Chicken. We eat a ton of it in the United States, growing 160 million chickens a week. We eat it in many different forms, from rotisserie to fried to nuggets. We use it to describe the way more unconventional meats taste, everything from alligator to raccoon to armadillo.
Yet, deep down inside, we know that many chickens had to go through a lot to get in our bellies, sometimes being kept in horrible, dark, cramped conditions as they're being grown.
And this is something we actually hear a lot about. Celebrities from Paul McCartney to Pamela Anderson have spoken out about the abuse that some chickens suffer in these farms as they're being grown for our consumption. It doesn't get more mainstream than that.
So taking down the poultry companies for their treatment of chickens would have been the obvious choice for John Oliver during Sunday night's installment of Last Week Tonight, which is probably why that's not exactly how he examined chicken farming in the U.S. during the show's top story segment. Instead, Oliver showed that chicken farmers may be suffering just as much abuse from poultry companies as the chickens themselves.
With the amount of chickens that Americans consume on the daily, chicken farming is big business. Well, if you're one of the four companies dominating the poulttry industry (Tyson, Pilgrim's, Sanderson Farms and Perdue), that is. With living at or below the poverty line, being forced to compete with neighbors for pay and living under the fear of retaliation from poultry companies if they do speak out about any of their practices, chicken farmers definitely don't have it so easy either.
Check out the full Last Week Tonight segment below, and you'll never look at Mickey Mouse chicken nuggets the same way again.
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