Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! movie review (2019)

In order to achieve his goal of creating a chicken joint that explains to people exactly what food they’re getting and the side of marketing manipulation that comes with it, Spurlock must first obtain some chickens and a farm where he can raise them. He calls his agricultural experiment “Morganic Farms.” We learn that, like everything else in the good ol’ USA, the chicken industry is a large corporate entity with powerful lobbyists protecting their interests. The film calls the industry “Big Chicken” and they control the distribution of live product for farms. Big Chicken has seen “Super Size Me,” so when Spurlock calls to inquire setting up a farm, he’s met with much resistance. He’s bailed out by the largest independent hatchery, who supplies him with over 2,000 broilers, “the most popular chickens on Earth.”

These chickens are bred to grow faster and bigger than their feathers will cover them at some points in their development. “In six weeks, they’ll be ready for the dinner plate,” we’re told. This unnaturally rapid growth leads to some rather horrific health consequences for some of the birds of Morganic Farms—their bones break and several suddenly go into cardiac arrest and die. But as the vet hired to do an onscreen autopsy tells us, this is normal and “the birds are not harmful to eat.”

Assisting Spurlock is farmer Jonathan Buttram, who rents a building to Morganic Farms and, along with his son, helps tend to the chickens. Buttram is the heart of “Super Size Me 2,” a guy locked into a contract with Big Chicken who’ll pay the price for helping the filmmakers. In a buttery Southern accent, Buttram tells us how he doesn’t really want his son to continue the family business. Part of that resistance stems from the Tournament System, a way for Big Chicken to punish/reward chicken farmers while simultaneously creating rules to keep them so in debt that they’re practically indentured servants.

With his chickens procured, Spurlock ventures out to meet with strategists and inventors to design a new sandwich to sell. The search leads him to a San Francisco firm called CCD Innovation. Their test kitchens have created several successful fast-food products including the culinary colonic known as the Taco Bell Gordita. People love these and other items despite knowing that they’re not good for them. As Anne Burrell says on Food Network, “brown food tastes good.” And healthy food tastes like crap, so a place only needs to give the illusion of something that’s good for you. Those salads at Wendy’s have more calories than a burger, but it’s a salad! Green equals good, as Spurlock discovers. I won’t spoil the type of sandwich that gets created here, but I will say I’ll never look at grill marks on a fast-food meat product the same way again.

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