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It is my first day of work in one of the largest poultry-processing plants in the world. I am given “the tour” that all new workers receive. We begin in live hanging. Hundreds of live chickens flood off the trucks, down a chute, and into a bin where workers quickly hang them by their feet onto the production line. It’s surreal. It is nearly pitch black, on the theory that the darkness soothes the terrified birds. The smell and look of the place are oppressive, so I look for something to focus on other than the hanging itself. A worker. I eventually learn that Javier is from
Mexico
, but the figure is hard to make out at first. He is covered from head to toe in protective clothing that is itself coated with blood, shit, and feathers. Javier’s job is simple, if somewhat gruesome. The chickens have already passed through scalding hot water and have been electrocuted, a process designed to both kill the bird and begin the cleaning. Neither task is accomplished perfectly. The communal baths, popularly known as fecal soups, do clean, but they also pass harmful microbes from one bird to the next. The bath also doesn’t do a particularly good job of killing the chickens: one out of every twenty seems to make it through alive. The birds are in their last stages of life when they reach Javier. For eight hours a day he sits on a stool, knife in hand, and stabs the few chickens that have managed to hold onto life.
While watching Javier, I realize what this book will be about. How did Javier and the chickens arrive in this place, under these conditions? Where do they go once they leave the plant? And what does their experience in the plant mean to those of us who eat chicken? The search for answers led me to study a period when chickens were raised and processed quite differently, and to visit poultry farms, supermarkets, restaurants, and communities in the southern
United States
and central
Mexico
. As I learned while doing this research, whereas the chicken’s journey is one characterized by uniformity and predictability, the worker’s path is defined by variation, insecurity, and chaos. Neither experience leads to a particularly healthy outcome for bird, worker, farmer, environment, or consumer.
I do not feel sorry for Javier or the chickens. I have worked in a plant before, and stabbing chickens is a relatively easy job. Many workers would be glad to trade places. And the chickens are there to die. I knew this going in. The problem, which became more transparent as I passed by “evisceration,” the “KFC line,” and the “wing room,” was that no one departed from the plant in particularly good shape. The workers left poor, exhausted, and, in many cases, seriously injured. The chickens not only exited the plant dead, but in a “further-processed” form that was not particularly healthy for consumers. In short, the postwar promise of the industrial chicken—as a healthy, plentiful alternative to beef—has been lost for all of the people involved in its raising, processing, and consumption. There has to be a better way.
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