The Chicken Mountain

This year, I started volunteering for Ozharvest, an organisation focusing on food rescue, reducing food waste, and addressing the paradox of simultanenous food waste and food insecurity. 

An incredible amount of food is thrown away in Australia every year, and this is something that is hardly on people's minds, even those of us like me who think that they are environmentally friendly by recycling and reducing plastic waste etc. I was under the impression that food waste was "better" than other kinds of waste because it's biological right? so it would degrade faster. But when you examine the issue in detail, the environmental impact of food waste is huge - the resources it takes to produce the food, transport it to shops, the amount of energy consumed by storing the food, and finally the discarded food releasing greenhouse gas as it decomposes. 

Ozharvest does a great deal to rescue and re-direct food, and I have mostly been involved in the kitchen where we prepare meals from rescued food for charities to re-distribute to those who are in need. 

So this week I arrived for my shift, and we got to work. A group of up to five volunteers is led by a chef who plans out the meals and the steps involved. It is really quite efficient because we prepare 200-300 meals in a morning's work. 

First I chopped up about 50 packets of tempeh. These were the Macro organic brand stocked by Woolies, and probably it was introduced as a new product line but subsequently taken off shelves due to lack of popularity. Despite having use-by dates in December, they were destined for landfill. We made the tempeh into a veggie stir fry with a satay sauce. 

My next job was to chop up chicken marylands, a cut of meat where the thigh joins onto the leg. These were rescued from Costco - I suppose with the new LGA restrictions in Sydney, people perhaps haven't been able to get to Costco for their bulk shopping. I'm not sure how much chicken was actually rescued but we had 200 marylands earmarked for this day's meals. 

I'm not sure if anyone can imagine what 200 chicken marylands looks like - it is literally a mountain of chicken. 

I started to get this extremely vivid imagery of all the chickens that died in order to be there right in front of me. I imagined a mountain of chickens without legs, decomposing in landfill. While I was happy that we rescued this food and we were able to feed it to others who needed food, I was saddened so much by the waste of the chicken's lives. 

Why did these chickens exist in the first place? The Chicken Industry doesn't care that these "waste" chickens died in vain, never even to be consumed by humans, the sole reason for which they were bred. The market demands chicken, being the commonest meat consumed in Australia. A quick Google shows some incredible statistics - 600 million kilograms of chicken produced in Australia each year, that is 45kg of chicken per person, per year. These numbers seems crazy, but it must truly be Australia's "Favourite Meat". It led me to wonder how much chicken that is purchased ultimately goes to waste - why did these chickens have to die? 

The second thing that really disturbed me was what the legs were really like. There was something extraordinarily unnatural about them, like they had been artificially plumped up. The thighs looked like breast implants. Are these chickens fed growth hormone, steroids and other medications to make them more profitable? I wondered. Even though they were unnatural looking, there was still a striking individuality to the chicken legs. If you look closely, every single chicken leg is different - just like every single human leg is different. 

The last thing that disturbed me was the action of chopping the marylands in half. Because of different roasting times, the chef asked for the thighs and drumsticks to be separated. I didn't know how to do it because I have never prepared a chicken before, and I immediately found it hard to chop through the bone. He showed me how to find the joint, and slicing through the cartilage was a lot easier. Running my finger along the leg to find the "knee" joint of the chicken, I could identify easily where to cut. The other volunteers joked that I was quick at picking it up because of my anatomy knowledge. This was probably true, and I was reminded of procedures I do on humans using landmarks for guidance - how is this any different?

I started to feel really nauseous as I was getting through the chicken mountain. By the time I finished, I smelled like a dead chicken, a gooey bloody smell that clung to my skin. No amount of scrubbing my hands took away the smell, and I had to shower for a long time when I got home. We usually have staff lunch together from the food that we have prepared, but I felt sick looking at the chicken. No one else seemed to mind, but I thought it was probably time for me to give up eating meat again. 

I'm an on-again off-again vegetarian since age 20. I've had a couple of periods of complete vegetarianism in my life - 5 years one time, and 4 years another time. My usual state is about 90% vegetarian, and I almost never prepare meat at home but will eat it when I go out or if others prepare it for me. 

But the chicken mountain is still haunting me a couple of days later. It's time to let go, put my money where my principles lie and stop supporting the industry. 

Rest in peace little chickens who were force fed, medicated, killed and wasted. I'm thinking of you.