The Obligatory Oprah-and-KFC Post

I like to imagine this as Oprah looking in the mirror and screaming, "What was I thinking?!" at herself.

So if you're tuned in at all to animal rights or animal welfare issues--or, hell, health issues--you've probably heard about Oprah's ginormous KFC gaffe. The woman who has been given awards by both PETA and HSUS in the past year (yes, both--I keep seeing people refer to the PETA award, but HSUS gave her show a Genesis Award just a couple months ago too) has teamed up with notorious animal torturer KFC in a promotion offering free pieces of grilled chicken flesh to every American with the ability to download a coupon from her site.

Loads of people have written about this in anger and disappointment now, from relatively mainstream columnists to sustainable food advocates to, of course, animal rights advocates, so I'm not going to repeat what everyone else out there is already saying. Here are the basics: No confinement, mutilation, and killing of chickens is humane, but KFC gets its dead chickens from Tyson, which engages in the cruelest and most torturous of the standard cruel practices. And Oprah's a smart woman. She knows this.

Everyone keeps referring to her program on Prop 2 and factory farming in October while expressing their shock that she would make this move now. But as those of you who were around during those very first weeks of this blog will recall--and I imagine that's a small percentage of you now--I was unimpressed with Oprah's program, and I wrote about it. A lot. In anger. It wasn't the monumental animal-defending exposé so many people wanted to make it out to be. It covered some of the cruelties of animal agriculture, yes, but it also involved remarkable half-truths and omissions aimed at appeasing people's consciences and animal agribusiness and the food industry. I won't go into all of that again now, but you can click here to browse those "Oprah"-tagged posts I wrote back in the fall.

Oprah Winfrey is a businesswoman. Not an animal advocate. And as any successful businesswoman knows, the food industry and animal agribusiness may not really give a damn about animals or about people's health, but they do have two things in abundance: power and money. And that's what's really important in this world, don't you know?

Check out Mary's thoughts on this at Animal Person. As I was wrapping up this post, I checked in with my Google Reader and saw we'd been writing at the same time this morning. We're on the same wavelength with the Oprah-as-a-business issue. And Mary shares a video that you should see regarding the health implications of the "food" Oprah's hawking. This guy is not nearly as concerned with animals as he is with humans' health, but he's still furious. And rightly so: "This ain't healthy . . . Oprah sponsors aren't good for you. Oprah, you have completely lost your credibility with this one."