I use to love chicken curry and maybe I will again some day but a steady diet of it for lunch and dinner has simply become too much. More, we have seen too many scrawny chickens, packed too tightly in baskets, heading somewhere on the back of rickshaws for my squeamish tastes. The final coup de grace though was the chicken man in the market. When someone wanted one he’d grab one from the crate, hold its head over a bucket, and whack it off. The head would fall into the bucket among the dozens of other chicken heads and he’d drop the flopping chicken into another bucket and leave it until it became still – which seemingly took an eternity.It was a little difficult to engage with people in the market place while this “flopping in the bloody bucket noise” continued directly behind us.
I just can’t help myself but I like my chickens delivered in plastic wrap, sans the floppy and bloody bucket. It is a character flaw born of a privileged life in a developed country I know and, yes, we all need to be closer to our food source, and, yes I know, sometimes you are so hungry you don’t have choices but, I might really have to become a vegetarian. I mean like a real one that doesn’t eat bacon and hamburgers and chicken curry or Taco Bell. And I might have to like vegetables a little more… but I can do this, I know I can.
