A Netflix chicken documentary

Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy will launch worldwide on Netflix on the 5th August 2026

Last year, I did some interviews for the documentary Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy. It will launch worldwide on Netflix on the 5th August 2026. Made by the Mindhouse team, the people behind Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, the doc follows British comedian Mo Gilligan as he tries to understand our obsession with fried chicken. In my interview for the documentary, I shared everything I learned while writing my book, Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company. I hope what I discussed will continue to help others learn about labor conditions for workers in the poultry processing industry. I will leave you with what I wrote in my book:

I am moved to do this work by what author C. E. Morgan describes as “moral beauty.” In a 2016 interview, she said: I think of moral beauty as what is the good and the just—terms perhaps best defined by their opposite: evil. Evil is the willingness to do damage to the other; its maximal expression is murder, but it includes a great deal of subtle and not-so-subtle injuries as it advances to that extreme. Evil acts reduce the other to an object, a being to its component parts, and obliterate subjectivity. Evil’s breeding ground is a lack of empathy. So I locate moral beauty in an other regarding ethic. Or perhaps it’s better to say it’s not located anywhere, because it’s not a static entity. It’s love, and love is not a feeling but an action.

This book explores the moral beauty of the immigrants who process our nation’s meat and poultry, whose commitment to the good and the just is worthy of our attention.

Personal News and Events

In June, Celia Vidal of Radio Nacional España interviewed me about “The Reality Behind the US Meatpacking Industry.” I interviewed legendary labor rights activist Dolores Huerta for the summer print edition of Elle Magazine. This fall, I will be in Italy for a book tour of the Italian translation of Life and Death of the American Worker. And in October, I will attend one of my favorite gatherings of journalists from around the globe at the Congress of Mérida Migration Journalism: Migrant Children and Youth in Mérida, Spain.

You can order LIFE AND DEATH OF THE AMERICAN WORKER: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company HERE.

An extraordinary feat of reporting—a gripping investigation into the brutal, often life-threatening conditions faced by America’s most vulnerable workers. It’s hard to imagine a more urgent or timely book, one written with rigor, deep compassion, and moral clarity. A vital, infuriating book - an absolute must-read.

—BRIAN GOLDSTONE, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of There Is No Place For Us