Woke up this morning once again to the endless cacophony of roosters. I’m in Poipu, a small town in Kauai, where I’m staying with Tom and Francesca like the luckiest girl in the world. It’s so beautiful and glorious that I don’t even mind being woken up by roosters at 6am.
But, after a mere 36 hours on this island, I am starting to become a wee bit curious about just why there are so many roosters. Not only do they wake us up every morning with their relentless screaming, but they are everywhere… wandering the fields, crossing the road, hanging out in the supermarket parking lot, on official Kauai t-shirts, on my coffee mug. Obviously they are the official bird of the region.
It’s interesting because we all just watched Food Inc. recently. Or, I should say that we tried to watch it. Not one of us could get through the movie.
I thought I was prepared. I read Omnivore’s Dilemma and various other tomes on ethical eating, and I cut chicken out of my diet a long time ago (for the most part). I worked for a Slow Food chef and I’m pretty savvy about the idea of buying meat from small ranchers who let their cattle/poultry truly roam free with full use of their extremities up until their final moment.
I lived with a vegan for two years, for crying out loud.
But there is something about the actual visual of seeing baby chicks being shoved down a factory shoot, of grown-up chickens who can’t walk because they’ve been bred to have such large torsos that their tiny little legs can’t support them, and even if they could walk, there’s no room to move in their dark, dirty, depressing little chicken coops. Or should I say gigantic chicken coops—where thousands of other chickens are in the same situation all across the country, as the U.S. chicken market tries to keep up with our God-given right to cheap, tasteless, barely nutritious Chicken McNuggets.
Okay I won’t preach. But seriously, it’s a pretty horrifying situation. And it doesn’t feel like an accident seeing live, happy, free-roaming roosters everywhere we go on Kauai.
Yesterday I tried to take a picture of a rooster up close, and it suddenly raised its wings and flew away. When’s the last time you saw a chicken fly? Probably not too recently. Most of us never see a live chicken, and even if we did, they don’t fly. Because, for the most part, they can’t. They can’t support their weight—at least not the ones that are being bred for food. So unless you live on a farm, you probably don’t associate chickens with flying.
I’m grateful for the reminder to take more responsibility for my eating habits. And I might have to force myself to watch the end of Food Inc. one of these days.
