Your desire to eat chicken will pass

It is very possible that some of you remember Super Size Me, that 2004 documentary where Morgan Spurlock took on the challenge of spending thirty days gorging himself on McDonald’s food. He wanted to demonstrate how it harmed health and to make the low quality of food in the United States evident. He gained eleven kilos, developed liver alterations, and his cholesterol increased drastically. In 2017 he directed a second part that went more unnoticed: Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!. Spurlock opened his own fried chicken establishment to show how these businesses work, creating a false image of natural and healthy food.Netflix now has in its catalog a new production that emulates Spurlock's work. In Big chicken: A fast food conspiracy (Big chicken), comedian Mo Gillighan sets the goal of eating only fried chicken for twenty-eight days to see how it affects his health. At the same time, he explores the chicken business in both the United Kingdom and the United States in the face of the massive expansion of this food around the world. He investigates how the industry manipulates and processes it to give it an appetizing appearance. The chicken is the most farmed land animal on the planet. In the United Kingdom, traditional fish & chips businesses have disappeared, swallowed up by a plague of fried chicken businesses: more than six thousand establishments across the country. Every day, twelve million pounds are spent on chicken consumption.Gillighan tries to keep a sense of humor during his investigation, but after the first week his mood declines and he feels unwell. The same thing that happened to Spurlock in Super size me. In the research process, the comedian interviews various experts in nutrition, food chemistry, and sensory scientists who explain to him how the entire chicken farming and meat ultra-processing industry works. You should know that if you decide to watch the documentary, it will be a few days before you eat chicken again, because there are sequences that are very disgusting. Gillighan shows terrible fattening farms. They make a forceful comparison: if a human baby grew at the same speed as chicks are made to grow, a baby would be the size of a sow after two months. Big chicken is a documentary that works above all because of the curiosity about the aberrations we will find. But the data is devastating. It makes us look at these fried chicken places installed in our cities differently after watching the documentary. We give them a new meaning, from an economic, as well as a social and cultural point of view.However, twenty years after the documentary Super size me, repeating the experiment forces us to ask ourselves how many times we will have to show the consequences of this food model for something to change. Documentaries are being made to denounce this industry, which keeps transforming itself to survive by doing the same as always.