{"id":502,"date":"2020-07-22T13:20:19","date_gmt":"2020-07-22T13:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/2020\/07\/22\/spectator-the-wests-industrial-sized-chicken-farms-could-be-as-dangerous-as-any-wet-ma-rket\/"},"modified":"2020-09-11T19:01:11","modified_gmt":"2020-09-11T19:01:11","slug":"spectator-the-wests-industrial-sized-chicken-farms-could-be-as-dangerous-as-any-wet-ma-rket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/2020\/07\/22\/spectator-the-wests-industrial-sized-chicken-farms-could-be-as-dangerous-as-any-wet-ma-rket\/","title":{"rendered":"The West\u2019s industrial-sized chicken farms could be as dangerous as any wet market"},"content":{"rendered":"

Broiler fowl reared in atrocious conditions are responsible for countless cases of gastro-intestinal illness and death, says Paul R. Josephson<\/h3>\n

Chicken: A History from Farmyard to Factory
\nPaul R. Josephson
\n<\/span>Polity, pp. 252, \u00a320<\/span><\/h3>\n

It wasn\u2019t Henri IV\u2019s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover\u2019s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in the mid-20th century chicken was a rare treat, not a cheap meal. What has happened to transform the noble Gallus gallus domesticus into what Paul R. Josephson startlingly calls \u2018a genetically formed meat machine\u2019? Chicken is a serious subject, even when it\u2019s not the chlorine-washed kind the US President wants to foist on us.<\/p>\n

I can remember buying a distressingly uneviscerated chicken in a Co-op in Cornwall in the late 1960s; and even ordinary supermarket fowl then came with neck and giblets neatly packaged inside them. You can still buy tubs of chicken livers, but what has become of all those gizzards? Mind you, we know where the feet go \u2014 the Chinese love them.<\/p>\n

Some of you will have noticed that chicken (apart from the expensive poulet de Bresse) doesn\u2019t taste as it used to, and is less firm in texture than before. That\u2019s because not even 1 per cent are now \u2018free range\u2019 (spending at least half their life uncaged in the open air). The demand for KFC (as opposed to the genuine fried chicken that was the family staple of my own Kentucky childhood) is now so great that France, according to Josephson, is \u2018the fourth largest producer and consumer of chicken in the world\u2019, and Saudis, South Africans, Spaniards and Brits are net importers, while \u2018Americans consumed in one day 1.3 billion chicken wings during the broadcast of the 2018 Superbowl alone\u2019.<\/p>\n

De-beaking is just one of the steps employed in turning chickens into drumstick-forming automata<\/p>\n

What has happened is that this feathered relative of the dinosaurs has undergone a kind of forced evolution into the \u2018broiler chicken\u2019, engineered to be the cheapest meat of all, and ready for slaughter at four to seven weeks. These \u2018benefits\u2019 result in the birds living their brief lives in cages, at densities that make their species-typical behaviour impossible.<\/p>\n

Chickens \u2014 long since domesticated from jungle fowl \u2014 naturally observe the familiar pecking order of the farmyard that makes for harmony; they discourage parasites by taking dust-baths; they preen; they scratch around for insects; they make the sounds we all learn to imitate in the nursery; they dislike rain and fear foxes, so are easy to coax back into their coops at night.<\/p>\n

To break these patterns of behaviour they are now frequently de-beaked \u2014 but this is just one of the steps employed in turning them into drumstick-forming automata. Most broilers are raised in their thousands in sheds, employing concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs). They are made to grow so rapidly with the use of antibiotics that their legs can\u2019t support their super-meaty breasts. Apart from the cruelty, Josephson reminds us that packing birds so closely, and dealing with their detritus, has a dreadful effect on the environment:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are guts, feathers and piles \u2014 millions \u2014 of dead animals, produced by poorly paid contract workers at massive factory farms. On top of this, the broiler presents a series of health and safety risks, including new vectors for bacterial diseases and avian influenza.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We are now highly conscious of the connection between \u2018wet markets\u2019 and Covid-19; but in CAFOs, animals do not deposit their manure directly on the land. \u2018Just remember,\u2019 writes Jefferson, \u2018there are allowable levels of faecal matter in your food, no shit!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018The agro-industrial complex presents dangers to us all,\u2019 he warns. Not just to farmers and agricultural workers but to consumers everywhere. We are lulled into thinking our food is cheap and safe, but it\u2019s cheap only because we do not cost in what economists term the externalities, including \u2018fish kills, polluted waterways and climate change\u2019:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it is \u2018safe\u2019 because we are inured to thinking that a few hundred thousand gastro-intestinal illnesses and deaths annually from food processing around the globe are not significant numbers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Josephson angrily invokes Upton Sinclair\u2019s The Jungle (1906) and the polemical novels of George Orwell to highlight how disgusting our current modes of food production are. But it\u2019s simple, really: we have to learn to live within our means, and (this includes vegan and vegetarian readers) to pay the true cost of our food. \u2018Basically,\u2019 this wise and scrupulously referenced book insists, \u2018we are asking how to produce nutritious food, and how to treat animals with dignity before they die to serve our appetites.\u2019<\/p>\n

WRITTEN BYPaul Levy<\/a><\/p>\n

TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLEBook Reviews<\/a>Chicken Farms<\/a>Broiler Fowl<\/a>Disease<\/a>Fast Food<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Broiler fowl reared in atrocious conditions are responsible for countless cases of gastro-intestinal illness and death, says Paul R. Josephson Chicken: A History from Farmyard to Factory Paul R. Josephson Polity, pp. 252, \u00a320 It wasn\u2019t Henri IV\u2019s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover\u2019s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSOZf-86","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":513,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions\/513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}