I read the following earlier this week:
We do not seem able to satisfy ourselves with the qualities which nature has given to the roosterish clan; art has stepped in; and with the pretext of bettering them we have made them into martyrs. Not only do we deprive them of their means of reproduction, but we condemn them to solitary confinement and darkness, we force them to eat, and by doing so we make them much heavier than they were ever meant to be.
I think this is a rather accurate picture of how we handle chickens now as the ones we find in stores are "unnaturally" fat.
Interestingly, this passage is a quote from The Physiology of Taste, written by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in1825. Is there anything really new?
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2 comments:
Hey there,
I am going one by one through your posts and catching up. Get ready for lots of comments.
While I agree that genetic manipulation is a prehistoric past-time, don't you think that in modernity it has been amplified in a way that makes it something different? 1825 is after the industrial revolution fell upon us, so one cannot be sure that two hundred years would make great differences.
It is also true that our chickens are extremely fatty, I am told. The question is whether this is "natural"--I don't see how one can even talk about "nature" from a scientific point of view. Nature is an ethical concept, because it is an Aristotelian concept. It was presupposed that each type of being has an essential form and its "nature" is to arrive at this form. This is the older notion of nature on which the modern notion of nature is based and from which it departs. The modern notion is essentially newtonian, and in that light it is not ethical. My point is that there is an equivocation on the word, and maybe you should take it in the former sense in this french author.
I might also add that one can object to the fattiness of chickens on pragmatic grounds--it isn't good for us that they are fatty, even if one cannot know what is objectively good.
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