RUBBER CHICKEN
In “Rubber Chicken”, Susan Squier compares the differences between a rubber and a real chicken. In the beginning of her piece, she states rubber chickens and real chickens are completely different, obviously indicating that one is made of plastic materials and the other is a creation of nature. Throughout her piece, she actually finds similarities between the two chickens.
With chickens being such a largely produced livestock, raising them healthily and organically is difficult due to high costs and more work needs to be taken. Saying that the chickens we eat are made out of plastic would be absurd, but if we look closely at how they are raised, this idea would make more sense. Squier mentions the different environmentally harmful items the chickens come across, starting from the time they were born and raised, to their journey to our local supermarkets. Chicks are hatched in gasoline, kerosene, or coal or oil-powered electricity, then are flown on a jet to auctions where the auctioneer uses a battery-powered mic to sell to the audience sitting in webbed aluminum chairs. Chickens and other livestock are “always petroleum-intense in their lengthy transit”.
Squier’s piece forces us to think about what we are really consuming, even if our food is labelled as “organic”, or “free range”. Even if the actual product is organic, the way the animal was raised was completely around plastic. Plastic and these environmentally harming materials are needed in order to produce such large amounts of livestock, and can not be avoided. In the end, there is really little difference between rubber chickens and live chickens, one being made out of plastic materials and the other raised by plastic. A question Squier’s piece poses and makes her audience think about is if livestock requires such a lengthy petroleum-filled transit, what else does? Or a better question would be what kind of produce or product does not require our environment to be harmed when made. This question really opens our eyes and makes us realize that everything we own has harmed our planet for our own pleasure.