Chickens are contained, caged, squished, bred, anti-biotic’d, fed other chickens. They put the word “processed” right on the package. Chickens are turned-out, rendered, butterflied, quartered, fileted and tendered.
The genetic acrobatics it took to go from red guinea fowl from Peru to two legs and a breast in your KFC meal is a testament to the human capacity to transform the world to suit us. Chicken suits us all. It’s the number one meat cooked for dinner. Cooking Light magazine boasts one hundred easy recipes for chicken breasts. Eating chicken is what most people do. 110,000,000 chickens are eaten across the world every day. If normal is defined as “everyone does it,” then eating chicken is the most normal thing you can do.
When my grandmother was young, people raised their own chickens. Eating chicken was normal. The word “processed” when referring to chicken was less so. Somewhere in the late twentieth century, it became abnormal to raise your own chickens, around the same time it became weird to get married and have a baby before you were twenty.
Read more Abortion, or What We Want from Chickens at The Toast.