“HOLY CHICKEN”

            Last week, as background for a school essay she had to write, my granddaughter Lauryn  watched Morgan Spurlock’s HOLY CHICKEN movie.  I’d seen his blockbuster shoestring budgeted SUPERSIZE ME several years ago but had not seen this second round so decided to watch it with her.

             If you’ll recall, SUPERSIZE ME was an experiment in which Spurlock ate only McDonald’s food for a month.  He nearly died as a result and it made a stunning point:  McDonald’s food is poison.

             In this new movie, he decides to open a fast food restaurant and serve chicken.  Some folks would say I’m stodgy and couldn’t get his bold satire; fair enough, but I found myself completely frustrated and irritated that he did not attempt to offer an authentic option.  He hired a factory farmer in Alabama who had one house out of 15 empty to raise his 3,000 chickens for him.  Same house, same feed, same everything as Tyson.

             He consulted food experts, restaurant gurus throughout the process and the bottom line is that he opened his restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio using the interior walls to proclaim that the whole thing was fake, a charade.  He painted artificial lines on the chicken to make it look like it was grilled—the restaurant industry makes stencils for this.  But unlike most eateries, he explained the fake grill lines to his customers.

             People flocked to the restaurant.  He explained that all his claims about natural were meaningless.  He showed pictures of the “free range”, which was a tiny alcove smaller than your home’s bathroom, no grass, that the chickens would not even venture into.  In spite of all this effort to tell his customers that everything about the restaurant, their perceptions of these feel-good phrases, and even the provenance was all a charade, people came and thought it was better food.  In a couple of days he ran out of chicken and closed down the place.

             I’m not sure whether the whole point of his million-dollar joke was to show how stupid and duplicitous urban Americans are or to show how terrible but ubiquitous Big Chicken is.  Maybe I am too stodgy for Morgan Spurlock.  It has hilarious spots and the background music adds humor and pizzazz. 

             My whole takeaway was this: “why can’t an authentic fast food model exist?”  I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if he’d procured his chickens from Polyface or some other authentic pastured poultry producer and offered a true blue honestly transparent differentiated option.  What if he didn’t fake anything?

             Is there no one, somewhere, who will take the McDonald’s antidote option and offer our nation something real?  In a time when screens and much of life seem surreal, virtual, or dishonest, why can’t we have an option that oozes integrity?  Wouldn’t it be cool if next to each McDonald’s you had a nutrient dense soil building animal-respecting human-affirming option where moms could take their kiddos without Ronald’s poison?

             What do you think is the biggest reason we don’t have that option?