The Farm System
Right from the start I was fortunate. Minimum wage was $3.35 and Church’s Fried Chicken wanted the competitive advantage, willing to pay $3.50. Better still, I somehow squeaked in during a stretch where they were short on cannon fodder to fry frozen birds, so I started at $3.80. Those thirty extra cents couldn’t have bought a candy bar, even in the ‘80s, but I felt a bit like the eager prospect called up to the majors, skipping Triple-A ball altogether. You calculated the hours and multiplied accordingly: in your head already savoring the cassettes purchased, the snacks obtained, the pocket change contributed every Friday afternoon to whoever could rustle up some cheap warm beer. A fantasy fulfilled, at least until that first paycheck; seeing in black & white how taxes work and the wake-up call of a cruel world, like the dazed idiot in a drunk tank, not realizing what’s going on until he hears the cell door slam shut. It’s impossible to imagine how adults did—and do—survive on these salaries, no one else footing the bill for rent, groceries, clothes, or the nightly six-pack to take the edge off the indignity of it all. But this work doesn’t do itself, and there are enough greasy franchises to keep the wheels of capitalism grinding, a product chain stretching from the cages to the factories, on to the truck drivers and delivery services, all the way down the line to high school kids or dropouts ringing up orders, mopping restrooms, and offering refunds when appropriate. Even the chickens themselves, part of the proverbial eggs broken to make this American omelet, might feel a pang of patriotic pride, being called up from their own farm system to take a place in the rotation, food becoming fertilizer and so on until the last customer is served.
Bodies
At least in the ‘80s our food wasn’t synthetic, not yet. All the chickens our franchise received came iced down, in sealed crates. This wasn’t Chemistry, yet—it was Biology, which I happened to be taking my sophomore year. I didn’t need to dissect frogs in class; I could watch Art, the Vietnam Vet from the Bronx with an unironic mustache and tattoo of the Grim Reaper that occupied his whole forearm, a throwback otherwise available only on TV reruns or old movies from the ‘70s where the good guys always won. Art would rock a Marlboro red (cowboy killers, he called them, and we thought that was cool even if we didn’t understand what it meant, Marlboro simply being the cigarette with the biggest signs in ballparks circa 1986) and stride into the walk-in, the refrigerated room we cleaned with a high-powered hose at the end of each shift, and start slicing up birds that had soaked, overnight, in a steel tank; each crate accompanied by a prepackaged solution meant to kill all the unsavory things that happened on farms and especially in transit, so many chickens with their heads cut off escorted by truck across every major highway in America, marinating in the same smog and second-hand fumes human animals ingest, punching blue collar clocks seven days a week so nuclear families could eat nuked meals while worrying about nuclear winters. Only managers were allowed to operate the circular saw, and we would watch, marveling at how minimum wage turned all these identical bodies into two, three, and ten-piece meals—the messy perfection of a process our older classmates learned about in home economics.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
