Chicken Parts

I freakin' love chicken wings. 

When I was in college, there used to be this bar near our campus that did twenty five cent wings on Thursdays. For five bucks (plus beer money) I could get a great feed that hits all the key nutritional food groups (salt, fat, acid, and heat. Hmm, now that I'm thinking about it, there's an argument to be made that the buffalo wing is the ultimate food that perfects all the core elements of deliciousness). But to top that, a different bar only a slightly longer drive away did TEN CENT WINGS and dollar PBRs on Monday nights. You could get drinks and eat yourself stupid and still get change for your five-spot. 

Twenty years on I am a whole lot more health conscious, but my love for wings hasn't changed. In fact, I've succeeded in passing this affinity onwards genetically. The other day my family almost finished an entire Costco package of chicken wings in one dinner. The kids carried their weight; even my one year old was stacking them bones. 

How many chickens worth of chicken wings did my family of five polish off in one night? Google says on average there's 8-12 chicken wings per kilogram, and so that 2kg package meant that we were responsible for consuming about ten chickens worth of vestigial flying appendages, give or take. 

One family.

For a typical weeknight dinner, no special occasions.

Not a special meal, not even a special ingredient. 

Relative to the society I live in, I am not considered particularly wealthy or privileged, but on a whatever, nothing, ordinary evening I am able to provide a whatever, nothing, ordinary meal for my family that required ten chickens to make. Most people that I know are able to afford this meal without thinking too hard about their budget. What other time in the history of mankind has this kind of casual abundance and extravagant consumption been available to whatever, nothing, ordinary people?

This is going to be kind of a weird confession but I've been thinking about chicken parts in a kind of on and off way for the last couple of years now. It fascinates me to consider what kind of societal and technological conditions have to be created in order to produce something that most of us in the modern world see dozens of times a week: A section in the grocery store where chicken wings are stacked up in one pile, chicken breasts are stacked up in another, and so on for the rest of the bird's anatomy in descending order of desirability: Thighs (with variations of skin on/off, bone in/out), drumsticks,  hearts, giblets, and neck. In order to create a society where ordinary people can say, "I don't want to eat the whole chicken tonight; just the legs" you need industrialization, mass production, factories, and scalable systems for producing, processing, and distributing your chicken products. 

But the physical tools are only the conspicuous part of the system. What's more important is the attitude towards life that enables us to look at a whole and break it down into usable, consumable parts, customized to my exact inclination. If you want to live in a society where on an ordinary weeknight you can do drumstick night, you need:

Commodification: You cannot simply view life as sacred. It must be seen as a commodity or resource that can be measured, quantified, and broken down into constituent parts to be exploited for maximum value. 

Efficiency: You have to change your definition of waste. Waste is not mass shredding male baby chicks because they can't grow into egg-laying hens. Waste is spending resources to raise them because something something sanctity of life. Any slack in the system is a waste. Economies of scale require ruthless elimination of any parts of your process that prevents you from extracting maximum value. 

Control: If you're serious about being able to provide skinless chicken breasts in mass for every fitness buff in your society, then you must seek absolute mastery over every aspect of the system.  You must have total control over your product's environment, and even control over your products food.

In his book The Uncontrollability Of The World, German philosopher Hartmut Rosa argues that the driving cultural force of the modern world is is the desire to make the world "controllable". We want to have mastery over our environment in order to make it usable and consumable. This doesn't always have to have negative connotations. For example, I'm able to write these thoughts at 11pm at night without needing to burn a candle because we've mastered electricity. We've quite literally caught lightning in a bottle and developed a grid to distribute it in the exact parcels so that I can see without depending on the sun. 

In certain respects controlling the world is the source of tremendous good, such as how we've learned to control wildlife so that across the board, death by tiger mauling has dropped dramatically in the modern world and little children playing outside don't routinely get carried off by large predatory birds anymore. 

But when our desire for control is paired with the dark inclinations of our heart: Wastefulness, excess, profit, greed, comfort... dark things happen. We commodify the world around us. We discard sanctity as a value. And we casually assent to the brutalization of God's good Creation in order to make our lives a little easier. Paul Kingsnorth, in his essay Want Is The Acid, says that the pursuit of instant pleasure is the organizing principle of society: 

We can enjoy our little towns here in the richer bits of the world because the waste we generate through our excitable purchases of big-screen tellies, lego sets, foreign holidays, cheap clothes, cheap food and all the rest of it always ends up somewhere else. The dioxins and PCBs go into the water and soil, the plastic goes into the oceans, the carbon dioxide goes into the air. Fifty million tonnes of ‘e-waste’ is shipped every year to the poorest countries on Earth, which are least equipped to deal with it. But then they’re not really supposed to deal with it: they’re supposed to keep it away from us. We don’t know what else to do with all this crap, so we - for example - ship 4000 tonnes of toxic waste, containing carcinogenic chemicals, to Nigeria, and just dump it on the beaches. The same way we dumped 79,000 tonnes of asbestos on the beaches in Bangladesh, and 40 million tonnes of our poisonous waste in just one small part of Indonesia. The same way we run our old ships up onto the beaches in China and India, and leave them for the locals to break up - if they can. The same way we dump nine million tonnes of plastic into the oceans every year.

In my life I don't usually view the food that I eat as formerly living creatures. I think that we create conceptual buffers in our life and even language in order to suppress that ugly truth. My kids still haven't made the connection that we're talking about the same thing when we see a pig in the farm or have pork sausages for lunch. But my eyes are opening, painfully, to the ways in which I have taken part in a perversion of God's original agenda for the world that he created. Our drive to control the world in order to satisfy our obsession with instant pleasure is the sinful corruption of the Creation mandate.

In the very beginning of history, God said to humans: "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground." (Gen 1.28). In this verse are two Hebrew verbs that can be translated as "dominion" or "bringing something under control/subjugation". But the command for humans to do this to the world is so that we might care for them and bring glory to God through our benevolent and servant rule over all the other creatures. The intention was for us to explore, understand, and master the world in order that everything under us would flourish. 

But we've taken the tools God has given us to fulfill his mandate and sought to control everything in order to press it into our own service. Not for their good, but for our indulgence. We've commodified Creation for our profit and pleasure. 

(By the way, don't for a second think that we only do this to chickens and not to each other)

So to bring it back to the beginning and also because I recognize I'm running really long on this post because I'm quite rusty from having taken a long break from writing, I've been learning to repent not just for individual sins but for my thoughtless part in the attitude and worldview that drives our uncreating of the world. "Why not eat 20 chicken wings if it only costs me two bucks? It's not like I'm wasting money?" Gluttony isn't just a sin because the Bible says it's wrong. It is the force that makes us choose harm over care in our orientation towards Creation. 

Reader, don't despair for the part that you play in this toxic drama. There is hope and grace, not in ourselves but from above. The redemption of the world has already begun because the Sacrificial Lamb has died for the sins of the world, and he promises it will be brought to completion. He will reverse the course. 

The world's exploitation and death for our indulgence and comfort. 

Jesus' suffering and death for the world's renewal. 

Amen.