My family likes to buy rotisserie chicken which we usually find priced at $3. It's cheap, it's convenient, and it's delicious. Some of our best bonding moments and family conversations were at the dinner table when eating rotisserie chicken, and now that I am in college, it reminds of the times when the whole family socialized at the dinner table. Although, we never really thought about the implications of buying the chicken - we always just saw it as an abundant option whenever we went to our local Albertsons. However, before getting there the chicken had a gruesome life story. Webster regards the industrial chicken production as, "in magnitude and severity, the most severe systematic example of man's inhumanity to another sentient animal" (Singer 24). This doesn't even begin to describe the brutality of the chicken production. The egg-hatching chickens are kept throughout their lives in extremely confined spaces (an area of an 8" by 11" piece of paper) where their uneasiness and discomfort are made visible when they exhibit a "range of behavioral vices that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding" (Pollan 9). This is just a little worse than what the chickens we eat experience – living in a cramped shed where the existence of sunlight is not known, walking over a year's worth of their feces. Actually, not walking; since the broiler chickens are manufactured to produce as much meat as fast as possible to meet the demands of the everyday American consumer, their bone growth is out-spaced by their muscle growth and fat – forcing them to surrender to their own weight and the pool of pool under them as explained in the film "Food Inc". .
However, the chicken is cheap, convenient, and as delicious as ever, so many Americans never ponder about the formulation of the product that takes place before it reaches the store.
