Kurtz : Where are you from, Willard?
Willard : I'm from Ohio, sir.
Kurtz : Were you born there?
Willard : Yes, sir.
Kurtz : Whereabouts?
Willard : Toledo, sir.
Kurtz : How far are you from the river?
Willard : The Ohio River, sir?
Kurtz : Uh-huh.
Willard : About 200 miles.
Kurtz : I went down that river once when I was a kid. There's a place in that river - I can't remember - must have been a gardenia plantation at one time. It's all wild and overgrown now, but about five miles, you'd think that heaven just fell on the earth in the form of gardenias.
Can you roast a live chicken?
The idea struck me while watching a comedian do an improv story.
We roast dead chickens all the time. Sometimes breast by breast, sometimes wing by wing.
It's no trouble at all to roast a chicken that was killed days or even weeks before the actual cooking part. It should go without saying that you can roast a live one. Or can you?
First of all, I do NOT condone doing this. It is incredibly cruel, disturbing on multiple levels and will probably have you put on a government watchlist somewhere.
I would not even recommend googling it. Sooner or later, you're going to leave your laptop unattended when you go to the toilet and your Hinge date Kirsty who works in HR or something is going to see your internet history and accuse you of being a monster. And not the sexy kind like Ted Bundy either.
I've done the legwork, walk with me here.
Firstly, the concept itself.
Some animals are able to be cooked alive with little to no regard for moral objections. Crustaceans for instance are routinely cooked while the animal is still alive in order to make sure the meat – which can rapidly spoil – is still edible.
I suspect this has also something to do with the fact that lobsters and crabs are fucking ugly and no one really considers them a domestic pet like they might a chicken or a cow.
In the same vein, I believe the world would mourn Dua Lipa being lowered into a vat of hot water far more than it would mourn Susan Boyle lowered into the very same vat. Their cooking times may also vary.
Experiments show that crustaceans do indeed feel pain from being cooked alive, but they aren't the world's strongest communicators and thus beyond some feeble thrashing there's little they can do to signal how brutal the practice is.
I'm certainly not thinking of the mad, senseless thrashing of a doomed creature hurtling towards the void when I'm munching down on some yummy nummy lobster.
Back to chickens.
I assume a chicken that hasn't had its nervous system severed or been knocked unconscious would thrash about in a far more disturbing fashion. As such, one would need to tie it down to an oven rack first and play some music at a relatively high volume to avoid any personal moral discomfort.
I'd suggest Paula Abdul's sensational 1988 debut, Forever Your Girl.
A chicken's regular body temperature is a little bit higher than a human's, somewhere in the region between 41°C and 42.2°C. (105.8°F and 107.96°F for those so inclined).
Chickens do not have sweat glands, and therefore they are not able to lose their heat via transpiration. Stupid idiots. Just another reason we're numero uno on this planet.
When this internal body temperature rises by 4°C to 46°C (114.8°F) chickens will die irrespective of every effort to save them.
Chef Jamie Oliver, to whom I turn for all my life advice, recommends cooking a whole chicken for 1 hour, 20 minutes at 200°C (392°F), with a drizzle of lemon and thyme.
Using a formula that looks something like this (where L is the distance to the center of the chicken, Traw is the unheated starting temp, and D is the thermal diffusivity):
We can infer that within that oven, a chicken would die real fucking quick. Like within minutes.
Would it be pleasant to eat? Probably not.
The myosin protein would begin to denature around 50°C (122°F) — i.e the chicken would turn yummy and white around then.
But considering it's a live chicken, you probably didn't pluck it.
Feathers start to break down at around 160°C (320°F) and melt completely at around 230°C (446°F) meaning the chicken and its entrails would be coated with a foul smelling garnish that no amount of lemon and thyme seasoning will fix.
Plus you know, the whole moral issue of torturing and killing a living creature. You might have to hold your horses on that one, Genghis.
I certainly have no intention of being strung up in front of a panel of birkenstock-and-sock wearing animal rights activists. Plus I just got a new oven and I'm not ruining it for a shitpost.
I will not test this theory for myself.
But there is one chef that has the sheer will, the moxie, the unmitigated balls to do something like this. Mother Nature herself.
The European Union has wisely delegated its climate policy to a Scandanavian high-school student and as Climate Minister Thunberg will tell you, the Earth is warming by several degrees at an alarming rate.
However for our purposes this pace is far too slow and will not cook the chickens as we require. We need to think bigger and hotter.
The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event (AKA the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs) saw a meteor 10 kilometres (6.21 miles) wide strike the earth.
It shattered into countless fragments which then ricocheted into the atmosphere, only to rain down again, as if the earth had COOMed them up into the air only for them to splatter back on the earth's own face.
It happens to the best of us.
The particles of material in the ejecta COOM plume that rained down would have again heated the atmosphere.
A large fraction of this meteoric COOM heat was radiated to the ground, raising surface temperatures to several hundreds of degrees and causing vegetation to burst into flames.
The models predicted the rain of shock-heated debris would radiate heat as intensely as an oven set to “broil” (260 °C or 500°F) for at least 20 minutes, and perhaps a couple of hours.
Our chicken might be a little overdone, but it'd still be cooked by then.
The world's largest chicken farm is CPV Food's Binh Phuoc complex in Vietnam. It boasts that by 2023, the facility will be processing 100 million chickens a year.
If a meteor were to strike the earth (not undeserved tbh fam), we could experience the very same extreme heat event that killed off the mighty dinosaur ancestors of the chicken.
If you happened to be two hours north of Ho Chi Minh City when the apocalypse kicks off, you'd be in for a real treat.
The fields of Binh Phuoc would stretch for miles in every direction with roast chickens, endless roast chickens at the end of the world.
Kurtz : Where are you from, Willard?
Willard : I'm from Vietnam, sir.Kurtz : Were you born there?
Willard : Yes, sir.
Kurtz : Whereabouts?
Willard : Binh Phuoc, sir.
Kurtz : How far are you from the CPV?
Willard : The CPV Foods Complex, sir?
Kurtz : Uh-huh.
Willard : About 200 miles (321.87 kilometres).
Kurtz : I went down to that complex once after the meteor. There's a place in that complex - I can't remember - must have been a hatchery at one time. It's all wild and overgrown now, but about five miles, you'd think that heaven just fell on the earth in the form of perfectly roasted chicken drumsticks.
--Marlon Brando (1979), unprompted, on the set of Apocalypse Now.