The truth behind that boneless, skinless breast is a production line that treats living creatures like raw material and your dinner like a data point. Chickens are bred for breast muscle so aggressively that their legs can struggle to support them, hearts strain, and normal behavior becomes almost impossible in cramped, artificially lit sheds. Their short lives are engineered around efficiency targets, not well-being or taste.

By the time they reach your cart, the story has been sanitized into marketing slogans and soft-focus images of barns and meadows that most of these birds will never see. Yet you are not powerless in this exchange. Choosing slower-grown, pasture-raised, or locally farmed birds, eating less but better meat, or simply asking harder questions at the counter begins to realign the cost. Each decision is a quiet refusal to accept cruelty as the hidden ingredient in convenience.