12/21/2023 0 Comments Cuel nuggitThe National Chicken Council is proud that “ the industry today remains free of domestic subsidies.” But that’s true only of direct subsidies, cash given by the government directly to the chicken industry. Money: Cheap food is the corollary of not just cheap work, cheap care, and cheap nature but cheap money. We’re moving to a world where only the wealthy can afford to eat five fresh fruits or vegetables a day. The Overseas Development Institute observes a general trend that processed food is increasing in price far less than fresh fruit and vegetables. The nugget is itself part of an arsenal of cheap food that allows low-wage workers and their families to eat, when supplemented with government assistance. So who is it that does the care? In America, as globally, the majority of caregivers are women.įood: Cheap care isn’t the only thing that is required to pick up the pieces after the exploitation of line work. Current IssueĬare: What happens to these workers’ bodies when they’re too broken to return to work? Disability and workers’-comp regulations might have provided some cushion for a lifetime of disability, but, as one ProPublica investigation found, those regulations have consistently been undermined, state by state, by firms like Tyson, one of America’s largest chicken processors. This is perhaps unsurprising, when workers attend machines with nicknames like “fat suckers” and “neck breakers.” Yet rates of profit are unsatisfactory, and the industry is lobbying the US Department of Agriculture to increase the speed at which birds are sped down the production line, from 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute and, ultimately, to no speed limit at all. One drug-rehab facility is facing a suit from the ACLU for sending its patients to chicken-processing plants in Oklahoma and Arkansas to work for free as “therapy.” For these wages, workers’ bodies suffer occupational illnesses at rates five times higher than those seen at regular jobs, seven times higher for carpal-tunnel syndrome, 10 times higher for repetitive-strain injury. Some processing facilities use prison labor. Forevery dollar McDonald’s spends on McNuggets, workers get two cents. About half of the 30 jobs with the lowest median hourly wage in America are in the food system. You need workers to do that and, like many food -system workers, they’re among the most poorly paid employees in America. Work: There isn’t yet a chicken that can turn itself into a McNugget. The modern chicken nugget shows how-in almost every case-the things that have made this breaded poultry confection are running out. Moore and I have traced a history of capitalism to seven cheap things: nature, work, care, food, money, energy, and lives. Globally today, humans eat about 30 pounds of chicken a year, the level seen in the United States in the ’60s.īut, again, how? My colleague Jason W. From around 40 pounds of chicken per person per year available in 1977, there were 80 pounds per person in 2002, and 88.4 in 2015. In the firmament of agricultural-lobbying giants, they’re Big Bird. Those figures are from the National Chicken Council, the lobbying arm representing 95 percent of the broiler chickens produced in the United States. Birds that once took nearly four months to come to market and were sold weighing 2.5 pounds are now ready in 47 days and weigh 6.2 pounds. The chicken we eat today is very different from those consumed a century ago. Gallus gallus domesticus is the world’s most popular bird.
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