I'm still going to do a blog entry about the book itself, but in the meantime...

Having read The Omnivore's Dilemma, I decided to choose the topic "To what extent should modern broiler chickens be considered an organic machine?" because there were many areas of the book that addressed chickens in their many states and production types. So here is what I wrote. The paper itself is only allowed to be 750-1000 words max, and it is worth 25% of my grade. You can see I had a bit of English-style fun with the poultry puns and whatnot.

Robot Chicken

Within the twentieth century, society has been through a bevy of social, technological, and environmental changes. Perhaps one of the best indicators of these changes comes in the form of a seemingly feudal presence: the chicken. Indeed, poultry has encompassed the culture changes of past, present and future all within the last 60 years; revamped from a simple egg-laying creature, chickens have been highly systematized in their life course, made wholly technical within the food industry, and become a major force in the market. Drawing upon the documented history of poultry in North America and Michael Pollan’s observations within The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a clear case for the chickens’ impacting evolution can be seen within its many roles in contemporary times. The high degree of environmental manipulation through modern science has created a chicken that is a fusion of nature and technology; from the base-line level of life-production to a second tier of technical food processing and a tertiary step into the mass markets of fast food, the chicken has been effectively reincarnated by humanity. This rhapsody of purposeful poultry planning has evolved the everyday farm chicken from rare fare to “organic machine” – an element of nature exploited by science and employed for society’s benefit.
From gene selection and breeding processes to life expectancy, scientists and farmers have systematized the broiler chicken in its entirety within the past century. The term ‘broiler’ was invented to describe the special type of chickens bred for their meat, not egg production. This term, and the product of the term – the actual chickens—was a result of Word War II rationing across the world when beef, pork and lamb was heavily restricted for the masses. In order to combat “meatless meals”1, chicken entered the public spotlight as one of the alternative foods that was introduced to “stand on their own merits”2. Thus, food scientists entered the sphere of poultry production in order to engineer “superior meat-type chickens”3. Prior to selectively breeding chickens for their meat-appeal, scientists and farmers had already begun their mechanization of game by figuratively sewing the seeds for the introduction and manipulation of broiler-breed chicken: “boosting the egg output of the average hen”4. To feed the starving wartime families on the home front of North America and England, then, chickens and ever-eager scientists new to the world of genetic engineering saved the day. Good intentions 60 years ago, however, have turned rancid in the wake of poultry’s popularization and have lead to an inherently industrialized, politicized animal. Nowadays to classify a grocery store broiler as ‘organic’, ‘free range’, or ‘all natural’ is less absurd than it is appealing. Yet chickens prior to garnering high status in the stomachs of North Americans, were essentially all ‘organic’ –barn-dwelling animals bred freely on farmland. The typical broiler not specially labelled au naturel is raised on a restrictive time schedule of seven weeks and fed specially-enhanced grain in order to grow “bigger drumsticks, plump thighs, and thinner skin”5: traits unnatural to the animal but high desired by hungry humans.
Geneticists and farmers were willing to re-work nature for war’s sake, and the post-war chicken has not been let off the hook since. Broilers have been reworked many times over, both in breeding and meat processing techniques to better satiate carnivore cravings and lubricate greasy fast-food greed. Beyond the initial Mendel-like selective breeding that created the niche of broiler chickens in 1948, a plethora of “state-of-the-art industrial”6 qualities have been engrained into broilers during their individual lifetimes, all for humans to reap in economical benefits. The economic incentive for farmers begins in the form of a gamete, breeding two chickens together that will give forth their best qualities, as praised by the farmer: efficiency to convert feed into those “superior meat-type characteristics”7. A swarm of chickens that are speedy converters equals fast turnover of poultry into pay. Coupled with antibiotics and growth hormones that produce “unnatural stresses”8 on broiler joints, these chickens are ultimately a Mendelian-manipulation more so than a vulnerable entity of nature. Past farm and feedlot life, broilers are further at the mercy of technology via culinary augmentation in extreme forms. Where the fast-food industry can get an easy hold on poultry, they make a quick buck further modifying an already heavily-altered creature into chicken fingers, McNuggets, Wendy’s Spicy Chicken fillets, and KFC’s chicken popcorn. Despite the scientifically enhanced element of broilers, hormones and antibiotics have so far failed to produce chickens with nuggets, fingers, or ‘popcorn’-like features. While these popular products may be advertised as broiler chicken fare, they are indeed only “reminiscent”9 of the idea of a farm-bred Old McDonald chicken that tastes as natural as it is untouched by human science and greed.
Bred for highly desirable qualities, broiler popularity soared and thus the markets of fast food chains, grocery stores and restaurant establishments bought into the commercial chicken. Consumer markets effectively facilitated and continue to facilitate the concept of chicken as a machine – an entity that works for the people, not in nature’s harmony but rather in a slave-master dialectic relationship. Certainly this has always been the case with animals and humans throughout history: at the top of the food chain, there is nothing to hunt but those below. In the case of broiler chickens, however, the ease at which they can be “grown”10 by large-scale farms and feedlots places them at easy reach for retailers to sell in any and all forms. Raw, refried into burgers and nuggets, or reconstituted into low-cal Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, broiler chickens have become an ever-present option each day of the week, every hour of the day. The mechanic capability of broilers works much like a large cog turning smaller (yet just as economically-powerful) cogs, machines like Petaluma Poultry’s “niche marketing”11 and the McDonald’s dollarvalue menu. From the McChicken to “kosher, Asian, natural and organic”12 broilers, poultry is the satiating opiate of the masses, injected into society not unlike the chickens’ growth hormones. In as much as genetic engineering has been done to chickens so that a “ growth rate of up to 3 percent per year is attainable”13, the availability of broiler poultry that has enabled a “McFrankensteinian”14 transformation of nature to be put upon society.
Where science stepped into to alleviate a public shortage of meat, nature has recoiled into the recesses of public imagination. In exploring the modern chickens' scientific and social exploitation and its resultant omnipresence in society, largely the broiler chicken is an "organic machine" – a fusion of nature and science to be utilized for society's economic and cultural benefit.