply problems of worker injustice, poverty, poor public health, and environmental degradation, all of which can and must be addressed.

For those readers who share a passion for reform, whether it be in the field of labour relations, environmental degradation, human rights, and yes, even animal rights, Striffler has provided a wealth of references for further study most of which is easily accessed on the Net.

THE SIERRA CLUB, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, VERSUS “BIG CHICKEN”

For example, The Sierra Club's Rap Sheet on Factory Farming, and the 2005 Human Rights Watch report on the meat and poultry industry make fascinating reading, neither of which pulls any punches as this quote from the latter suggests: “Nearly every worker interviewed for this report bore physical signs of a serious injury suffered while working in a meat or poultry plant. Automated lines carrying dead animals and their parts for disassembly move too fast for worker safety. …. They often receive little training …not always given the safety equipment they need. They are forced to work long overtime hours under pain of dismissal if they refuse. Meat and poultry industry employers set up the workplaces and practices that create these dangers, but they treat the resulting mayhem as a normal, natural part of the production process, not as what it is – repeated violations of international human rights standards”.

INSIDE A POULTRY PLANT OR WHAT THE INDUSTRY OMITS TO TELL YOU

While researching this book, Striffler spent two summers working at Tyson's Springdale Arkansas Plant. This is how he tells it: “Tyson processes job applicants like it processes poultry. The emphasis is on quantity, not quality”. “There were no pleasantries but neither was there any bullshit”. In less than five minutes after the foreman's “What can I do for ya”, I was offered a job on the line”. The only white American, he was apparently, “Tyson material”.

A short while later Javier, his orientation leader, escorted him and other new recruits into the classroom. A large sign, prominently displayed, caught his eye. Written in English and Spanish its message was sharp and to the point, “Democracies depend on the political participation of their citizens - but not in the workplace”. The going rate for the job was $8 per hour.

He describes his first evening in the plant: “ Hundreds of live chickens flood off the truck, down a chute, into a bin where workers quickly hang them by the feet onto the production line. The atmosphere is surreal, nearly pitch black, on the theory that the darkness soothes the terrified birds… The smell and look of the place is oppressive”. Line workers (mainly women) must hang chickens at a pace of up to forty birds a minute for eight hours a day. They stand in the same place and make the same series of motions for the entire shift. It is inevitable that given time, they will sustain serious injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, spinal and leg problems, varicose veins - to name just a few.

The workers are covered with “blood, shit, and feathers”. The pace is relentless. The birds pass through an electrically charged bath that stuns the bird, but leaves it conscious until its neck is cut further down the line. These communal baths, popularly described as “fecal soup”, pass on harmful microbes from one bird to the next, presenting a severe health hazard to the consumer. At the end of the process each chicken is plunged into a scalding tank. Apparently about one in twenty survive even this horror, for it is Javier's job to stab these birds. It is not Striffler's intention to be an advocate for the chickens. This may seem regrettable but it should be remembered that the Animal Rights movement possesses sufficient talented writers able and willing to take on this important task, as indeed they have done for the past thirty-five years.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL COST OF CHICKEN WRONGS

If you eat chicken, you should be informed about the manner in which it is produced. According to the Animal Rights Organisation, United Poultry Concerns , every year nearly nine billion chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other birds are slaughtered in the United States without any requirement that their deaths be humane. Why? Because the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA), which is supposed to ensure that animals are rendered insensible to pain before being slaughtered, does not cover poultry.

Striffler makes no mention of this situation but nevertheless presents damning evidence of the enormous impact the activities of such corporations are having over every aspect of (human) life. “The interconnectedness of work, consumption and the environment, are now central to the problems of modern industrial agriculture”. These are highlighted in the Sierra Club's Rap Sheet on Animal Factories . This Rap Sheet , although not a complete list, cites the illegal activities of some of the largest food agribusiness companies that have come to light in court in recent years.

Con-Agra, for example, owns a turkey plant that slaughters about thirty thousand turkeys a day and discharges 1.3 million tonnes of treated slaughterhouse waste per day. Over four years after being caught, the Company continued to dump the waste into its lagoon, and why wouldn't they when it is more profitable to pay the fine of $42,000, a drop in the bucket, compared to the $2.8 million worth of products that the plant sold during that period to the federal food assistance programs, including the school lunch program. This was not always the way the poultry industry was carried on. What happened along the way?

The broiler industry first emerged in the Delmarva Peninsula (the eastern shore of Delaware , Maryland and Virginia ) in the 1920s. Raising chickens was women's business, carried on mainly to supply the household and in good years, provide a little spending money. The region's major industry was vegetable growing, offering precarious returns at the best of times and subject to seasonal market fluctuations.

Poverty drove the early development of the poultry industry. In those days beef was the most highly sought after source of animal protein, while chicken was as expensive as lobster. Before it could become a serious profit earner its cost had to be reduced and its image improved. Most farmers existed from day to day, virtually one step away from the breadline. It took a class of middlemen to transform the industry, men like John Tyson, who moved from Missouri to Springdale Arkansas in 1931, with his wife and an infant son, a nickel in his pocket, and a truck that allowed him to run a small haulage business.

WORLD WAR II AND THE INDUSTRIAL CHICKEN

Devotees of the ‘free market' like to attribute the success of the broiler chicken industry to the workings of Adam Smith's “Invisible Hand”. But there is no doubt that the US Government was a major architect of chickens' post-war success. During World War II the Government stimulated production by (1) setting a price for chicken well above the cost of production; (2) requisitioning chickens reared on the Delmarva Peninsula for federal food programs; and (3) instructing all patriotic Americans to eat eggs and chicken in order to leave beef and pork available for the troops. The raising of chicken became a patriotic duty. American broiler production almost tripled during the war, helping to make chicken an everyday food for American consumers.

State power, combined with the forces of (mainly public) Science and the ongoing integration of the industry by its founders and patriarchs, who became key players and competitors, expanded and rationalised the industry. Men like Tyson, Charles Lovette and Jesse Jewell, each dependent upon and exploiting an inexhaustible supply of cheap southern and later on, immigrant labour, delivered the “Industrial Bird”.

Striffler quotes William Byrd who sums up the process: “Beginning in the interwar years and accelerating rapidly after the Second World War, advances in nutrition, health and genetics translated into massive increases in the biological productivity of broilers…”

“At the same time, the incorporation of hatcheries, feed mills, contract grow-out operations and processing plants within a single firm provided an institutional vehicle for further rationalising of the production system in order to capture productivity gains”. At the end of this process the barnyard chicken had been made over into a highly efficient machine for converting feed grains into cheap animal-flesh protein”.

To the discerning viewer, two pictures, each bearing a bland caption, illustrate the cost to the chicken, the innocent victims. The photo on page 24 shows a flock of elegant white chickens being fed outdoors by a Japanese-American interned during World War II. The second picture, taken inside a crowded broiler chicken house in the 1970s, tells a different story. In this picture the birds show the ill effects of selective breeding on the body conformation, with its unnaturally plump breast. Most appear barely able to stand, while their faces are missing the wattles and combs that signify the individuality of each bird.

NO GOLDEN YEARS FOR THE POULTRY GROWERS

By the mid sixties, integration of the industry was complete, dominated primarily by large national feed companies like Ralston Purina and Pillsbury. In the year 2000, the average American was eating 100 times more chicken than before the war. The chickens were not the only losers. By the 1960s many chicken growers had been reduced to “a cheap hired hand with a large investment” in land, farmhouse, sheds, equipment chickens, chemicals and feedstuffs. “The integrators scoop up all the profits, leaving the growers to bear the losses”. “Once vertical integration and contracting became the industry norm, everyone – regardless of their views- became subject to that system”. “Consolidation, mergers or acquisitions, and corporate shake-up, all occurred within this basic framework”. During the 1970s and 80s, as some feed companies left the industry “this allowed chicken-centred integrators like Tyson, Perdue and Holly Farms to emerge as industrial leaders.

WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS? AND WHO ARE THEY? A NEW KIND OF IMMIGRANT?

The great majority of workers in US meat and chicken packing plants came originally from a seemingly endless army of impoverished, landless immigrants from Mexico , El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1960s. They were prepared to risk life and limb to enter the US . Fruit and vegetable growers in California and the southern states eagerly sought their services as cheap, servile labour. From places like California and Florida many made their way to poultry packing plants in places on the east coast of states like Delaware, Maryland and Virginia (Delmarva Peninsula), or more commonly in recent years, the southern states of Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee.

A large number are “illegals”, driven from their homeland by a combination of grinding poverty and civil war. Most are grateful to be granted the privilege of performing some of the most nastiest, dangerous and low paid jobs on offer. Striffler relates this with his usual language of moderation but as a reader and reviewer I cannot help wanting to express myself in a more value-laden manner.

Employers make their money out of some of the most vulnerable people on earth. On the one hand they promote themselves as models of individualism and “free enterprise” – continually spouting all the usual well-worn clichés, while on the other hand, they are absolutely ruthless in fending off worker (and grower) demands for fair treatment. Unfortunately, in my opinion, there is no alternative system on offer so those of us who care about the rights of all living beings are going to have to find ways to work creatively together to bring about change in a system sadly lacking in justice and decent ethical values.

There is no question that people's consciousness is growing. We have Peter Singer's Animal Liberation , first published in 1976, and Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights in 1983, but it is not until the 1990s that we begin see a plethora of books being produced by theologians, whether based on process theology or tradition-based. Then there are the feminist and more particularly, eco-feminists, writers such as Carol Adams, with her concept of “the absent referent”, to describe the animal whose needs, interests, and individuality disappear in the production of meat. *

I recommend Steve Striffler's book Chicken as a worthwhile contribution to this ongoing discussion.

Note: In chapter 8, Striffler explores the concept of a "Friendly Chicken" being pioneered in the Delmarva Peninsula , the birthplace of the poultry industry.  The perspective covers social justice, environmental and human health concerns and to a lesser extent, chicken welfare.  Since Abolitionist on-line is, as the name implies, an "abolitionist site", we decline to discuss the issues canvassed in this chapter.  However, in the interests of intellectual honesty and to avoid misrepresenting Striffler's position, we direct readers to   http://www.thewitness.org/agw/lewis0501.html  where some of the source material for the chapter is located.