The Chicken Dance

On July 3rd of this year, I ended my nearly six-year stint as a vegetarian. My family was in town, and we went to a Ted's Meat Temple/Montana Grill because really, if you're gonna go back to eating meat, you might as well do it big.  I'd imagined my return to meat-eating as pretty much the same thing as that time Ozzy at a bat.  It just seemed kinda barbaric, and entertaining when other people do it, but just something that's not for me.

I ordered a chicken salad. For the first time in six years, I didn't say "chicken on the side, please!" My family had taunted me enough (with love...ish) that there was no going back. The first bite was nasty: It's hard to enjoy food when you are picturing it, alive and well, running through a field somewhere, probably singing a chirpy little Disney song about its happy, sunny, feathery life.

Yes, I know that chickens don't really get to run free in the sunshine. That was part of the reason I went veggie in the first place. But I don't think the chickens want to die. There are no emo chickens. To put this all more succinctly: Shut Up Hippie and let me eat a bird.

I grew into this whole chicken-salad-including-chicken thing. Put enough cheese on just about anything, and hey, whaddaya know it tastes good! I did feel a little guilty about going back on something I believe in, but also, it was covered in cheese. So there's that.

In the middle of all this, as I tried to tune out the sound of various family members clucking at me, I thought of something I learned in high school.

I didn't learn it from high school. I learned it from a guy I went to school with in a high school. He said: "Why do people think free range chickens make eating meat so much better? Wouldn't you rather eat the chicken that WANTS to die? The one who pulls up to the slaughterhouse and is like 'YEAH sweet relief!"

To those of you who are thinking, "but you just said that chickens would prefer to live!" I say, "Shut up hippie and let me eat a bird." Cluck cluck!