"Like Fast Food Nation, Chicken will drop more than a few jaws with its descriptions, facts, and figures. That’s all the better. I hope that this smart book will be passed from hand to hand, so that consumers will challenge the status quo and so that activists, environmentalists, labor rights organizers, and others will recognize how closely their issues are linked."—Joel Stonington, Orion
"[A] fast-paced narrative, rich with personal detail."—Publishers Weekly
Selected for the National Agricultural Library collection.
"Striffler presents the first in-depth look at the rise of the chicken industry in late twentieth-century America. The story is vivid, engaging, and—in chapters dealing with Mexican and other immigrant chickenworkers—riveting."—Deborah Fitzgerald, author of Every Farm a Factory
"A gripping and deeply sobering view of ‘big chicken’ from the bottom up. Striffler’s experience on the (dis)assembly line, his sympathetic grasp of the hopes, dreams, and origins of the workforce, and of the larger history of the industry, make for a uniquely powerful and memorable book."—James C. Scott, Yale University
"Modern chicken production and consumption is embedded in a fascinating web of political, economic, social, and even psychological factors that need to be described, understood, and questioned. Steve Striffler, combining scholarly analysis with his remarkable brand of participatory research, has produced a masterful book, one I will recommend widely."—Kelly Brownell, Yale University
"With gripping prose and clear analysis, Striffler's Chicken brings workers, growers, consumers, as well as bird together around one big, unhappy table. His treatment of Mexican immigrant workers at Tyson's, in
particular, is a model of modern-day ethnography."—Leon Fink, editor of Labor: Working-Class History of the Americas
"Extraordinarily powerful. . . . This book will do for chicken what Fast Food Nation did for beef." —Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health