A Look in the Mirror

Chickens from the 'egg factory'

It’s hard to examine industrial agriculture for what it really is because it’s designed to be unexamined. Perhaps more importantly, we are taught to be uninterested.

Only a few short generations ago answering the questions, What is it I’m eating? Where did it come from? And, how was it grown? would not have required more investigation than looking out the window or strolling a few miles down the road. Now, books are being written on the matter.¹

Last week we bought fifty hens from what I call the “egg factory”. I pulled up to the barbed wire fence in front of a grid of metal warehouses. Forklifts carried crates packed to the gills with a sorry mess of feathers and bones. Their claws scratched at the plastic floors of the cages, sliding as a bunch into the walls as the blue overalled workers flung the cages in a heap and set off for another load. A middle-aged lady with dead eyes handed me six chickens at a time by their feet. I struggled to get them onto the truck before the next six were passed to me. They looked horrible and smelled even worse.

Chickens naturally lose some feathers in the fall before growing their winter coat. It’s a process referred to as molting. As the chickens prepare for winter, the number of eggs they lay decreases to preserve energy. In the climate controlled conditions of the warehouses, these chickens have been pumped dry for a season and now think it’s fall. For the ‘egg factory’, this is unacceptable. So they’re sold cheaply to people that want to adopt them, or turned into cat food.

No one needs to know a thing about chickens to know that these chickens are sick. Their bald spots, pale combs, glazed eyes, and ragged breathing make it obvious. They’ve never been outside, never seen sunshine, or felt a breeze, never eaten a worm or a blade of grass. All they've known is a cage the size of a piece of paper and grain ground to a powder. In short, they’ve survived sixteen months of unimaginable torture.

Our machine driven culture of constant commoditization has reduced these chickens to widgets, things, not beings, that convert industrially grown grain, with its vast assortment of chemistry, into eggs. This has been done in the name of efficiency, even progress, to bring us cheap eggs.

Before anyone thinks this is another animal activist's rant against the cruel treatment of animals, I assure you, I’ve done my own shrewd reckoning. As a farmer, I’m pragmatic. I’ve drawn up the figures, the cost of the chickens, the cost of feed, my time, and the price of eggs, plus the price of a stewing hen. And come November, I’ll be the one to draw the knife, pull their guts out, and pluck their feathers.

This is our main flock of chickens in the compost run. These are the same breed as the chickens from the ‘egg factory’. The only difference is their living conditions.

As a fellow living being, I also know that these chickens deserve better and that it is my responsibility to ensure that my flock is healthy and happy. Healthy, by ensuring they have fresh pasture, quality food, a clean house, dust to bathe in, and protection from predators. Happy, by  encouraging them to be chickens, which primarily means giving them fresh ground to scratch  to look for bugs and greens to eat. By allowing the chickens to do what they want to do, what they were made to do, they help me achieve my goals of increasing soil life and fertility, which in our style of farming are one in the same thing. They also clear ground for garden beds, make our compost, lay delicious eggs, and provide ample entertainment.

Last year’s flock helped clear and fertilize land for a pumpkin patch and this year’s new garden beds.

The abysmal labyrinth of the industrial food system hides behind glass windows, corrugated metal, barbed wire, ‘ag-gag’ laws, and plastic packaging with words like ‘eco’ and ‘natural’. In many of our still United States you’ll get thrown in prison for photographing or filming confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s). Since 2002, this can even win you the honor of being put on a ‘terrorist registry’. In what other industry is this the case?

The uncomfortable fact of the matter is that the industrial food system exists because we support it. By buying these chickens or buying their eggs in the supermarket, we are propping it up with our dollars. We are turning our living world into a factory, ourselves into machines. You can see it everywhere if you bother to look. And where better than on our plates?

In the name of science and health eggs are reduced to their chemical parts. Reduced to simply a delivery mechanism for a few grams of protein. Part of the egg is good (the white), the other bad (the yoke). They even sell carton jugs of separated egg whites now. Depending on the year and which way the winds of funding are blowing, eggs either cause or cure cancer, heart disease, etc. But to call an egg an egg is absurd. In what conditions did the chicken who laid that egg live in? What was it fed? How was it cared for?

By allowing our chickens to simply be chickens they recover remarkably quickly. Within two weeks they are hard at work eating weeds and worms, scratching and dropping little steaming piles of fertility. Within two months most of them are fully feathered and look like otherwise healthy chickens, though they never quite reach the level of vitality as our main flock. All the eggs these chickens will lay until the fall are eggs not bought from factory farms. The work they do on the meadow means healthier soil which in turn becomes healthy food which feeds a growing community of people who care where their food comes from and how it is grown. This is not a luxury of modernity. This is how it’s always been. We’ve lost sight of what’s important by burying our faces in screens and prioritizing cheapness over quality.

This one didn’t make it.

Now’s your chance. Take a hard look. For a glimpse of this sick chicken is a glimpse into what you’re not supposed to see. You’re looking at a reflection. Our reflection. This is what life inside the machine looks like. Perhaps not physically (but in many cases, yes), but culturally and spiritually. This is the reflection of a machine obsessed society that’s forgotten its values - or the very idea of value.

The remedy, as I see it, is in the word ‘culture’. Culture means, ‘to cultivate’. Agri-culture has been replaced by agri-business. The families and communities that cared for and stewarded the land have been replaced by petrol, gears, and chemistry. This is a trend that, if not reversed, inevitably results in ruin.

We’ve allowed ourselves to become blind consumers. It’s long past time to open our eyes, even if just to squint.

1. Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemna and Margaret Visser’s Much Depends on Dinner are excellent places to start.