A queer feeling about the chicken industry

Wilhelm* had a queer feeling about the chicken industry, that it was sinister.  On the road, he frequently passed chicken farms.  Those big, rambling, wooden buildings out in the neglected fields; they were like prisons.  The lights burned all night in them to cheat the poor hens into laying.  And the slaughter.  Pile all the coops of the slaughtered on end, and in one week they'd go higher than Mount Everest or Mount Serenity.  The blood filling the Gulf of Mexico.  The chicken shit, acid, burning the earth. ......

"Read me that soy-bean figure now, boy," he said, and Wilhelm did.  He thought perhaps the old man might give him a tip, or some useful advice.  But no.  He only wrote memoranda on a pad, and put the pad in his pocket.  He let no one see what he had written.  And Wilhelm thought this was the way a man who had grown rich by the murder of millions of animals, little chickens, would act.  If there was a life to come he might have to answer for the killing of all those chickens.  What if they all were waiting?

*sitting next to old Mr. Rappaport the retired chicken farmer king in the futures trading room.

From: Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow, 1956

Last month most the chicken tested in the US supermarkets contained arsenic, residue from the processed food they are fed.
And most fish contained mercury, and meat contained hormones and a half dozen deadly bacteria and crop chemical residue.  Vegetables (non organic) had a virtual cocktail of chemicals on them.
If you can find it and afford it, do the organic vegi's, and chicken (or at least antibiotic free and minimal processed), and wild caught salmon and sardines.