The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [87]
Petaluma Poultry has its headquarters not on a farm but in a sleek modern office building in an industrial park just off Route 101; there’s little farmland left in Petaluma, which is now a prosperous San Francisco bedroom community. The survival of Petaluma Poultry in the face of this development (it’s one of what were once dozens of chicken farms in the area) is a testament to the company’s marketing acumen. When its founder, Allen Shainsky, recognized the threat from integrated national chicken processors like Tyson and Perdue, he decided that the only way to stay in business was through niche marketing. So he started processing, on different days of the week, chickens for the kosher, Asian, natural, and organic markets. Each required a slightly different protocol: to process a kosher bird you needed a rabbi on hand, for example; for an Asian bird you left the head and feet on; for the natural market you sold the same bird minus head and feet, but played up the fact that Rocky, as this product was called, received no antibiotics or animal by-products in its feed, and you provided a little exercise yard outside the shed so Rocky could, at his option, range free. And to call a bird organic, you followed the natural protocol except that you also fed it certified organic feed (corn and soy grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizer) and you processed the bird slightly younger and smaller, so it wouldn’t seem quite so expensive. Philosophy didn’t really enter into it.
(Petaluma Eggs, a nearby egg producer with corporate ties to Petaluma Poultry, pursues a similar niche strategy, offering natural free-range eggs [no drugs in the chickens’ feed, no battery cages]; fertile eggs [all of the above plus the hens have access to a rooster]; enhanced omega-3 natural eggs [all of the above, save the rooster, plus kelp in the feed to boost levels of omega-3 fatty acids]; and certified organic eggs [cage- and drug-free plus certified organic feed]. These last are sold under the label Judy’s Family Farm, a brand that until my visit to Petaluma I hadn’t connected to Petaluma Eggs. The Judy’s label had always made me picture a little family farm, or maybe even a commune of back-to-the-land lesbians up in Sonoma. But it turns out Judy is the name of the wife of Petaluma’s principal owner, a marketer who has clearly mastered the conventions of Supermarket Pastoral. Who could begrudge a farmer named Judy $3.59 for a dozen organic eggs she presumably has to get up at dawn each morning to gather? Just how big and sophisticated an operation Petaluma Eggs really is I was never able to ascertain: The company was too concerned about biosecurity to let a visitor get past the office.)
Rosie the organic chicken’s life is little different from that of her kosher and Asian cousins, all of whom are conventional Cornish Cross broilers processed according to state-of-the-art industrial practice. (Though Petaluma Poultry sets the bar higher than many of its competitors, who routinely administer antibiotics and use feed made from animal by-products.) The Cornish Cross represents the pinnacle of industrial chicken breeding. It is the most efficient converter of corn into breast meat ever designed, though this efficiency comes at a high physiological price: The birds grow so rapidly (reaching oven-roaster proportions in seven weeks) that their poor legs cannot keep pace, and frequently fail.
After a tour of the fully automated processing facility, which can translate a chicken from a clucking, feathered bird to a shrink-wrapped pack of parts inside of ten minutes, the head of marketing drove me out to meet Rosie—preprocessing. The chicken houses don’t resemble a farm so much as a military barracks: a dozen long, low-slung sheds with giant fans at either end. I donned what looked like a hooded white hazmat suit—since the birds receive no antibiotics yet live in close confinement, the company is ever worried about infection, which could doom a whole house overnight