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Barn 8

In case you were not aware, Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth is a novel about two women who attempt to liberate* an entire egg farm worth of chickens (somewhere around 1 million hens) in a single night and despite a wonderfully planned heist, fail miserably. Barn 8 is a hilariously written book that comments on and criticizes human industrialism and our effect on the environment. 

The story begins by detailing the early lives of two women, both auditors for egg farms. In case you did not know, these farms house hundreds of thousands of hens in a single barn in conditions ranging from slightly humane to unlivable. The two auditors come to this realization as Unferth compares the lives of modern humans to “free” chickens or the “housed” chickens that lay millions of our eggs and end up on our plates: 

“Which of these chickens do humans most resemble: the ones roaming in ovals—a school yard, a campus, a neighborhood? Or the genetically modified monsters—wobbling inside our boxes, clutching our pieces of plastic and metal, mincing and crimping in our shoes, snapping at each other in tight spaces, poking our various machines that swivel or light up or open in simulation of activity, ‘amusement,’ ‘exercise,’ ‘work,’ ‘love’?” (Unferth 104).

In case you needed proof, this writer goes incredibly hard. Throughout the book, Unferth uses chickens and their farm habitats to describe the situation of the world and of America. She acknowledges our growth and progress in the food industry and especially our capability to feed our nation but questions whether all this progress will instead lead to “civilized civilization-destruction” (Unferth 180) due to the constraints it’s putting on our environment and the social aspects of our society. In the large barns, it’s almost impossible to see where the cages–the hens–end and the noise of the laying tracks and the giant fans drown out even an individual’s thoughts. Unferth describes the hum of barn machinery as a “pure sound, the song and silencing of America” (182). This quote really reminded me of the writing style and general message in The Diviners by Libba Bray even though each are highlighting very different aspects of silence.

A few hundred thousand of the hens are freed at an abandoned laying farm in a quarantined contamination zone from, you guessed it, dangerous chemical runoff from larger egg laying farms. Even though the book follows the fictional proposed evolution of chickens in the centuries and millennia to come, the message is still the same: “It all gets worse from here on out. Earth will be covered with contamination” (Unferth 275). This is a terribly important message for everyone, especially American’s to hear and understand. As one of the top contributors of greenhouse gasses (ie. gas-fueled cars, factories etc), with water reservoirs and groundwater shrinking in number, the expansion of our southern desserts, the raging wildfires scarring our western coast, and the slow disappearance of Florida, and now no longer a member of the Paris Agreement, we need to be much more vigilant in how we manage our resources and how to best preserve them.

Large, corporate farms and livestock barns like the one liberated* consume a vast majority of our existing resources and are responsible for a vast majority of contamination all to put an overflow of packaged and genetically altered food on our grocery store shelves that will likely expire before it is bought. I have no doubt that this food is needed and valued by American families but right now we have a surplus of it going wasted in wealthier communities and a gap of fresh foods in poorer ones. This problem needs to be addressed without the priority that money and big corporation lobbying get in today’s reality.

These corporations are responsible for oil spills, water pollution, poisoning our seas with plastic, soil pollution and infertility, wide deforestation, polluting less wealthy and minority communities with toxic chemicals and waste, and consistently waiving funds and support from important government programs to support their own goals and legislation. These corporations, while competitors, are actively supporting each other and swaying money and political action to support their own interests regardless of what lives (plant, animal, or human) it affects.

“Against them, you’ve got humans. No animal stands a chance against us. We’ll kill anything alive, right where it’s standing, wherever and whatever it is, and we’ll have plenty of excuses for it” (Unferth 264). Like money, the American Dream…. Moving on, this affects me in a quite a different way. My chimps, my gorillas, my beloved primates and the luscious forests and jungles they inhabit will all be affected and possibly endangered, if not already, by these environmental changes and corporate greed. Already these forests have shrunk to provide land for grazing farming and wood for the world’s needs (and wants).

What can we do to prevent this? Use our voices, use our vote, support policies and organizations that make products with these concerns in mind. Support local farms, electric cars, and the Paris Agreement. We have moved beyond the impact reduce, reuse, recycling and carpooling could have provided. Now is the time for action. Our world has been warming at an alarming rate since the moment humans started manipulating our environment (maybe I’ll make another post about it sometime). We can not let these issues, these illnesses get pushed to the side, which brings me to my next quote:

“Only then, at the business end of history, did the hen’s standing [from valued animals to lying dead, trampled by hundreds of her sisters] begin to fall, correlating to when we began putting them into cages and out of sight” (Unferth 204). This quote could be used to touch a vast number of social aspects (poverty, mental illness, pollution, genocide, etc) but I’ll leave you with this to think on, if we allow anything to get pushed to the sidelines and out of site of the general public, it will be forgotten about. People prefer to turn their back on and ignore something that makes them uncomfortable than pursue a logical and meaningful solution.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

*liberated – there is a significant debate in the book about what to call the hen-knapping (?) because “liberating” sounds too revolutionary and “repurposing” sounds too much like auditing. Please excuse my use of “liberating”….