Rethinking Chicken in China
Imagine this: You’ve just finished a long day of hiking through the karst hills of Guilin, China and are famished. You come upon a small, family-run food stall, complete with four plastic folding tables, two woks on a gas burner stove, and about a half dozen healthy adult chickens running around the premises. A young woman hands you a paper menu printed in Chinese. You order 宫保鸡丁 (Kung Pao Chicken) not because you have a craving for it, but because it’s one of the only menu offerings you can actually read. The young woman smiles and mentally takes your order. Then, she grabs the chicken pecking around your feet, takes it outside by the road, chops off its head, dips the still-writhing body in a bucket of water, plucks its feathers in four minutes flat, dices up the flesh, and cooks it. The killing is swift, and dinner is served.
Now imagine the same initial scenario, except this time, you ignore the blisters on your feet, walking a bit further until you come upon a nice sixty-seat, air-conditioned restaurant. A uniformed waitress hands you a menu printed in English and Chinese and for some strange reason (Out of habit? Because it’s safe? Because you recognize it? Because it’s easy?) you order Kung Pao Chicken. She scrawls your order on a piece of paper and heads back to the kitchen. Your meal arrives fifteen minutes later, minus the slaughterfest of scenario A.
The first chicken, the “free-bird,” the chicken that pecked my bum at a roadside stand before becoming someone’s dinner, was the last chicken I’d seen in China.
The second chicken is more of a mystery.
For a while now, I have been doing a lot of thinking about how what we put in our bodies affects both our individual lives and society as a whole. In my search for answers about food, I recently picked Jonathan Safran Foer’s incredible book, “Eating Animals,” a memoir that explores the history, philosophy, and folklore of how we justify the way we eat. Safran Foer’s stated intention in writing the book was not to turn his audience into a bunch of die-hard vegans and animal-right activists- nor is mine- but rather an inquiry into what it means to “eat animals” in an age where family farms are nearing extinction. If you read any one book this year, I urge you to consider picking up this one because hey, what’s more important to your life than what you put in your mouth?
But, let’s get back to the second chicken, the “mystery chicken,” the chicken in the fancy restaurant. What if it was like the type of chicken that Safran Foer describes in his book, the US “factory farmed chicken”?” What if this fancy restaurant chicken lived in a cramped, filthy, feces-encrusted room with other dead/dying/diseased chickens for the entirety of its forty-two day life (in the name of “science”, this chicken only gets to live for forty-two days)? That this “fancy” chicken, although drug-stuffed, was likely infected with a nasty virus like E. Coli, and that this chicken had been dipped in a chlorine bath, plumped up with “fecal soup,” and then injected with a salty solution to make it taste good before it traveled thousands of miles to get to the restaurant that you’re sitting in, starving, with chopsticks (or fork and knife) in hand?
Which chicken would you rather have for dinner- chicken A or chicken B?
While “Eating Animals” focuses mainly on US agribusiness, I could not help but wonder how much the American model of “efficient farming” and next-generation chickens has impacted the way that China, the world’s biggest consumer of agricultural products, eats today. According to the Institute for Food and Development Policy, a California-based NGO, meat consumption in China has quadrupled since 1980, at approximately 119 pounds per person each year (USA averages about 185 pounds per capita), with more than 50,000 factory farms in operation. But, who cares, right? We all have to eat and China has 1.3 billion people to feed. Well, beyond the evidence that consuming factory-farmed animal products may not be so healthy for us after all, there are a few other reasons to be concerned, like the negative impact that factory farming has on the environment and the possible link between factory farming, food-borne illnesses and pandemics. In other words, take what we already know about the not-so-pretty side of factory farming in the US and extrapolate it. What will it mean when a nation as large as China consumes as much meat as the US does per capita? Why are we consuming so much meat in the first place? What does it mean when factory farms become the global norm? How is China’s chicken industry changing to keep up with rapid development and shifts in consumption? Additionally, what does it mean when US companies, like Goldman Sachs, invest in Chinese chicken farms?
I don’t have the answers, nor can I claim that Safran-Foer’s description of factory-farmed chickens is entirely accurate- after all, I’m not a chicken expert nor have I ever seen the inside of a chicken factory farm- but I think, at the least, it’s worth talking about.
Just a little food for thought.
Be sure to check out Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, “Eating Animals.” What do you think about this issue? Should we be concerned about the growth of factory farming in the US, China and the rest of the world? Any insight into today’s chickens (or pigs or cows) in China?
Hey Aimee, are you familiar with Slow Food (http://www.slowfood.com/) by any chance? It’s basically a socio-environmental movement with the goal of promoting the consumption of healthful foods that are produced with the environmental impact of food production in mind. Slow Food emerged as a response to the negative effects on the health of both people as well as the environment that modern commercial mass food production methods have and although the movement hasn’t quite caught on in the mainstream society, for practical reasons I guess, it does have a dedicated following.
The problems with the modern production methods for animal food products that you raise also remind me of the related issue of how the plant foods that we consume are produced. The fruits and vegetables that we consume nowadays are mass produced in monocultures with the specific genetic traits that have been selected to meet our requirements for our food and as a result of this artificial selection the biodiversity of many of the plants in the world has been greatly reduced. The implication of this reduction in biodiversity is that many of the existing plants are now more vulnerable to disease and are less able to adapt to changing environmental conditions, and in the context of our food security this also means that we are putting our sources of fruits and vegetables at risk.
You should read omnivore’s dilemma
@Rocker
Thanks for your comment! I am familiar with the Slow Food movement, but only mildly. You make an excellent point regarding the depletion of types of fruits and vegetables; it appears that it is becoming infinitely more difficult to eat “naturally” these days. In New York, I had access to some great local farmer’s markets, which made it less of a hassle to eat healthful, organic and somewhat trustworthy produce (although that produce was much more expensive). Now, living in Singapore, it’s a bit more difficult to pinpoint the source of the foods I eat. Your comment has given me another idea though… I’m going to do a bit of digging on what food movements are taking hold in Asia. Is there a growing awareness and concern here as there is in the US? Thanks again!
@Michael
Thanks for your comment. It’s now on my reading list!
Hi, Aimee:
We should meet. I am in shanghai.
I tells China Cinderella Story in My Tears Wont Fall-Memoir of a Chinese Migrant worker—- From country girl wanglili to Chinese migrant worker wang lili to author wanglili which you can see the summary and some sample chapters in my web http://recordsoftoday.com/
I blog Art of life in practice independently at http://recordsoftoday.com/.
Not sure whether to thank you for this post or not.
I am guilty of the ostrich (or is it emu) approach to this issue and sometimes would rather not know.
However, living in China has been a big eye-opener for me in this regard. Unlike in the UK where (poor quality) fruits and vegetables are available all year round in the supermarkets, I now get excited by the approach of lychee, mango, pineapple season as advertised by stalls on the streets of Beijing. The wet markets in other cities in China and the fish in tanks in restaurants take me a lot closer to the origin of the food I’m eating than I am used to.
Finally, and this probably reflects worse on me, given that public health can sometimes seem a sketchy issue (at best) here in China, I am much quicker to be skeptical about the safety of pesticides, etc in use in farming. Consequently I mostly purchase organic produce.
However, two questions arise from this; am I so much more confident that food in the UK is ‘safer’ and ‘better’ produced?
Secondly, is food with and organic sticker (and price) really organic?
Should we be concerned about the growth of factory farming in the US, China and the rest of the world?
i truely appreciate your global perpective and genuine concern for the planet and health of its inhabitants. as i’m enjoying my baked chicken (spiced with salt, pepper, poultry seasoning, garlic powder, and paprika)i realize there are more immediate and pressing issues that deserve my concern: nuclear war in the middle east, potential collapse of our economy, my basement flooding after tonight’s rain, finding a girlfriend, etc.
40,000 americans die in car accidents each year – why isn’t anyone screaming about that? (how many die in china?) we accept the risks whether it’s for smoking, drinking booze, eating meat, drinking tap water, being a vegan etc. if i became concerned over the food i consumed and all the terrible things that might happen to me during the course of a day, i would lose my mind and probably get stressed enough to lose a few years of my life.
let the chinese (nicaraguans, brazilians, russians, etc) eat their chicken raised from factory farms financed by goldman sachs. they’ll figure out an efficient way of disposing the waste because in the end (you are right) they have to eat and chicken is yummy.
well, my basement is in good shape! it’s time to light up a cigar and have a glass of bourban on the porch. cheers!
Hi Pierre, while I appreciate your point about the need for perspective, I don’t think it constitutes a reasonable argument to discount the concerns that Aimee has raised. First of all, as I understand it the main purpose behind Aimee’s post here is to shed light on the reality of what exactly is involved in the production processes that are employed to meet our demands for meat (in particular chicken), which is something seemingly mundane that most people simply take for granted without much thought. If people understood the true costs, for their health as well as the environment, that are incurred every time they tucked into their generously spiced baked chicken they just might consider adjusting their lifestyle to accommodate a less destructive habit of meat consumption.
Second, even if we accept for the sake of argument that there are more pressing matters in the world that require our attention it still does not make sense for people to just ignore the negative effects of modern meat production processes, especially if the negative effects can be eliminated, or mitigated, once people are informed of their existence.
(By the way, I’m formerly known as “Rocker”.)
e coli is a bacteria, not a virus.
Hi Aimee-
Admittedly, I’m torn. I love Jonathon Safron Foer, but I consider meat a divinity. That being said, will take your recommendation and read the book.
On another note, I’m the editor of Expat Arrivals.com (http://www.expatarrivals.com), a site devoted to developing comprehensive destination guides aimed at easing expat transitions abroad. We’re constantly looking for contributors to “beef” up (no pun intended) our China guide in exchange for promotional space. Let me know if you’d be interested. Additionally, would you be interested a link to our China guide from your blog, I think it has some great info that could nicely supplement your posts (http://www.expatarrivals.com/china/moving-to-china). Thanks for your time.
Best-
Stephanie
I, too, would like to know more about the condition of meat production in China. I’ve been living in China for a while now, just started reading Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’ (A compelling read for meat-eaters and vegetarians alike) in the airport on my way back over here, and couldn’t help wondering where the supply of 肉(ròu) for China’s burgeoning population is / has / will be coming from. I’ve often rationalized my own consumption of meat over here, thinking, “Well, this probably all comes from small rural farms where the animals are more healthy than in the US, so it’s all good!” With the population of China as it stands today, this just obviously can’t be the case. I think we all like to tell ourselves certain stories about why it’s okay that we do things we know are not okay.
Hey Aimee,
I’m an expat living in Beijing and while I eat mostly vegan, I’m also really concerned about issues surrounding animal welfare and food sourcing in China. I recently wrote an article at my blog that explores the issue of factory farmed chicken in China along with some reference material on the state of China’s factory farms:
http://www.suluku.com/2011/05/15/u-s-may-lift-ban-on-chinese-chicken-imports/
I’ve been to some farms surrounding Beijing. Even one that claims to be an “ecological farm” houses its chickens in giant long-sheds (No visitors allowed in the facility, which makes me even more suspicious about the conditions inside). They supplied organic eggs for the Olympics and are considered to be an example of top quality organic poultry. Not very encouraging.