The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [88]
Compared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good: They get a few more square inches of living space per bird (though it was hard to see how they could be packed together much more tightly), and because there are no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to accelerate growth, they get to live a few days longer. Though under the circumstances it’s not clear that a longer life is necessarily a boon.
Running along the entire length of each shed was a grassy yard maybe fifteen feet wide, not nearly big enough accommodate all twenty thousand birds inside should the group ever decide to take the air en masse. Which, truth be told, is the last thing the farm managers want to see happen, since these defenseless, crowded, and genetically identical birds are exquisitely vulnerable to infection. This is one of the larger ironies of growing organic food in an industrial system: It is even more precarious than a conventional industrial system. But the federal rules say an organic chicken should have “access to the outdoors,” and Supermarket Pastoral imagines it, so Petaluma Poultry provides the doors and the yard and everyone keeps their fingers crossed.
It would appear Petaluma’s farm managers have nothing to worry about. Since the food and water and flock remain inside the shed, and since the little doors remain shut until the birds are at least five weeks old and well settled in their habits, the chickens apparently see no reason to venture out into what must seem to them an unfamiliar and terrifying world. Since the birds are slaughtered at seven weeks, free range turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens as a two-week vacation option.
After I stepped back outside into the fresh air, grateful to escape the humidity and ammonia, I waited by the chicken door to see if any of the birds would exercise that option and stroll down the little ramp to their grassy yard, which had been mowed recently. And waited. I finally had to conclude that Rosie the organic free-range chicken doesn’t really grok the whole free-range conceit. The space that has been provided to her for that purpose is, I realized, not unlike the typical American front lawn it resembles—it’s a kind of ritual space, intended not so much for the use of the local residents as a symbolic offering to the larger community. Seldom if ever stepped upon, the chicken-house lawn is scrupulously maintained nevertheless, to honor an ideal nobody wants to admit has by now become something of a joke, an empty pastoral conceit.
5. MY ORGANIC INDUSTRIAL MEAL
My shopping foray to Whole Foods yielded all the ingredients for a comforting winter Sunday night dinner: roast chicken (Rosie) with roasted vegetables (yellow potatoes, purple kale, and red winter squash from Cal-Organics), steamed asparagus, and a spring mix salad from Earthbound Farm. Dessert would be even simpler: organic ice cream from Stonyfield Farm topped with organic blackberries from Mexico.
On a hunch it probably wasn’t quite ready for prime time (or at least for my wife), I served the Cascadian Farm organic TV dinner I’d bought to myself for lunch, right in its microwaveable plastic bowl. Five minutes on high and it was good to go. Peeling back the polyethylene film covering the dish, I felt a little like a flight attendant serving meals, and indeed the entrée looked and tasted very much like airline food. The chunks of