Did This Chicken Have a Good Diet and Social Life?

Elle Campbell
Word Count: 1266

Fun fact: I’m terrified of birds. I’ve been scared of them since I was a kid. To this day, whenever I see a crow on campus, I try to walk as far away as possible. When I was small, this fear got so bad that I couldn’t go to the beach or the pond because I didn’t want the birds to attack me.

When I was ten, my dad took me to my uncle’s farm, so I could experience tame fowl up close. They let me look at my uncle’s small chicken coop (he only had about 5 chickens) and I even held one of the new chicks. I loved it. Even at only ten, I could recognize how happy the chickens looked and could see the difference in their eggs compared to what we bought at the store. Altogether, it was a great experience until the chickens cornered me in the pen and I started crying.

Though I still hate birds with a fiery passion, I can certainly sympathize with how badly they’re treated in our typical food system. That much suffering is ridiculous, and I can see why free-range culture has sprouted up in the last ten years.

Looking deeper into the ethics of meat, I want to explore the humane meat movement and its impacts on us and our animals.

In Dr. Emmerman’s lecture, we heard about a number of moral arguments against eating meat. The two major arguments were a welfarist view and an abolitionist view. The welfarist view is what I’d like to focus on. This utilitarian ideal aims to minimise pain for a majority of animals - favoring practices like free-range farming (whatever that might mean) and grass-fed meat. Because the goal is to minimize suffering, this welfarist view isn’t necessarily against eating meat, it’s against eating “inhumane” meat. Utilitarianism wants bigger cages and more fields, not less cages. Both Emmerman and Adams have issues with this utilitarian view, citing the continued suffering of animals and prepetuated “rape” of our food system. However, to the general public, this utilitarian view is much more palatable. The welfarist perspective fits more easily into the mind of a well meaning meat eater. Rather than changing our diets or lifestyles, we simply change who we buy our chicken from.

In this Portlandia clip, the main characters investigate where their chicken comes while ordering in a restaurant. They begin with “normal” questions, asking where the chicken was from, whether it was local or not, what it was fed. This slowly devolves into more specific queries, asking about the chicken’s name (Collin), looking at photos of him, reading about his personality. At one point, the customers even ask about the chicken’s social life. Though these questions may seem like overkill in this satirical world, many of them ring true to many recent food movements. A basic search into the meat preferences of many Americans reveals this preference for free-range, organic, grass-fed, antibiotic-free animal flesh. You can find articles like this one on the Whole Foods blog touting the health benefits of organic meat, with ads for boneless, skinless, “Animal Welfare Rated” chicken breasts for $4.99.

How “natural” can that be? Just by this standard, we’re steps away from driving straight to the chicken farm and falling in love with the owner and his polygamous lifestyle.

Even this representation of a “humane” chicken farm is far-fetched. Over the course of this clip, we only see about ten chickens, and the story is focused on the farmers, rather than the chicken’s lives. The customers get so enamored with the aesthetic of the farm’s inhabitants that they don’t investigate their chicken practices further. Again, this may seem like a far-flung satire, but it rings true for so many consumers. Often, folks buying meat in the grocery store will check the label, but rarely research further. We associate “organic” and “grass-fed” food with being healthy, but don’t look into the fine print. Consumers are often more concerned with the aesthetic and the ideals of being an “informed consumer”, rather than taking the time to actually be an informed consumer.

No matter how much we care about our meat being happy, at some point, it won’t be happy. Humane meat still has to be killed. Animals are killed.

One of the arguments for consuming humane meat is a utilitarian one. Giving our chickens better lives makes them healthier, and, in turn, makes us healthier.

But really, if we’re looking to lessen animal suffering, why buy meat in the first place? There are plenty of ways to get calories other than eating animal flesh. In such a globalized market, too, meat substitutes and vegan options are traveling to locations they’ve never been. If we care so much about how badly our animals are being treated, why bother buying their flesh?

Though the question seems logical, the answer is anything but. Many people continue to eat meat for a plethora of reasons on the RCI triangle. For convenience purposes, this is fairly understandable. Though vegan culture is a budding trend in American supermarkets, many chains still don’t carry vegan staples like nutritional yeast or vegan butter. Even if they do, these options are often twice or three times more expensive! Just look at the butter/Earth Balance comparison! Though many could find these price differences minimal, they stack up over time. This puts disenfranchised communities at a disadvantage to these vegetarian/vegan opportunities, making these diets less accessible and inconvenient. Beyond that, finding plant-based restaurants is a nightmare anywhere but a major city. This means less options for quick lunches, dinners out with friends, and even coffee shops. All these factors can make cutting meat out of your diet a difficult and isolating thing.

In terms of identity, many meat dishes are tied to our most cherished memories: a steak dinner on graduation day, grandma’s pork chops for Christmas, grilled hamburgers in the summer. As Warren Belasco argues in Food: The Key Concepts, if we divorce ourselves from certain foods, are we doing the same to our memories and experiences with those foods? Many find it hard to cut meats out of their diets, myself included, citing a lack of familial support. If an aspiring vegan sits down to Thanksgiving and only puts salad on their plate, questions immediately crop up from the rest of the table.

It’s incredibly isolating. Social events at restaurants, too, can be a source of major stress for plant-based individuals. Going out for burgers with coworkers? Dinner with a date at a fancy steakhouse? Depending on where you live, finding options without making a fuss can be damn near impossible. If that happens every time you go out to eat, it can get frustrating and discouraging. There go half of your first-date activities.

Ultimately, we live in a tough spot either way when we think critically about our food. Eating ethical meat is hard, but so is completely cutting out animal products. We tread a fine line. That said, just the act of thinking about our food is an act of defiance. As food scholars, we redefine norms that plague our society. We critically think about the systems in place around us. Abstaining from the system is not a prerequisite to challenging it.