When I started my messy breakup with cheap chicken, one of the immediate complications I found was, well, how do you define "cheap chicken"? (And, by extension, what is "good" or "sustainable" chicken?) By cheap chicken, I meant some kind of admittedly vague combination of chicken that is treated poorly while it's alive; that's of questionable healthfulness, for both bird and man; that's slaughtered cruelly; that's produced in a way that damages the environment -- all of which are endemic to an industry that prioritizes low price above all. But with buzzwords like "sustainability" and even "organic" thrown about all willy-nilly, it's hard to know what we even mean by them. And it's especially hard since marketers realized that more and more people are willing to pay more money for products with those words on them.


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