Industrial Landscapes

Written by Bergen Vermette

This great pic from Canadian potographer, Edward Burtynsky, reveals one of our modern industrial landscapes - the chicken factory.

Located in Dehui City, China, this factory runs 24-hours, seven days a week, and processes over 100 million chickens per year. Rather, 375,000 chickens are slaughtered, plucked, dismembered and packaged here every day.

That's a lot of chicken. A lot. But to put it in perspective, even this insane amount of poultry - the 100,000,000 chickens produced here in a full year - is still only enough food to feed one meal to (less than) 3% of the global population. (I'm a bit shocked trying to imagine how much food we humans actually consume every day..)

And this chicken is, in fact, part of the global meal. It is consumed domestically in China, and also exported to over 20 different countires (far-flung locales such as Germany, South Africa, and Japan).

I find this whole idea of chicken from China amazing. When I pick-up a drum stick there's a whole world of farming, industry, transport, and marketing behind it. The image says a lot. It's both eerie and beautiful.

manufacturedlandscapes.photo02

This image comes from Burtynsky's documentary, Manufactured Landscapes.

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6 comments

Comment Link Friday, 04 March 2011 20:30 posted by Morgaine Beckley
Eerie? Beautiful?? How about horrifying!?!
Comment Link Saturday, 05 March 2011 05:59 posted by Bergen Vermette
Haha, yes, I'd say that captures it too!

One thing though, trying to imagine how much food us 7billion people eat in a day has me seeing it less as horrifying and more as just kinda stunning.

Admittedly, I find it a bit confusing. Because on the one hand, Down with Factory Farms!! But on the other, man, we eat A LOT of food. We're going to have to come up with a comparable way to feed everyone especially as new nations get richer and start hankerin' for more meat, dairy, and eggs, as is the trend.

I don't have a solution (I'm working on it and will get back to you ;) ), but getting real about our situation seems a good first step. For now, I'll never look at chicken the same, that's for sure! Are you involved in any of the food movements at the moment? Any ideas here?
Comment Link Monday, 14 March 2011 01:38 posted by Jennifer Grove
Standardized and downscaled versions locally.

And vegetarianism.

Jesus.

~J
Comment Link Monday, 14 March 2011 06:07 posted by Bussard Mattsen
Anything seen in large quantities can appear more shocking than when viewed in context. It hard to image, for example, that if you connected all the veins in your body and stretched them out they would go around the earth 2.5 times. And yet, they would!

That said, I have often thought about the number of chickens who gave their lives for a plate of chicken wings, no matter how tasty they might have been.

Personally I'd like to see more experiments in vertical farming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming
Comment Link Monday, 14 March 2011 23:08 posted by Jennifer Grove
Hi, Bussard.

The notion of "chickens giving their lives" is an old notion. The "primitive" believed that that is *exactly* what the animal was doing - totally projecting their own noblest ideals into the animal - and they were sincerely grateful. It produced a very different attitude when eating than our now fetishised obsessions with Chef and recipe.

I loved how you and Bergen brought attention to how things look different and shocking in large quantities. Mass production is a weird thing, isn't it? When it was only about metal widgets, it seemed like such a great thing, but when it comes to other sentient beings, it becomes disturbing. And if it's not disturbing, that's even more disturbing.

Temple Grandin, a full-blown autistic person, was able to grasp that nature is cruel, but we don't have to be. And she works towards reducing the suffering of sentient beings when they are being mass-processed in this way - including chickens. And she is well-aware of the presence of people in the industry who are not disturbed by the suffering of animals, and that the industry attracts people like that - and that this is a big problem.

It's odd and disturbing that an autistic person can be aware of that and not some "normal" people.

Bless her.
~J
Comment Link Sunday, 05 June 2011 21:46 posted by braj
go vegetarian!