The breast on your plate is the endpoint of a design that values speed over sentience. Modern chickens are pushed to grow so quickly their bones can’t keep up, their hearts labor under unnatural weight, and simple movements become exhausting. They spend almost their entire short lives indoors, on litter soaked with waste, under lights tuned to keep them eating instead of resting. Their existence is calculated in feed efficiency and yield, not in any measure of a life worth living.

But the supermarket aisle is staged to soothe you: soft colors, rustic fonts, comforting words like “farm fresh” and “natural.” That gap between image and reality is where your power sits. Buying less but better meat, seeking verified higher-welfare or pasture-raised sources, and asking how animals were raised sends a signal. Every deliberate choice says out loud that low prices should never be built on hidden, routine cruelty.