"The Chicken Dance"

by: friar Rich Rome, OFM Conv.

One of my favorite TV comedies, Arrested Development, chronicles the antics of the hyper-affluent Bluth family who develop real estate in California.  With one exception, they are all completely (and hilariously) disconnected from the real world.  And the way the show drives that point home is that each character has a unique “chicken dance”.  Whenever one character accuses another of being a chicken, they mockingly perform their version of the dance – none of these versions bear any resemblance to a real chicken (see gif below).

While some societies for religious or cultural reasons do not eat pork or beef, almost every society eats chicken.  Just about everyone on earth understands what a chicken is like (hence, the comedy of the show).  But how connected are we on where our chicken comes from?  Our time in Ellicott City, MD and Siler City, NC revolved a lot around chickens. 

In Maryland, we spent a morning at Mary’s Land Farm, which partners with the friars’ own Little Portion Farm.  Mary’s Land Farm, like many of the others in the area, are trying to reconnect people to a reality that often gets overlooked in America: where their food comes from.  On this morning, we were going to help slaughter chickens.  Prior to this, my experience with chickens was either with them alive (my 2^nd grade class raised some chicks in an incubator in the back of our room), or with them already packaged in plastic at the grocery store. 

Slaughter was a more complicated process than I thought it would be.  I was an eviscerator and I had to be very careful where I inserted the knife to start the process.  Knick this organ, and a green fluid would spill out and contaminate the meat.  Knick another organ, and partially digested food would spill out.  Most of the organs were connected and could be removed somewhat easily with practice, except for the lungs, which were almost impossible to get out regardless of practice.  A lot of water goes into the slaughter process to keep everything clean, but that makes holding the chicken difficult.  But the hardest part was the tedium that started to set in: I found myself focusing so much on repeating the task, because focusing on anything else would have made it too difficult or too slow.  After standing for 6 hours trying to cut apart slippery chickens, I was stiff from neck to toe.  As challenging as the experience was, it provided that missing link in the chain.

The economy of Siler City is primarily driven by chicken processing plants (a new one opened shortly before we arrived).  And the plants are primarily staffed by immigrants.  Some of them have gone through hell to come to this country, and now live in a sort of purgatory with their immigration status.  This is the work that many of them are hired to do.

Both of these experiences connected a human dimension to this elaborate “chicken dance”.  The farmers had spent weeks raising the chickens, moving them from pasture to pasture early each morning, so the chickens could eat fresh greens.  My brothers had worked with me in slaughtering them, so seeing all the work that both they and the farmers had put into this made the thought of wasting a chicken seem a graver act.  Then meeting the amazing immigrant community in Siler City, who do this work every day, imbued an even deeper gravity to this “chicken dance”: people who have risked their lives, so that their children might have a better life.   While I don’t think I was as clueless as the Bluths, I didn't understand how complex the “chicken dance” was that provides the staple protein most of us probably eat everyday.