Chew On This, p. 163-203

            This next section of Chew On This by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson was called "Meat," and as you can guess, it was about meat. I've been dreading getting to this section the entire time because I knew it would be really gross and sad. It went into full detail about slaughterhouses and their cruelty to the animals. The chicken explanation was terrifying. They basically are crammed in a little room for about 6 weeks and that's all the time they get to live. The company delivers them to a farm when they are 1 day old, and then the farm owners feed them a certain chicken feed to fatten them up. They become so fat they can hardly walk and are in constant pain their whole short lives. Then the same truck that took them to the farm a month ago comes back to pick them up to take them to the slaughterhouses. There they are hung by their feet, shocked in electrical water, sliced at the neck, and broiled in bubbling water. The electrical water is supposed to knock them out, but a lot of the time that does not happen and the chicken ends up getting burned alive. They also said that occasionally a chicken will break free of the chains they are hung upside down from, so the worker will hit it against the wall or jump on it. The worst part of reading about this was a worker and what he said about stepping on the chickens. After jumping on three at once he said, "I like to hear the popping sound they make." That's just plain sick!

           I realize there is no way of stopping our consumption of meat in this world because it is our human nature, but there are definitely more humane ways of killing these animals. They explained that in many slaughterhouses in England, it is much different. They put chickens in a room and have the chickens breathe in a gas that is not at all painful for them. Although it is still sad to kill animals, it is a much nicer way of doing so. Reading about the cows and pigs was not much better. It is basically the same, except for killing cows must be done mainly by hand, which causes many injuries to the humans doing the work. Because the assembly lines move so fast, injuries are much more likely to happen. The sad thing is, these giant companies can hardly be fined for even a person getting killed because of their good relationships with Congress ($$$). The most these meat packaging companies can be charged for a death is $70,000. This is hardly anything compared with the company's salary of $27 billion a year.

           Reading about all of this was horrible. I definitely cringed the whole time. It's so sad to read about the sick way we treat these animals. It seems like there could be much better ways of getting the job done, and there are. The problem is, they cost money. And why on earth would McDonald's want that?