$5
A network of rational and skilled human beings has operated in perfect tandem across space and time to hatch, raise, slaughter, pluck, clean, season, cook, and sell me an entire chicken at Costco for $5. It’s called a “rotisserie chicken,” and they’re so popular that Costco has bought out hundreds of farms in Iowa and Nebraska to process about 2 million birds a week. Film director Werner Herzog once said the eyes of the chicken reveal a “bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity” of the most “horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creatures in the world.” I have to say I was surprised by Herzog’s naivete. I believe in the personhood of animals, and there’s no worse animal than a human, which Herzog should know.