Chicken

I am quietly, single-handedly decimating the chicken population of Israel. I calculate that on a good week I might eat about three or four chickens. I count turkey as chicken because, in my book, they are almost the same thing, just bigger.

There are some things about chicken, and meat in general, which I find rather intriguing. Like, if a live chicken is shaped like so, how do we get cold-cuts that are round in shape? It's sort of like the question about wood - if a tree is cylindrical, then how do we get sheets of wood that are big, flat and square? The mysteries of the world abound.

Read this fascinating list of chicken facts here: http://www.vfr.net/~tbruce/facts.html you will learn that chickens can travel up to 9 miles an hour. Amazing. And that there are about 450 million chickens in the United States - that sounds like a lot, but not compared to China's three billion chickens. That's three billion chickens who aren't allowed to surf the internet.

Some people squirm when they realise that the succulent bone they are chewing on used to hold up some fowl's body-part. But once it's on my plate, the food is food and becomes completely divorced from what it was before. Therefore, to eat chicken is only to eat chicken, and not to eat a chicken. It is much more civilised to think of it that way. I must say that I have no compunction eating dead animals. As they say, if G-d wanted us to be vegetarians, why did he make cows out of meat?