But with the case of what happens behind the scenes with the meat that KFC sells, the sheer number of shocking, nauseating, and gut-wrenching secrets is staggering. From the increased amount of pathogens and poisons and bacteria they have been allowed to add to their meat to increase its weight in order to pump profits (keep this industry term in mind: "fecal soup"-- we'll get into that), to the beyond-nightmare lives and deaths of the birds, to the secret (to the public) but blatant (to authorities) manner in which they get around the laws protecting consumers, KFC is as close to an evil empire unto itself as anything we have here in a developed country in modern times.
I'm going to do something I haven't done before. Because I have become increasingly disturbed about what I've discovered behind KFC, and because I have a handful of friends/family members who patronize them, and because I know I won't be able to send everyone books to help them educate themselves on what they're eating, I've decided to plagiarize some of the books I've been reading. Not truly plagiarize, as I'll give credit where due, but I can't say I've ever transposed parts of a book word for word into a note in order to share some news. But I don't care how long this takes me to type out or how wrong it might be to copy a book without permission-- I'm going to get this stuff out there.
KFC has long been known as a buyer of birds who come from the factories guilty of some of the most extreme degrees of animal cruelty. Many animal advocacy and consumer groups have attempted to persuade KFC to change their policies. I knew about this. I did not, however, know everything. I didn't know the exact extent of the horrors, and I didn't know the revolting practices they engage in that put unaware consumers at risk. I'll share what I know with you. But I'll let Jonathan Safran Foer tell it. Everything below that is not in bolded in brackets is his, from his acclaimed book, "Eating Animals." I'll start with what the birds endure and KFC's longstanding policy of duping the customer, then get into the health stuff and wonderful new world of chicken "fecal soup" that they've been serving us.
"KFC: Formerly signifying Kentucky Fried Chicken, now signifying nothing, KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history." [Process that for a moment. This is not me saying this. This is not one of the thousands of people who protest KFC sharing their opinion. This is an award-winning author who researched the subject matter extensively before making that enormous statement.] "KFC buys nearly a billion chickens a year... so its practices have profound ripple effects throughout all sectors of the poultry industry."
[In light of the many complaints failed against them], "KFC insists it is "committed to the well-being and humane treatment of chickens." How trustworthy are these words? At the slaughterhouse in West Virginia that supplies KFC, workers were documented tearing the heads off live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes, spray-painting their faces, and violently stomping on them [as far back as 2004 I remember watching the footage on TV of the little birds being stomped to death while employees hooted and laughed] These acts were witnessed dozens of times. The slaughterhouse was not a "bad apple" but a "Supplier of the Year." Iimagine what happens at the bad apples when no one is looking." [Yes, if factory employees can stomp animals to death, spit in their eyes, spray paint their faces, and take a live bird in their hands and rip his head off and be awarded the "Supplier of the Year" title.]
[KFC is well aware that the majority of people are against animal abuse. They complete extensive studies to find out how the general public feels about cruelty to farmed animals. That said, they then have to convince the public they are actually really nice people who care about these birds.] " On KFC's website, the company claims, "We are monitoring our suppliers on an ongoing basis to determine whether our suppliers are using humane procedures for caring for and handling animals they supply to us. As a consequence, it is our goal to only deal with suppliers who promise to maintain our high standards and share our commitment to animal welfare. " That is half true. " [Foen goes on to explain the reason why this claim is so easy for KFC to make--] ANYTHING the factory employees do to these birds is considered "animal welfare." [Something many people don't know: in the US (and many other countries) chickens who are raised for human food are exempt from animal cruelty laws. EXEMPT. That means it's legal to torture them. Of course KFC failed to mention this on their website when they talk about how they are making sure their suppliers are promising to maintain a commitment to animal welfare. If people didn't care about chickens being brutalized, they wouldn't have to put these lines on their website. Lucky for them, most people don't know the truth behind them.]
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| Why does this bird have such horrendous trauma to her body? What fun did some "Supplier of the Year" employee have with her... |
[Foen shares the manner in which KFC "monitors" its suppliers: they warn the factories and slaughterhouses in advance, to give them plenty of time to clean up anything they don't want seen. Yes, because that seems like a good way for KFC to make sure that the abuse the public was so upset about will be monitored and corrected, right? Sure it does. KFC wasn't kidding-- they really DO care about these birds. They really ARE making sure that the torture that was going on before with their "Supplier of the Year" has actually stopped. Or maybe they just want to fool their customers into thinking so. One of the two...]
[Foen goes on to highlight how KFC's auditors at the factories did not report on one single standard that KFC's animal-welfare advisors board listed for them to check on. Not only that, the advisors who gave those recommendations are no longer working for KFC. At least five resigned out of frustration, when KFC refused to hold meetings with them (!!), refused to ask for or take their advice..... but then held press conferences to tout to the public about how they had their own "animal welfare advisory committee." One man, an internationally-known expert they hired on to impress people, quit, stating KFC was always going to start looking at making changes "later," while making it a practice of endlessly putting off actually creating any standards to help the birds. ]
[Now here's the best part. Strangely, KFC didn't hold a press release to share this info with the public-- but Foen's book puts it out there, and I think I will too: ] "How were these five board members replaced? KFC's Animal Welfare Council now includes a vice president for Pilgrim's Pride, the company operating the "Supplier of the Year" plant at which employees were shown sadistically abusing birds; a director for Tyson Foods, which slaughters 2.2 billion chickens annually, and where some employees were also found to be mutilating live birds during multiple investigations (in one, employees also urinated directly on the slaughter line), and regular participation from its own "executives and other employees." Essentially, KFC is claiming that its advisers developed programs for its suppliers, even though its advisors are its suppliers." [Must be nice to be a big, multi-billion dollar company like KFC, where you can get away with stuff like that. As long as they can keep fooling the public, they have nothing and no one to fear.]
[From another report]: "Tyson Foods is a major KFC supplier. An investigation at one large Tyson facility found that some workers regularly [REGULARLY!] ripped off the heads of fully conscious birds (with explicit permission from their supervisor), urinated in the live-hang area, (including on the conveyor belt carrying birds), and let shoddy automated slaughter equipment that cut birds' bodies rather than their necks go unrepaired indefinitely. " [Imagine that for a moment-- you have been shackled upside-down by your freshly-broken ankles... you are whipped along an automated blade that is supposed to slice your throat... instead, it slashes your body apart as you hang there. You are then dumped into a tank of water to have your feathers boiled off of you, completely conscious..] "At a KFC "Supplier of the Year," Pilgrim's Pride, fully conscious chickens [imagine your dog or cat here] were kicked, stomped on, slammed into walls, had chewing tobacco spit in their eyes, literally had the shit squeezed out of them, and had their beaks ripped off. And Tyson and Pilgrim's Pride not only supplied KFC; at the time of writing they were the two largest chicken processors in the nation, killing nearly five billion birds per year between them." [In the US alone.]
"Even without relying on undercover investigations and learning about the extreme (thought not necessarily uncommon) abuse that results from workers taking out their frustrations on animals, we know that factory-farmed animals have miserable lives."
[So let's cover Foen's chapter entitled "The Life And Death Of A Bird." This is where we get into fecal soup. Prepare yourself. You're about to hear a run-down of why millions of people have stopped eating chickens. My reasons are in here. Not the fecal soup part-- that's new to me. And thank god I learned of it years AFTER I'd given it up.]
"The second farm I saw with 'C' [informant] was set up in a series of twenty sheds, each 45 feet wide by 490 feet long, each holding in the neighborhood of 33,000 birds. The dimensions are typical in the industry - though some growers are now building larger sheds up to 60 feet by 504 feet, housing 50,000 birds or more." [Foen goes on to outline how the poultry industry's own "Animal Welfare" team has recommended giving the birds 8/10ths of a square foot of space each to spend their lives in.] "It's worth pausing on this for a moment. Although many animals live with far less, let's assume the full 8/10ths of a square foot. Try to picture it. (It's unlikely that you'll ever get to see the inside of a poultry factory farm in person, but there are plenty of images on the internet if your imagination needs help.) Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) [These are not egg-laying hens, remember. These are the ones they sell you parts of to eat.] Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, hearting, and ventilation systems. This is a farm."
"Now to the farming. First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1 and 4% of the birds will die writhing in convulsions from sudden death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms."
"For your broilers, leave the lights on about 24 hours a day for the first week or so of the chicks' lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day - just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long - the lighting and crowding, the burdens of their grotesque bodies."
"Broiler birds are typically slaughtered on the 42nd day of their lives (or, increasingly, the 39th)." [Trying to think, of the endless KFC commercials I've seen in my life... if they ever shared with us the fact that we're eating babies. Oh, that's right. They didn't.]
"Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste." [Up to 30% of the weight of what can be marketed as "natural" chicken flesh is this brine or other substances that you are paying for thinking is chicken. We'll get into that in a bit.]"
"The farming done, it's now time for processing. First, you'll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and "hold the line" that will turn the living, whole birds into plastic-wrapped parts. You will have to continuously find the workers, since annual turnover rates typically exceed 100 % [that is not a typo]. The interviews I did suggest turnover rates of around 150%. Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable employees. By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations; for you, they constitute a crucial way to produce cheap meat... Pay your workers minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds - grabbing five in each hand, upside down by the legs - and jam them into transport crates."
"If your operation is running at the proper speed - 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes [!!] is the expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed - the birds will be handled roughly and, as I was also told, the workers will regularly feel the birds' bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30% of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly-broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.) [of the 23 million birds who were brought in for slaughter today, 6.9 million showed up with freshly-broken bones. It isn't enough what they lived through in their short 42-day life, or the gruesomeness of what comes next.... 6.9 million of them each and every day have their legs snapped so workers can get them to our plates fast enough to meet our demand to eat them.]"
"Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don't feed them or water the birds, even if the plant is hundreds of miles away. [Once again-- no laws intervene on their behalf here. All perfectly legal.] Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, to hang upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, onto a moving conveyor system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won't be able to hear the person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror."
"The conveyor system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyzes them but doesn't render them insensible. Other countries, including European countries, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, where the USDA's interpretation of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act exempts chicken slaughter [that's right-- the USDA decided that these birds do not have the right to live humanely or be slaughtered humanely], the voltage is kept low - about one-tenth the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has traveled through the bath, a paralyzed bird's eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though attempting to scream." [Has there been a horror movie more horrific than what is being described here? This is the stuff of nightmares and insanity. These are the things that are beyond belief to anyone with a conscience or a soul.]
"The next stop on the line for the immobile-but-conscious bird will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, "all the time." So you'll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers - "kill men" - who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens "all the time." According to the National Chicken Council - representatives of the industry - about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L. Lobb, the council's spokesman, sighed, "The process is over in a matter of minutes."
"I spoke to numerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men who described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank. (Government estimates obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggest that this happens to about 4 million birds each year.) [11,000 birds today, after living a total of 42 agonizing days then being trucked up to hundreds of miles away without food or water or shelter from the weather then hung upside down by their ankles in metal shackles and dragged through electrified water then ran through an automated slicing machine, will then finish their gruesome and horrific death throes by being literally boiled alive. All so we can take what is left of their battered little bodies and eat it.]"
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| Unlike boiling dead chicken parts, when a chicken has been boiled while still alive, his or her skin will turn bright red. |
"Since feces on skin and feathers end up in the tanks, the birds leave filled with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin (the tanks' heated water helps open the birds' pores)."
"After the birds' heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds' body cavities. Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces to that it could continue to use the automatic eviscerators. [Once again-- must be nice to be the mind-bogglingly powerful poultry industry. The USDA does not rule agri-business. Agri-business rules the USDA.] Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a "cosmetic blemish." As a result, inspectors condemn half the number of birds. Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, "People are done consuming feces in a matter of minutes."
"Next the birds are inspected by a USDA official [yay, here come our heroes!], whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds [not a typo] to examine each bird inside and out, both the carcass and the organs, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 a day. Scott Bronstein wrote a remarkable series for the Atlanta Journal-Consititution about poultry inspection, which should be required reading for anyone considering eating chicken. He conducted interviews with nearly a hundred USDA poultry inspectors for thirty-seven plants, "Every week," he reports, "millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers." [Millions each week sent to our stores and restaurants. And we eat them. And feed these diseased carcasses to our kids. And people wonder why they're so sick, or their kids get sick so often.]
[Ok, here is the part I didn't know about.] "Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the "water in these tanks has been aptly named "fecal soup" for all the filth and bacteria floating around. By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you're practically assuring cross-contamination."
"While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99% of US poultry producers have stayed with water immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue the outmoded use of water-chilling. It's not hard to figure out why. Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird's carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the same water known as "fecal soup"). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity for the industry to turn wastewater into tens of millions of dollars' worth of additional weight in poultry products."
"Not too long ago there was an 8 percent limit set by the USDA on just how much absorbed liquid one could sell consumers at chicken meat prices before the government took action. When this became public knowledge in the 1990's, there was an understandable outcry. Consumers sued over the practice, which sounded to them not only repulsive, but like adulteration. The courts threw out the 8 percent rule as "arbitrary and capricious." [Great! The courts threw out the "8% allowable" rule! They don't want us eating feces-soaked chicken meat! What could possibly go wrong?.....]
"Ironically, though, the USDA's interpretation of the court ruling allowed the chicken industry to do its own research to evaluate what percentage of chicken meat should be composed of fouled, chlorinated water. (This is an all-too-familiar outcome when challenging the agribusiness industry.) After industry consultation, the new law of the land [ie; what the highest amount of feces the industry thinks you'll eat before you'll notice the taste or become TOO ill] allows slightly more than 11 percent liquid absorption (the extra percentage is indicated in small print on the packaging - have a look next time). [I did, at the store, much as I hated picking up that tortured little bird's lifeless body parts. But yup, they said "water from processing," and others referred to it as "chicken broth." I wonder if there's a hell for people who do this to an unaware public?] As soon as the public's attention moved elsewhere, the poultry industry turned regulations meant to protect consumers to its own advantage." [Over one-tenth of your chicken is literally liquid shit. Who else but the colossal and grotesquely powerful animal agriculture business would get away with this stuff?]
"US poultry consumers now gift massive poultry producers millions of additional dollars every year as a result of this added liquid. The USDA knows this and defends the practice - after all, the poultry processors are, as so many factory farmers like to say, simply doing their best to "feed the world."
"What I've described is not exceptional. It is the rule. More than 99 percent of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this."
"In some way factory systems may differ considerably, for example in the percentage of birds that are accidentally scalded alive each week during processing or in the amount of fecal soup their bodies absorb. These are differences that matter. In other ways, though, chicken factory farms - well run or poorly run, "cage-free" or not - are basically the same: all birds come from similar Frankenstein-like genetic stock; all are confined; none enjoy the breeze or the warmth of sunlight; none are able to fulfill all (or usually any) of their species-specific behaviors like nesting, perching, exploring their environment, and forming stable social units; illness is always rampant; suffering is always the rule; the animals are always only a unit, a weight; death is invariably cruel. These similarities matter more than the differences."
"The vastness of the poultry industry means that if there is anything wrong with the system, there is something terribly wrong in our world. Today six billion chickens are raised in roughly these conditions each year in the European Union, over nine billion in America, and more than seven billion in China. India's billion-plus population consumes very little chicken per capita, but that still amounts to a couple billion factory-farmed birds annually, and the number of birds they raise is increasing - as in China - at aggressive, globally significant rates (often double the growth of the rapidly expanding US poultry industry). All told, there are fifty billion (and counting) factory-farmed birds worldwide. If India and China eventually start consuming poultry at the rate the United States does, it would more than double this already mind-blowing figure."
"Fifty billion. Every year fifty billion birds are made to live and die like this."
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| This inquisitive little girl is a chicken my friend photographed living free in nature. (Photograph: Elisa Johnson) |
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| A factory farmed chicken. |
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| Processing complete. |
"It cannot be overstated how revolutionary and relatively new this reality is - the number of factory-farmed birds was zero before Celia Steele's 1923 experiment [earlier in book. Ask me if you want to hear about it. Suffice it to say, I wish that woman had died in infancy.] And we're not just raising chickens differently; we're eating more chickens: Americans eat 150 times as many chickens as we did only eighty years ago." [And why not? Pay attention to how mind-bogglingly much chicken is shoved down your throat in advertising every day. And, incredibly, often as a "healthy" menu item. The last time we went to Applebee's, for example, I counted the number of salads that had chicken in them. They had a total of eight salads. Seven had chicken in them. (The eighth had bacon and shrimp We have to kill SOMEONE to create a salad, huh, Applebees?)]
"Another thing we could say about the fifty billion is that it is calculated with the utmost meticulousness. The statisticians who generate the figure nine billion in the United States break it down by month, state, and the birds' weight, and compare it - each and every month - to the death toll in the same month a year before. These numbers are studied, debated, projected, and practically revered like a cult object by the industry. They are no mere facts, but the announcement of a victory."
Ask me why I'm outraged.
