FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Cheap chicken
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/10 10:55 AM]Y'know, Rod, when I first read Salatin's comments in the book something about them surprised me — feels like something is incomplete. The question is, why don't legal Americans work (or want to work?) processing these chickens? You have to acknowlege, at least, that illegals are willing to break their backs at bottom-tier jobs like this, which curiously don't get taken by born-here workers. Are we a nation of snobs? Or does this train of thought lead us back to the need for a "family wage"?
A few years ago I visited one of the mega-vast-o-warehouse stores just after Christmas, when the lack of customers made it seem even more immense than it is. I expected a tumbleweed to roll across the concrete floor. It got me thinking about what it does to us to buy food, a daily entity that is so very personal, from something so immense. I found this quote in Vance Packard's 1957 The Hidden Persuaders: An Indiana supermarket operator nationally recognized for his advanced psychological techniques told me he once sold a half ton of cheese in a few hours, just by getting an enormous half-ton wheel of cheese and inviting customers to nibble slivers and cut off their own chunks for purchase....The mere massiveness of the cheese, he believes, was a powerful influence in making the sales. "People like to see a lot of merchandise," he explained....A test by "The Progressive Grocer" showed that customers buy 22 percent more if the shelves are kept full. So maybe there is something about buying a chicken that came from a mass-producer that we actually like, and prefer to buying a small-farm chicken. Here are two guesses why.
1. Perhaps it unnerves us a bit to think of eating an individual chicken, and one purchased in this way has comforting anonymity. Remember the scene in Douglas Adam's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where a cow walks to the table and discusses with the diner which portion of her body he would like, recommending particularly tasty areas. The diner, who would have tucked into an anonymous steak, loses his appetite when an agreeable, personable one volunteers.
2. But Packard drew a different conclusion from the "big cheese" experiment — he thinks it's humans who like being part of a herd. We want to buy from a big source, because "The urge to conformity...is profound with many of us." "Conformity" of course was the bugaboo of the 50's and people saw it everywhere. Funny how we don't talk about it any more. But do we actually prefer to buy a chicken alongside untold millions of others, rather than have our personal small-farm product?
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