Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Date: 11 Jun 95
They'll probably send the "Chicken Police" after me for telling you this, but the truth must be revealed. I recently got into some financial trouble -- gaming, the horses, credit cards -- and had to take on a night job to settle my debts. So I applied at the local Boston Chicken. (I figured, what the hell, the place looked clean and the employees seemed nice.)
To get this job, applicants must spend a week at "Chicken College". Here they taught us the typical customer service crap for the first three days. "Would you like some gravy on the side, Sir?". "Do you want your chicken quartered or halved?". "To stay or to go?" Etc.
On day 4, however, I learned the secret of Boston Chicken. The back-room operation. They called it the "Preparation Area." I was stunned and horrified. The muffled, tortured, cackles of tormented fowl. The stench of bird blood. It was truly hideous.
The "Pre-cooking Process" was explained (and demonstrated) as follows:
1) Each day, chickens are unloaded -- live -- from a large truck at 3:45 AM. I counted approximately 250-300.
2) The chickens are next taken to the "De-Feathering Area", where they are thrown, live, into a huge rotating drum with hundreds of rubber finger-like spikes protruding from all surfaces. The chickens spend 2-3 hours in this spinning hell, while the rubber fingers slowly rip out all their feathers.
3) Once this process is completed, the groggy, half-dead chickens are dumped from the tube onto a conveyer belt. A couple of workers remove any remaining feathers from the birds as they move past.
3) The most heinous act of inhumanity occurs in the next processing area. I openly wept when I witnessed the "Overnight Marinade" technique. Upon reaching the end of the conveyer belt, the featherless, battered birds are deposited in a large plastic dumpster. While the dumpster is being filled with its horrible cargo, a worker prepares the "Overnight Marinade". I saw something that looked like soy sauce, some powdered spices, and vegetable oil being added to the concoction.
What happened next still gives me cold sweats at night. The chickens -- some dead, most still twitching from the previous treatment -- are dumped into the "Overnight Marinade". A chilling "mmmmrrawwwwwaaahhh" is heard as the chickens that are still alive struggle to keep their beaks above the waterline. Slowly, over the course of 30-40 minutes, the most robust chickens sink, one by one. I turned away and sobbed when I saw the last bird gasp for breath, look around the room in sad puzzlement, and sink into the brew.
I didn't stick around for Day Five: "Skewering and roasting".
-Jim