Civilization is not knowing the origin of what you eat.

While walking through the ancient city side of Casablanca, I noticed live chickens in a cage in the middle of the street. As I started to watch from a distance, a woman approached the man with a knife standing next to the chickens. Having never seen anything like this before, I couldn’t grasp the situation at first. After a brief conversation, the man opened the cage, took out a chicken from among the flapping birds, and delivered a sharp blow to its head. The sound of the knife hitting the table echoed down the street. While I watched in shock, everyone else continued with their daily lives as usual. After dismembering the chicken, which had been alive just ten seconds earlier, he handed it to the woman in a bag. The fact that no one seemed to find this unusual made me think.

How often do I encounter the original form of what I eat?

Over time, as societies have become more urbanized and industrialized, the connection between food and its original source has become more distant for many people.

Historically, people were directly involved in the process of raising, slaughtering, and consuming animals, which meant they were acutely aware of the origins of their food.

Today, with the advent of supermarkets, processed foods, and fast food restaurants, many people are far removed from the processes of food production.

Let’s say, in a rural village 150 years ago, a family raised chickens on their small farm. The family members were responsible for feeding, caring for, and eventually slaughtering the chickens when they were ready to be eaten. They saw the entire lifecycle and were directly involved in every step.

Today, consider someone living in a large city who decides to eat chicken for dinner. They go to a supermarket and buy pre-packaged chicken breasts. The chicken is already cleaned, cut, and ready to cook.
The consumer has no direct connection to the farm where the chicken was raised, the people who cared for it, or the processing plant where it was slaughtered and packaged. For many, the chicken simply exists as a product on a store shelf, disconnected from its origins as a living animal.

As agriculture became industrialized, the production of food transformed from a communal and transparent process into a complex, opaque system. The use of machinery, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, as well as the globalization of food supply chains, has led to increased efficiency but also to a profound loss of connection. Consumers are often unaware of how their food is grown, harvested, and processed, leading to a form of ignorance about the very substances that sustain them.