#242 Chicken Free

I just saw a product at the grocery store that I didn’t believe. A little update in case you’ve been living under a rock. A while back, the notion of free-range chickens emerged. The plight of poor ordinary chickens raised under tortuous conditions was brought to the forefront of American sensibility. The buzz was about the birds. Seems that by raising factory chickens in tiny little cages, stacked one on top of each other, chicken farmers were somehow being inhumane. Well duh. They’re fowl for gosh sake. How humane can you treat a non-human. Now I’m not one of those guys that twirls cats around by their tail. The closest thing I ever did to inhumane treatment of animals was to have a cat’s rear claws declawed. That way, whenever I left the house, I could hang him on the screen door. Bad for him, good for my furniture. And I’m not a hunter, flushing nearly flightless birds out of a game park and obliterating them with a shotgun is not my idea of fun. There are plenty of video games that don’t require as much feather cleanup. And I think it’s a shame so many folks think hunting is parking their truck up by the blackberry patch and getting drunk while they wait to ambush a poor bear as he shambles by on his way to a fresh fruit dinner. Bears seem way too human for me to want to shoot em in the back. Just doesn’t seem sporting somehow. But, as I’m not a vegan—at least I think not, I didn’t catch all of Star Trek The Next Generation—and I’m not even a vegetarian, I find it hard to be up in arms over chicken food. Whether a chicken that we are raising solely for the purpose of killing and eating is better off never having tasted the freedom of the chicken yard or it’s better to let the little bugger scamper around and peck bugs out of the gravel in his supposedly free range is a matter for the ethics masters. Personally, I’m squeamish enough about bugs to prefer my chicken raised on a vegetarian diet of whole grains, peanuts, and an occasional blueberry. Beetles and worms translated into breast tissue is a little tummy unsettling. I mean there’s a reason game food tastes, well, gamy. The gamy stuff is transmogrified bugjuice. To me the best argument against factory-raised chicken is the chance of super bacteria emerging from the close proximity of countless gallons of chicken poop to countless pounds of chicken flesh. Superbugs love that kind of stuff, and one strain of avian flu in a modern chicken shed that develops resistant to the every-antibiotic-known-to-man-cocktail factory chickens are inoculated with, is going to be one strong avian flu bug indeed. Goodbye factories crowded with chickens and hello world empty of humans. But you really you know an idea has caught on when subsidiary products start to hit the shelves. The can I was looking at said it all. Swanson, Free Range Chicken Broth.
America, ya gotta love it.