Explaining that I am a vegetarian at various functions, the objection that chicken is healthy comes up without fail every time. Chicken may have an appealing macronutrient ratio, but fails in many other ways. Chicken is truthfully horrifying from an ethical standpoint and has many other health pitfalls as well.

Poultry probably goes through some of the most painful deaths in the entire factory farming industry — not to mention the most unsanitary. More than 95 percent of chicken in the US has some type of contamination — through campylobacter, salmonella, or E. Coli. Even those chickens who are uninfected become so after being exposed to all the other contaminants during the cooling process. In processing and cooling the chicken, factory farms submerge each group altogether in a bunch of water — this process is absolutely unhygienic and largely abandoned in other countries. The US still partakes however, due to the sole fact that it results in weightier chickens and a bigger price tag in the end. This in itself serves as proof that the concern in factory farming is not for public health but profit.

The antibiotics used on chickens today are leading to higher antibiotic resistance in humans than ever before. Naturally, when you consume something pumped with antibiotics, the antibiotics will come to affect you as well. With this, we can expect a large portion of the population to be susceptible to pandemics and epidemics; what this means is that should a virus spread, those who have a high antibiotic resistance are less likely to survive. Is that worth a bucket of KFC?

Lastly, acknowledge that 99 percent of meat sold today comes from factory farms. Large chains buy from them. Grocery stores buy from them. If you eat meat, you likely buy from them, too.