The Pollan/Safran Foer Effect: Even 'Bones' Gets Food Political

Books like Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals and the Michael Pollan oeuvre aren't just turning vegetarian starlets into hardcore vegans. Their message of the evils of factory farming may also be reaching mainstream television audiences across the country via such innocuous shows as FOX's forensics crime series Bones. In this episode, Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth investigate the murder of an industrial chicken farm owner. It features real images of baby chicks getting their beaks clipped off so as not to attack each other when they go crazy from being penned up in such cramped quarters. Kudos to the writers for injecting a little food for thought into the script (or, for the cynic, jumping on the latest hot-button-issue bandwagon).