Bell and Evans Farm

Went to visit Bell and Evans Farm, in Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania, last Thursday. It's the largest all-natural poultry company in the US and they are proud to say they are now the largest buying of certain commodities like grain feed in Pennsylvania and employ, what seems like, most of the surrounding area. I'm sure we've all seen the logo of the farm and chicken in the foreground surrounded by blue scrolls at your local Publix all the way to the South. It's about a two and a half hour drive from the city (Manhattan, that is, for all you globetrotters) and about an hour into the drive the road opens up towards Allentown onto green pastures with farms and silos just like one of the wall calendars at Barnes and Nobles.
Last year, I toured the plant where flags of Fredericksburg greeted us flying high on poles with chicken images. And this year, even prouder still, Bell and Evans' few thousand employees work on a new "air chilled" system (only one of two in the country, like Europe where most chickens are air chilled to bring down the temperature by air to 38F instead of with cold water bath aka "fecal bath"). Some employees are cut offal out of chickens all day that fly on plastic green hooks like a roller coaster up and down the ceilings, the sides, and passageways of the many rooms. The evisceration room is called "evis" and the employees work hard on the line at various stages of processing from portioning out breasts, picking Grades A-D of birds to trimming birds.
I am wearing my blue lab coat with the chicken logo on the back with the hairnet having been dripped on with chicken juice and water. I shut my eyes and smell chicken feathers. It's all very well done and we celebrate at the end with a prideful show of chicken: chicken cordon bleu, chicken nuggets, chicken parmiggiana, and grilled chicken for lunch. Another long day at the farm. Real work for real people.