Customer Reviews

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

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4 star:		(3)
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Wow! An academic who can write! This is a great book from beginning to end. Striffler actually worked in poultry processing plants and lived to tell about it -- and tell about it he does! He really provides an excellent, if critical, look at not only the industry, but how we raise, cook, eat....food in general. And he is a great writer. It really makes you think.

One other thing. I noticed one reviewer on Amazon was critical of Striffler for caring more about poultry workers than chickens. Uhh? I hope he cares more about people than birds! Is this a bad thing? I am an animal rights activist, and I wish there was more on this subject in the book, but that would be a very different book for a very different audience. This is just not a book about animal rights; it is much broader in perspective. But I found the book to be very informative, and even suggestive for those of us interested in animal rights....because Striffler provides the whole picture. The fact is that most people eat chicken, and will do so for some time -- so the question is how do we make the system better for everyone, including the birds. On this, Striffler is very critical of the industry; his analysis is superb and his ideas suggestive. Let's not lose perspective!

I bought and read Striffler's book to gain a better understanding of the largely immigrant-filled workforce in the meat processing industry. This book more than satisfied me. It serves not only to introduce you to the growth of the chicken industry, but also to describe insightfully immigrant workers' experiences, in any industry.

It is a very timely book given this year's focus on immigration reform. This industry will likely be more affected than any other if any major legislation is enacted.

This is one of the best books I have read on food. If you liked Fast Food Nation you will love this book. In some ways it is better, in other ways it is just different. Striffler is a wonderful writer and storyteller. The history of the industry, and the rise of so many chicken products, is fascinating. His account of working in a poultry processing plant is incredible -- sad and funny at the same time.

Definitely read this book. It will change the way you think about chicken, food in general, and the immigrant workers who do all the work.

Awesome book!

Striffler gives an inquisitive peek at an industry that most people have little awareness of. Much of his book studies the workforce that mans the chicken abbatoirs. The prose shows a somewhat grisly job, that is also repetitive, mind-numbing and dangerous. The ever sharp knives and scalding liquids give rise to the inevitable workplace injuries.

Yet hope shines through in portions of the book. Many of the workers are Mexicans, who more or less legally migrate to these factories, which are often located in the American South. To the Mexicans, the work offers a good income that can support entire families back home.

This book is a must read for anyone who eats Chickens. You should know what you are supporting and the dangers of the product.

A harsh indictment of the aggressive tactics of the poultry giants, Striffler's work gives a grim view of the consequences for farmer, worker, and consumer. This book can be enjoy equally by activist, academician, and voracious reader all equally. Imminently readable, Striffler's work not only conveys a sense of the author's ideology but more importantly, backs up his concerns with hard and fast statistics.

Even for those who don't wish to endure a frontal assault on Tyson Foods and other major agribusiness corporations, the discussion on how American consumerism around chicken has changed over the last 20 years. For those who are old enough to remember a world without McNuggets, its an interesting cultural retrospective.

Book Review

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food by Steve Striffler, Yale University Press, 2005

Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns

In Chicken, Steve Striffler, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas, looks at the US poultry industry with a particular interest in "the Latin-American immigration into America's heartland." Starting in the 1980s, Latino farmworkers from Mexico, Central America, California and Texas poured into previously all-white and black regions of the south to find jobs in the poultry industry. Low living costs and steady employment were, and remain, major incentives: Unlike seasonal agriculture, poultry processing plants "operate nearly all day, every day, and require a permanent labor force" (p. 96).

To observe the life of slaughterhouse workers firsthand, Striffler worked for two summers on the "saw" lines at a Tyson plant in northwest Arkansas. The first summer he worked close to the "Church's Line," the following year next to the "KFC Line." Each line, he explains, "takes a whole chicken, cuts it, marinates it, and then breads it. With twenty to twenty-five workers, each line processes about eighty birds a minute, or forty thousand pounds of chicken a day" (p. 114).

Despite workplace hardships that include recurrent machinery malfunction and repetitive motion disorders that debilitate workers, many employees view the slaughter plant favorably for providing livable wages (about $8 an hour), a degree of security and possible advancement. Moreover, as one worker told Striffler "[a]s we sat eating the chicken together" in the Tyson plant cafeteria, "Outside, we are Mexicans. . . . We don't belong. At least here in the plant we belong, even if we are exploited" (pp. 124-125).

Chickens and Workers

"Their motions are so rehearsed that each [live hang] worker is able to grab two frantic chickens (one in each hand), hang them on the line, smoke a cigarette (without their hands), and heckle the new recruits as they watch in amazement." (Chicken, p. 108)

Small sympathy is shown in this book for the birds compared to concern for the workers. Striffler's refrain for chickens is "America's favorite food," although in the Preface, he does describe the birds as they are being dumped off the transport trucks down a chute and into the bin where workers grab and hang them upside down on the conveyer belt, in the "nearly pitch black," as "terrified." To cope with the oppressiveness of the place on his first day at Tyson, Striffler says he focused his attention on a Mexican worker he calls Javier. Covered "from head to toe in protective clothing that is itself coated with blood, shit, and feathers," Javier, he says, sits for eight hours a day "on a stool, knife in hand, and stabs the few chickens that have managed to hold onto life."

According to Striffler, "The chickens have already passed through the scalding hot water and have been electrocuted, a process designed to both kill the bird and begin the cleaning." But in addition to passing harmful microbes from bird to bird, the water, he says, "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."

This strange account led me to contact Striffler. Was he saying that some birds actually emerge from the scald tank alive, and that the number of such birds is so high that Tyson actually pays a guy to sit on a stool and stab them to death? Instead of the scald tank (which is not electrified), was he not referring to the pre-slaughter electrified waterbath "stun" cabinet from which the live birds emerge paralyzed and semi-paralyzed to be met by a mechanical and/or manual neck-cutter? Striffler emailed me back on December 6, 2005: "My understanding is that the water contains an electrical current [and] that some birds do manage to make it through the process alive - indeed, they looked alive and were moving, and Javier was there to finish the killing process. . . . He was stabbing the chickens. . . . He was not slicing their necks."

For verification I contacted former Tyson chicken slaughter plant worker Virgil Butler and animal scientist Temple Grandin, both of whom said it's not possible for chickens to emerge alive from the scald tank, which is the final phase of a process that begins with live hanging, followed by immersion in cold salted electrified water (which is not intended to electrocute, i.e., kill, the birds, but to paralyze the muscles of their feather follicles so their feathers will come out more easily after they're dead), neck-cutting, and bleed out. What does happen, however, is that many birds are still alive following the bleed-out phase (Striffler indicates one out of every twenty above), and these birds are plunged into scalding water, a fact statistically recorded each year by the US Department of Agriculture which undoubtedly underestimates the true number of what the department calls "redskins." In an affidavit signed on January 30, 2003, Virgil Butler wrote that when chickens are scalded alive, they "flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. They often come out of the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they've struggled so much in the tank." And this is after they've been electrically shocked, mechanically throat-sliced, and manually stabbed.

In his Preface, which Striffler defended to me as "not [intended] to educate readers about the technical details of killing a chicken" (so it's okay to bungle the facts?), he writes: "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."

Granted, a job where you get to sit on a stool and stick, as it were, "sitting ducks" for eight hours beats most other jobs at the plant, where the majority of workers, a third of them women, are forced to stand on their feet for eight hours and perform ruinous physical labor. As for invoking the fact that the chickens are "there to die" to justify lack of pity for them, ask yourself if this logic works regarding, say, terminal cancer-ward or nursing-home patients - "I don't feel sorry for these people; they are there to die."

In response to my inquiry about this, Striffler wrote back, "What I meant by that statement was that I didn't feel sorry for the chickens at that point. . . . Sympathy seemed a little misplaced in the sense that there was nothing I could do, their death was inevitable at that point. . . . In the larger sense, I of course feel sorry for the chickens, which is why in the final chapter I advocate more humane treatment of the birds."

Final Chapter: "Put a `Friendly Chicken' in Every Pot"

The final chapter, "Toward a Friendlier Chicken," closes with an advertisement for a company called Bay Friendly Chicken. Incorporated in 2004, this company is supported by poultry worker and environmental advocates on the Delmarva Peninsula (Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia), with the help of a grant from the US Department of Agriculture. Noting that "it is all too easy to produce `healthy' organic and free-range chicken in a way that differs very little from industrial chicken," which is "why companies such as Tyson have moved so quickly into organic chicken," Striffler says that by contrast, a "Friendly Chicken tastes better, is healthier, and is grown and processed in a manner that actively maintains high labor and environmental standards." The chickens, he says, "are given more space, more ventilation, more natural lighting, more frequent litter clean-out, more growing time, and more humane treatment" with less use of hormones (which in fact are not FDA-approved for use in commercially raised chickens anyway), and fewer antibiotics.

Never having visited any "Friendly Chicken" houses, I cannot confirm or refute Striffler's vague claims about better living conditions for the birds, and he gives no clue as to how the company's catching, transport, slaughter and culling procedures differ from standard practice. (On page 162 he describes the standard catching crew method of rounding up the "panicked birds" to crate them and truck them to slaughter.) While anything that reduces the suffering of the chickens is not negligible, the word "humane" is not applicable to animal production systems.

A reality check to the hopeful prospect raised in the final chapter occurs in an earlier chapter which tells of a failed attempt by growers (the workers who raise chickens for the companies that own the chickens such as Tyson or, in this case, Wilson Fields) to convert commercial chicken houses to a "free-range friendly" environment for Kentucky-based Wilson Fields Farms. The growers liked the arrangement until Wilson stopped delivering feed. Then, says one,

"The chickens started getting hungry and needed food. We couldn't afford to feed chickens we weren't going to sell. You get the feed on credit from the company that buys the chicks. Besides, chickens aren't pets. We're not feeding 25,000 chicks if we can't sell them. This is a business. Oh, but these people from Washington [PETA] go nuts. They come down here and start picketing. They kept using this term. Damn. I can't remember it. . . . They said we were being cruel to chickens. We're raising them to be processed into nuggets so these people can eat them and they say we are being cruel" (p. 88).

This account gives a truer picture of the realities of chicken production than all the talk about "humane treatment." Of the workers, Striffler writes that under the current system, they are "oddly incidental" to the food they produce (p. 71). Perhaps under another system workers will be less incidental, but this will never happen for those individuals who, until people stop eating them, are fated to be the food itself. [..]

I first became interested in the greedy chicken industry when James B. Stewart revealed in his book Bloodsport that the Clintons made a killing in commodities because of help from an executive of Tyson Chicken. When people say chicken destroyed President Clinton, they mean the ones with feathers not skirts!
The author made three excellent points in his book: First chicken companies exploit the most vulnerable people in America. These people are illiterate or immigrants who cant speak English or unskilled minorities.
Second, chickens are processed in conditions so horrible as to rival "The Jungle" or a Steven King novel. Beside exposing underpaid workers to dangerous working conditions, the chicken industry exposes consumers to strains of bacteria so virulent they can even survive cooking.
Last but not least, chickens are drugged up big time. Only huge amounts of antibiotics can treat the litany of diseases that factory conditions can cause. This means antibiotic resistance to consumers.
Anyone who eats chicken on a regular basis has a death wish. My only regret is that the author didn't go far enough with the gory details . I want carnivores to be scared. I want them to be very scared.
Only fear and outrage will cause the public to act. The greedy poultry industry needs to have their feet to the fire before bird flu wipes us out.

I ordered this product one month ago and never received it. I would not recommend this seller to a friend.