Slaughter Reading

Chapter twelve of Omnivore’s Dilemma covered Pollan’s experience at Polyface Farm. He talks about the slaughtering process of the chickens on the small family farm compared to slaughtering the chickens in an industrial slaughterhouse. The process is completed outdoors, and the customers may show up early if they wish to see their dinner being prepared – so to speak. This creates a relationship between the consumer and the producer that large-scale agriculture does not allow. Personally, I would like to see how my food gets from an animal to steaming on my plate.
Throughout the chapter, you get a firsthand look of a self-sufficient farm. Toward the end of the chapter, Pollan explains how everything on the farm is used to help run something else; how the land feeds the animals, then the animal waste, when slaughtered, fertilizes the land. It’s a nice concept that most consumers don’t think about when they take a closer look at where the majority of their food comes from. If they tried to look past the surface of the industrial slaughterhouses, Pollan touches on the fact that the waste in those large facilities, the waste is used to make protein pellets fed to livestock that ultimately leads to disease.