Is the McChicken Really Worth it?

 Jennifer Spatz

Local Places, Global Regions

Response Paper 2

1/16/2021

Is the McChicken Really Worth it?

    In “Seven Cheap Things'' by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, they cover seven topics that highlight the everyday human life experience; nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. They go on to explain how each of these qualities is slowly being destroyed by capitalism and as a result of the increase in human consumption, inflation, and markets. Throughout time, humans have faced turning points in life, or, “state shifts” in which they have altered natural life in order to gain a sense of convenience. As a result, because this trend continued for so long, it escalated into what we call capitalism, taking the simple things and altering them until there's not much else natural or healthy about the world, just some chemically engineered products. Humans are now programmed to want things quickly that lack in value and they have accepted that because that’s all they know, quantity over quality. 

    Patel and Moore use the poultry industry as an example of the destructive nature of humans. They speak of chicken bones in the geological record first explaining that the chickens we know and eat today, are in fact nothing like the chickens that existed a century ago. Humans have genetically altered the chickens in order to create a profitable market where the meat grows fast and the money comes in faster. The chickens are born quicker, matured faster, and have oversized breasts perfect for human conception. It is cheap and inauthentic nature, cheap work, cheap care, cheap food, and cheap energy time and time again because it is an endless cycle that people do not even know that they are stuck in.  

    On the path humans are heading down now, we are going to be living, breathing, and ingesting chemical filth based off of the cycle that is capitalism. We are digging our own graves and ignoring it because “this is forgotten in the act of dipping the chicken-and-soy product into a plastic pot of barbecue sauce.” (5). Patel and Moore explain the importance of “reparation ecology” as a method to move past history, fight to better ourselves, better the world, and plan and work towards a better, stronger, and healthier future. There need to be radical changes made to prevent the downfall that we are currently in. We must put the McChicken down and think about the reimagined web of life we could have.