Chicken Reflection

In Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Food, author and anthropologist Steve Striffler discusses the history of how the chicken industry came to be as it is today, and the atrocities behind mass chicken processing.  This book is crazy and definitely wasn’t what I expected.  I had expected this book to concentrate more on the injustices being done towards chickens (which it definitely does), but Striffler focuses more on the human workers in factories.  Striffler, who himself worked in a Tyson chicken processing plant, is an expert about what goes on behind the scenes, and discussed the low wages, working conditions, and physical toils of working at a chicken processing plant.  I am very glad he did this, because often times I feel like America focuses far too much on injustices being done towards animals without discussing the human side.  Chicken hasn’t really motivated me to be a vegetarian all the way yet, but I would still like to try it out for a week.