Love chicken (after all, they're quite yummy) but are disturbed by the cruelty in the way the farm-industrial complex raises hundreds of millions of broiler chickens every year?
Architecture student André Ford has got the solution. All you have to do is convince the chicken to take the red pill:
Ford [...] proposes a "Headless Chicken Solution". This would involve removing the cerebral cortex of the chicken to inhibit its sensory perceptions so that it could be produced in more densely-packed conditions without the associated distress. The brain stem for the chicken would be kept intact so that the homeostatic functions continue to operate, allowing it to grow.
Ford proposes this solution for two reasons: to meet the rising demand for meat, particularly poultry, and to improve the welfare of the chickens by desensitising them to the unpleasant reality of their existence.
After this "desensitisation", the chickens could then be stacked into huge urban farms with around 1,000 chickens hooked up to each large vertical frames -- a little like the network of pods the humans are connected to in The Matrix. The feet of the chickens would also be removed in order to pack more in. There could be dozens of these frames in the vertical farming system, which Ford refers to as the Centre for Unconscious Farming. Food, water and air would be delivered via a network of tubes and excrement would be removed in the same way. This technique could achieve a density of around 11.7 chickens per cubic metre instead of the current 3.2 chickens achieved in broiler houses.
Olivia Solon of Wired UK has the story: Link
Gotta laugh when these city boys come up with ideas.
"
"This is the latest," said Crake.
What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.
"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.
"But there aren't any heads..."
"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."
"
Nope. People have no clue where food comes from or in what horrible conditions the animals are bred.
Btw: they are growing meat in petri dishes today; zombie chickens are small potatoes compared to that.
http://www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/
Plus this sounds REALLY expensive and would probably jack up the prices of meat.
I think people are going to be more disturbed by brainless zombie chickens on their plate than densely packed normal chickens. Not to mention the complete lack of muscle development this will cause is going to create a different product.
I'd rather see more development on growing muscles from scratch as meat than this.