“Chicken breasts for $12.00 a pound? You’re $%&@ing kidding me right? Tell me you are $#%@ing kidding me!”
This is a small part (my part) of a recent conversation I had at a small boutique food store in my neighborhood. I apologize for the obvious foul language, but honestly, sometimes there is a need for foul language.
This small store is part of a city wide chain and is representative of a huge lie that is making some people a ton of money, at the expense of their less than enlightened but obviously wealthy customers. That illusion is that healthy, farm-direct foods are extremely expensive and so we should pay much, much, more. This idea was started and propagated by companies like “Whole Foods”, but has been capitalized on and made worse by small expensive stores like this.
This store even has the word “farm” right in the name, giving it even more pseudo-credibility. Now this store “looks” really good. It is adorned with beautiful floors and earth tone colors, small bins full of perfectly placed fruits and vegetables, smiling and professional staff, perfect packaging…and of course really, really, really, REALLY, expensive food.
There is an uncomfortably strange communication in this store that all things pastoral are clean, clinical, pleasant and perfect. For anyone who has actually set foot on a real farm though, this is about as ridiculously artificial as plastic flowers. This ambiance of this store strongly suggests that the Gabor sisters or Kardashians would be right at home standing in a muddy field watching the hogs root for insects and grubs. Obviously, it’s important to keep their wealthy customers comfortably bathed in this warm illusion.
So, their chicken breasts were $12.00 per pound. Yet, I can get real, pastured (that is chickens wandering around OUTSIDE eating stuff off the ground that chickens naturally eat – insects, leafy greens, lush plants, dropped fruit, etc) from at least 3 other stores within the same neighborhood for about $5.99 a pound. These small, family run stores proudly tell you all about the farms that their chickens come from and exactly how they are raised. Now, because the chickens from these other places were actually raised in their natural environment, not only are they cheaper, but…
THERE ARE MUCH HIGHER QUALITY &%#@ING CHICKENS!!!!
Sorry, I know, I swore again. It’s just that this stuff makes me so angry. It should make you angry too if you have been shopping at overpriced stores like this. Not only are they ripping us off, but they are also calling us stupid as they take our money.
It gets better (worse)! So I asked the lady “why on earth the chickens at this store were so expensive when the other 3 stores were half the price for truly farm direct, naturally raised chickens?” Her reply was “well, these chickens had really expensive chicken feed, so that must be reflected in the higher price”. I replied that Chicken feed should basically be free because a pastured animal wanders around foraging for its natural food which was provided by nature and the last time I checked all that stuff was in fact – FREE!. Her reply: “Oh no, these birds were never allowed outside. They were kept penned up their whole lives because if they went outside, they might get bird flu, so they had to be fed the expensive feed in-doors, all year round”
WHAT THE &%@#!???
Okay, let me get this straight, you are selling me chicken breasts for $12.00 per pound that are basically industrially raised and from a confined animal feeding operation. It may sound like the “room and board” is top notch for these birds, but I highly doubt the chickens would agree. So, these chickens weren’t even from a small farm. They were from a confined animal feeding operation! That’s not a farm. That’s a livestock factory. So, name and misrepresentative bucolic imagery aside, the reality is that this store sells overpriced food from tortured animals that were not even raised on a real farm!
It gets worse. She told me that they weren’t even certified “organic” and that those chickens “were even more expensive so that their price was actually a really great deal.”
A Side note. Well, it’s obvious that the term “organic” has gone to hell in a hand basket. If the word organic were a person, it would be getting gang raped by the food companies comprising our modern industrial agricultural industry. Sorry, but this has to be said. Please, hang your heads and lament for the word “organic” because it’s true meaning is long gone where public perception is concerned. It still exists in the hearts and minds of the small farmers who continue to struggle against modern agriculture. Unfortunately though, for most of the uninformed public it’s a grand illusion created to charge you exorbitant prices, the true meaning long dead.
I was speechless. I hung my head and headed for the door in anger and despair. I quickly high-tailed it over to my favorite neighborhood farm store where real chickens and other great stuff sell for half the price. This store doesn’t look quite as “perfect” and its location is not as central as the first one. When I got to that great store, the family members who own and run it thought it was odd that on that particular day I thanked them about 7 times for opening such a great business and feeding grateful customers like myself. They started to laugh after the 5th “thank you” wondering what had got into me that day.