Eating chicken

Food is the topic of the entire NYTimes Magazine this week. I haven't had time to read most of the articles, partly because the puzzle is pretty hard this week although I've just cracked the "code" and expect to make headway later this evening. However, I have read the interview with Robert Kenner who is making a documentary called Food, Inc. about, obviously, the industrialization of how we get our food.
What he says about how chickens are raised -- crowded in the dark doing nothing but eating and growing lots of white meat -- is not news to me. In fact, for the last two or three years I have liked the taste of chicken less and less. So what idiot thing did I do this afternoon? You guessed it. After three hours of walking about in glorious warm weather to a street fair and thrift shop and flea market -- at which first an third places I resisted gyros, crepes, home made donuts and, falafel, not to mention the disgusting oncoction, deep fried Oreos.

I was, as I said, tired and hungry so I stopped in the supermarket where I need to get a couple other items and at their hot food center where the chickens are roasting, I saw that I could get a nice piece of chicken breast with sweet potatoes [love them, even plain as they were]. So I gave in to the hungery/lazy syndrome. Big Mistake!!

I added a salad - at least that was smart -- nuked the other food and discovered all over again how awful chicken has become. I remember farm chickens, now called "free range" then called June's chore to feed and gather the eggs from and to shut up at night. (Dad unlocked them early in the morning and checked for signs of foxes.) The white meat might as well be made from some amalgam of styrofoam and silly putty. It does awful things in the mouth -- like semi-cooked pie dough. It seems to grow and threatens to clog the esophagus like a wade of paper towel in a toilet.

I eat very little meat as it is and I MUST remember not to eat chicken again. Oh, tiny cubes or slivers as in soup or some casseroles that are greatly disguised, or enhanced can be tolerated or even enjoyed. I wonder if people really like those roasted chickens. Or is that why chicken as such seems to be mainly consumed breaded and fried so that people really aren't tasting chickent at all but all other coatings. UGH!