The claw! The claw!

The first time we came across an image of chef Chris Bleidorn’s fried chicken sandwich from Birdbox in San Francisco, that is all we could see. And there are reasons for that.

This creepy-looking sandwich, complete with claw, exists because Bleidorn loves poultry. And he thinks that everyone else should give a little more thought to the chickens they’re eating.

Bleidorn’s frustration with how we consume poultry is directly related to the claw staying on his fried chicken sandwich, which comes with assembly instructions and happens to also be extremely delicious and instantly addictive.

“We buy all our chickens, it’s called Buddhist style, head on, feet on. The fact that it’s still attached means this bird was raised properly and wasn’t jammed up in a pen.” Bleidorn continues, “What the claw means to us — it’s a standard of the type of chicken we sell at Birdbox.”

The poultry industrial complex — the major manufacturers who focus on mass production, use hormones and take little care in how the birds are raised — has found itself in some pretty hot water these days.

For now, the hope is that the people of San Francisco — and hopefully visitors, too — will order and savor the Birdbox fried chicken sandwich and relish the context as well as the flavor. As Plato said, knowledge is the food of the soul.