Brave New World… of Food?

Something about the menu didn’t seem quite right. We were at one of our favorite restaurants for our weekly Saturday dining-out. The menu had been redone, and one of the new offerings caught my eye. It was an appetizer:

Chicken Fingers with dipping sauce $3.99

Maybe it was the fact that I was unusually alert for a Saturday evening, or maybe it was because I had been raised on a chicken farm, but this was something that didn’t seem, well, kosher. I just couldn’t push it out of my mind. So I chewed it over (so to speak) through the salad course. Then, halfway through the entrée, it finally hit me: chickens don’t have fingers!

At least they didn’t when I was growing up, because I had gotten up close and personal with hundreds. Could this have been a quantum leap in evolution? Say in the last thirty years? No, that didn’t seem right; Fox News would never have let that one by. Could it be careless naming? Unlikely. I mean, we do have Truth in Advertising laws. Hummm.

As I continued to spoon my way through dessert, I could think of only one logical explanation. This must be the result of a hitherto unreported genetic experiment. I thought such efforts were illegal. But remember, we’ve had a government which went to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Surely something as mundane as chicken engineering could be slipped through. One of those anonymous earmarks, to appease the farm lobby, perhaps? I mean, I can see some group of scientists in a secret government lab (probably in that “undisclosed location” where  Vice President Cheney used to hang out) working away, convinced that this will be the salvation of our farm economy, especially if ethanol doesn’t pan out. Just think of how much meatier chickens would be if they had fingers. Especially if those fingers are attached to arms!

By the time the check had arrived, I was thinking back to my childhood among all those chickens. They seemed to get along just fine without fingers. Or arms, for that matter. So why tamper with perfectly contented chickens? Doesn’t anyone else realize the implications? Would chickens with fingers – and arms — have an evolutionary advantage? What would this mean for the pecking order? Would it now become the pinching order?

That’s why I’ve decided to raise the alarm. Whoever is behind this must be exposed and stopped! Do you see where this could lead? Once this gets started, no species will be safe; especially those normally found hanging around barnyards. Can you imagine what might be coming next? Buffalo wings?

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