http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/super-size-me-2-you-may-never-be-able-to-eat-chicken-again.html
The heart of the movie, though, is Spurlock’s journey raising his own chickens in Alabama with the help of an affable, mustachioed, third-generation farmer named Jonathan Buttram. Spurlock goes to a hatchery to get a bunch of broilers, specifically bred to get so fat so fast their feathers, their legs, and their hearts often can’t keep up. By the time their seven-week lifespan is nearly up, they’re dropping dead by the half dozen. Soon, he’s proving that the words you read on packages at the grocery story are meaningless. He gets to call his chickens “cage-free,” even though meat chickens have never been raised in cages, and it’s not like they’re living the life in their giant, windowless chicken house. “Hormone-free” is equally empty, since it’s already against the law to give poultry hormones — not that that stops anyone from throwing it on a label. The feed Spurlock bought contained pork, but if it hadn’t, he could call his birds “vegan” and “organic” instead of just “100 percent natural” and “minimally processed.” Most galling is when he demonstrates how meaningless the FDA’s definition of “free range” is: All it requires is that he provide a small horseshoe-shaped pen on the lawn just outside the barn door, and that he give the chickens the option of wandering into it for a certain amount of time each day. (None of them do.)
But things get really dark when Spurlock starts delving into the workings of what he calls “Big Chicken,” the mafia-like collusion of five mega-corporations (Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride, Sanderson Farms, Perdue, and Koch Foods) that provide 99.9 percent of the chickens eaten in the U.S. Farmers sign contracts with them, pay on their own dime to buy land and build chicken houses, and then are subjected to a “tournament” system that arbitrarily ranks them against their neighbors to see who can grow the fattest chickens for the least amount of money — even in cases when the companies have given them sick hatchlings, females (who don’t get as big as males), or stale feed. Farmers who want to give their chickens better living conditions, such as sunlight and fresh air, are forbidden, because happier birds don’t get fat enough. To be at the bottom of the list means getting docked in pay to the tune of $5,000 a flock, which usually results in falling into debt, which gets even worse when the companies force unnecessary upgrades on the chicken houses. It’s hard to stay objective as Spurlock interviews these salt-of-the-earth men as they weep and talk about being indentured servants millions of dollars in debt, with no way out but to keep producing chickens in hopes of climbing back up the ranks. One farmer said he hadn’t had a day off in ten years, and had to go back to placing chickens two days after his son died. Another spoke of his son not being able to join the family business as a fourth-generation farmer because the lifestyle is too depressing.
