on the other side of this tunnel the chicken emerges into a new room, now a decapitated, drained thing, all white pocked skin, a whizzing gleaming globe of meat racing forward on the line. There is a phase shift. The floors are now bloodless, men and women in white smocks stand at green plastic counters, and the whole area radiates with the high, reassuring notes of chlorine. “That is the precise point they go from living thing to food. You watch it happen,”
