In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Then he created light, and land and sea, and birds and animals including, presumably, chickens - that is, presumably, chickens with feathers. Finally, he created humans. Then he took a rest.

In the end, humans created featherless chickens. Plus lots more creatures strange and bizarre. This could well put the entire human race to rest. To eternal rest.

Where else could we be heading if we continue to meddle with our food supply, making our source of nourishment - nay, our very source of existence - more and more weird?

Already, illness and disease have become so widespread that NO ONE, not even the most health conscious person, can be said to be truly healthy, absolutely free from any ache, pain or discomfort.

Because over the centuries we have been taking in “food” - defined in the broadest possible sense to include everything that enters our body via all possible means - that is increasingly unnatural.

The process begun innocently enough a few hundred years ago, with the refining of flour and grains. Just polish off the fibre. No harm. After all, the nutritionists and other scientific experts of the day - until, believe it or not, as recently as the 1980s - proclaimed fibre to be useless, having “no nutritional value”.

It continued with the introduction of synthetic chemicals, at first indirectly in the form of chemical fertilisers, then directly as artificial food colouring, artificial flavouring, artificial preservatives, artificial flavour enhancers... Along the way were added artificial butter (aka margarine), artificial sugar and, more recently, artificial fat.

---

Artificial thinking

As humans consumed more artificial foods, is it at all surprising that their thinking also became more artificial? So not only did they invent artificial intelligence (which is arguably a good, or at least useful, thing) but they also developed new, artificial methods of cultivating food.

Singapore is well known for this. First, hydroponics. Now, aeroponics. Growing plants in water, then growing plants in air. Certainly not the way God, nature, evolution or whatever other supreme force intended.

And so, featherless chickens take us to the next stage in this trend towards unnaturalness? If you think so, you obviously ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

More than 10 years ago I saw, in a Chinese newspaper, photographs of chickens with four legs and six legs. Or, from the commercial point of view, four drumsticks and six drumsticks. Developed by scientists. Who else?

Those days, digital manipulation of photographs was still not rampant. So I doubt if the chickens, or pictures, were developed by a computer morph artist.

Go back further... It must have been some 20 years ago by now when some scientists at the local university developed rootless towgay or bean sprouts. Their achievement was announced in the newspapers with much hoo-hah, then the project was quietly abandoned when it was discovered that those “miracle” spouts would cause cancer.

Featherless (apart from 4-drumstick and 6-drumstick) chickens are merely the more blatantly obvious examples of what critics rightly call “Frankenfoods”. They are deformed, mutated monsters.

They are sick creatures. Can eating sick animals be any good? You will be suprised what the common expert opinion is: “yes”.

I say this because veal is widely considered - by doctors, nutritionists, dieticians and other so-called health experts - to be a “healthy meat”. Yet veal is the flesh of a calf that is deliberately made so sick (from anaemia) that it would die on its own if not slaughtered on time.

The way modern man evaluates food has become absolutely warped. Sick. And so some of the less obvious examples of mutated, sick foods are a lot more scary.

---

Genetically Modified Food

Look at the brave new science of genetically modified (GM) foods. It’s a wide field where some of the things being done are, apparently, quite harmless - like inserting a gene from a wild species of rice into a cultivated species. That, it can be argued, is akin to imitating the natural process of cross-pollination.

But there are also GM foods that have the genes of fish, cows and other animals implanted into tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce and other vegetables.

Now this is really, really, going against nature. Since the beginning of time, animals have always been animals, and plants have always been plants. They form two, clearly distinct, forms of life. They never crossed paths.

You have to pardon my expression here, I really feel strongly about this. But to combine the genes of animals with plants is, to me, equivalent to a man having sex with a vegetable.

Most of us are naturally aghast, repulsed, at the thought of humans having sex with apes, our closest biological relatives, to create a new species. Yet we get swayed by the intellectual arguments of scientists to agree that it is okay to genetically “mate”, say, fishes with cucumbers. You won’t end up with a sea cucumber, for sure!

Where will all this lead us?

The end? Maybe not.

The optimist in me says not to worry. After all, I just read in The Sunday Times recently that “naturally raised” kampung (village) chicken is in vogue.

We shall see. Perhaps one day, in a typical Singapore hawker centre, we shall have three types of chicken rice stalls beside each other - a kampung chicken rice stall, a regular chicken rice stall, and a featherless chicken rice stall.

Let’s start to get worried only when the featherless chicken attracts the longest queue.