I see that some people are complaining that Oprah's grilled chicken promotion (as I understand it, it involves getting free "Kentucky Grilled Chicken") is somehow hypcritical or wrong more generally because KFC feeds people industrially raised chickens.
Let's just get something totally clear here - whatever one thinks about eating KFC's chicken themselves, our agriculatural system will simply not work if, as the complainer says, KFC starts selling free range chickens (and by free range I mean actually free range, rather than industrial free range, whereby the chickens theoretically could go outside if only they knew how to get there through the small hole in their coop). Real free range chickens cost at least $12, and more like $20 a bird. As tasty and delicious as they are, as amazing the difference is between them and an industrial chicken, the existence of the industrially raised product is the only thing between us and a two tier world where the wealthy eat meat, and everyone else dreams about their once a week or month roast.
Maybe that's a good world, in a lot of ways. But it ain't going to fly today.
5/07/2009
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3 comments:
Why do you think any meat at all would become a "once a week" (at best) matter for the non-wealthy if we didn't have industrialized agriculture? That seems to have been historically true in hyper-densely-populated areas where animal breeding wasn't very advanced (I joke that Hindu vegetarianism really just made a virtue of necessity), but meat seems to have been a standard part of most Europeans' diets long before the kind of animal husbandry that we have today.
I'm not sure I agree with your premise. Meat was a pretty rare part of a European's meal before commercialization - it was a once a week/month luxury. The British in fact used to brag that they had a Sunday roast every week as a point, as opposed to the impoverished continentals, who had to eat polenta and bread and dairy.
What do you consider commercialization?
If it's the case that most Europeans didn't get to eat meat more than once a week and were functionally vegetarian, I'm surprised that Catholics' meatless Fridays were significant. If almost no one gets to eat meat on Fridays, what's the big deal?
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