Poultry plant tour

[orthodoc]

I toured a poultry 'processing' plant today, aka an abattoir. I was NOT looking forward to it, having read various accounts of same and being a non-meat-eater currently for various reasons. Re raising animals for meat, I've done it. My family had a small farm when I was in my teens and we had chickens, pigs, and a milk cow. No beef cattle and no sheep, no ducks, geese, etc. But we did raise chickens and pigs over the summer to slaughter in the fall, and we traded a pig for a side of beef with a neighboring farmer, that type of thing.

The poultry place hatches their own chicks from breeding stock, literally farms them out for six weeks until they reach 4 lb live weight, then calls them in for slaughter. We were not permitted anywhere near the 'kill room' or the 'plucking room'. The rest of the place was an exercise in processing 2 million birds per day. I suppose what struck me was the sheer scope of it, the incredible numbers our greedy population demands. Our per capita meat consumption has soared over the past century and there's no good reason for it. Agribusiness and Big Food/Fast Food have prodded our appetites to want more and moar ... and if we're all dying of diabetes and hypertension and cancer, who cares? Just get those units of production out the door.

Seeing the amount of waste, the fat and parts and slime and blood all over the floor, and knowing that virtually all of this particular plant's 'product' was off to feed the fast food industry, I cringed. How can we ever explain this to people who don't have enough to eat? And these birds are bizarre-looking, pale and watery and no decent breast or wing muscle. But then, they've never used their wings. They've lived truncated lives of only a few weeks in crowded pens with no natural light, had their beaks cut off, and grown to only a fraction of their potential. They've eaten only gmo corn mixed with the rendered remains of relatives they never knew (they're pretty much genetically identical anyway); they've never scratched in the dirt or crowed or done a single thing chickens are supposed to do. Why would we think we could be healthy eating them?

It's bull to say that this is the only way people can eat. We can do better than this. The 10 lb of grain we put into gaining 1 lb of meat would be far better used elsewhere. More importantly, the idea of thinking of an animal as a 'unit of production' is antithetical to compassionate stewardship.

So, opening a huge can of worms. I realize there are differences of opinion. What do you think?