PETA, paranoia, vegetarianism, blah, blah, blah...

Here is Tyson's dinner prayer booklet, free for you to download. Go ahead, look it over! Despite entirely cynical preconceptions, I couldn't help but feel relaxed and warmed this sentimental little booklet.

On the other hand, here's an interesting video from inside one of Tyson's chicken processing facilities.

I am not so bothered by the visual, visceral sensation of a conscious chicken's head popping off in the rubber gloves of a weary factory employee. After all, eating meat has always involved the toleration of a certain amount of violence. It's the image of that moving belt loaded with hundreds of dead chickens, a few live ones freaking out--a mass-processing system that treats millions of living beings in every way as inanimate "food units" for their entire (short) lives.

What disturbs me even more though is how you and I deal with the disconnect between our personal comfort level and the reality of industrial meat production. I think that most of us have seen something like this at some point but we have to push the image to the back our minds, to the very edge of our consciousness, in order to contentedly eat a chicken breast. Maybe we westerners have been doing this in many areas of life ever since we had to start questioning the giddy utopianism of endlesss technological progress sometime in the middle of the 20th century, ever since we became vaguely and obscurely afraid that our lives might be negatively transformed by the elaborate systems and environments we've engineered for ourselves.

If we chose to look under the hood, we would most likely be disgusted by feces-littered pens crowded with obese chickens with clipped beaks. We might have to consider the unpleasant possibility that our international system of food production and transportation would find ways of perpetuating itself even after it ceased to be the most efficient, cheap or healthy solution. But why should I consider such complicated questions when I can easily opt for the comforting vision printed on the packaging of my chicken breasts? "Look, this food was raised on an idyllic village farm where happy, healthy animals wander around on the sun-warmed earth under the gaze of a watchful, benevolent farmer."

Corny marketing is not convincing, it's just an extremely convenient anesthetic for the chafing of our various ideals against the world as it is.