Playing Chicken: Technologies of Domestication, Food, and Self

Abstract

To engage the mediating and enabling aspects of food technology, I reflect in this essay on my (rueful) attempts at raising chickens. As an incompetent chicken-raising hobbyist and an STS-trained scholar, I came to view my chickens as technologies themselves—results of human interactions with nature, through the overarching frame of domestication. Viewing the chicken–human relationship as a technological one has allowed me to foreground several elements at once. First, the chicken and the systems that sustain it put in stark relief the process of defining nature very specifically. Certain aspects are coveted and augmented while others are disregarded or overcome. Thus, technology does not strictly demarcate artificial from natural, but rather restricts or accommodates fuller forms of nature. Second, these definitions of nature (the chicken in this case) stabilize and enable other technological forms that take the initial stability for granted (e.g. human social and geographic organizations premised on industrialized agriculture). Third, these systems of stabilities, premised on necessarily partial versions of nature, complicate normative decisions on proper human–chicken relationships. In creating a uniform animal, and a relatively cheap and stable source of protein, we have empowered identities that can think about food less as necessity, and more as choice. As a result, we as consumers become increasingly dependent on the systems of domesticated nature that make such choice possible. And when the chicken itself becomes a product of that lifestyle choice (expressed as an element of consumer behavior), its very skeletal structure becomes optional.