Imagination vs. Crap Reality

"Foster Farms, family owned since 1939."

This tagline is printed on a package of mini corn dogs I have had in my freezer for a while now.  The small corn dogs, while generally tasty, can get kind of wonky and moist if prepared in the microwave, and you can't really send them for lunches with kids, because they don't do well over longish periods of time.  They're okay on a picnic - it's just not a "prepare and eat hours later" kind of food.  So they're not quite as convenient a food as they might have appeared initially.  Which is kind of a shame, sort of.  I say all of that to explain why the box has become kind of a default shelf in my small freezer over the past month or so, giving me an opportunity to see this tagline probably one hundred times by now.

The line inspired my imagination. "Family owned since 1939" for some reason leads me to believe that they existed in some other state prior to 1939, regardless of how much time that might actually have represented.  And it's 1939.  So, I internally created a days of pre-World War II type scenario wherein Der Fuhrer Factory Farms, (an obviously Deutsche-owned company; I would have used Kaiser, but they already exist) the leading producers of fine sausages, wursts and schnitzels, seizes the humble Foster Farm by force, and there is a daring raid in the small hours before sunrise, involving chickens with ammo belts and grenades strapped to them to get it back.  It is a heroic enterprise, accomplished with only a very small loss of life, and the chickens are then shipped overseas to mascot bomber planes.  And of course, be eaten eventually.  This fantasy entertained me in a mild, unfocused way until I sat down to compose this blog entry and typed "Foster Farms" into Google.

I'm sure this will come as no surprise to my more animal rights focused readers, but Foster Farms has been the target of numerous secret videotaping endeavors which primarily show diseased chickens waddling around in their own shit on legs malformed by the artificially accelerated growth of what is essentially mutant yardbird.  In addition, they have a record of not treating their employees very well - but that seems to have been resolved a couple of years ago.  I found multiple sources online claiming that they do or do not use artificial growth hormone, but now I don't know who to believe.

Fucking stupid buzzkill reality.