Mel Brooks always said chicken was one of the funniest words in the English language. I have taken that to heart many times. (Ain’t nobody here but us chickens.) But it’s a serious matter when it comes to actually eating chickens.
Have you ever actually seen a large scale chicken farm? Tens of thousands of birds are crammed into one shed with no access to the outside. They are bred to grow fast but their organs and bones can’t keep pace. The norm are under developed bones, heart and lungs causing crippling lameness or heart failure.
Factory farming began in the 1920s after it was discovered that if vitamins A and D were added to feed, animals no longer required exercise and sunlight to grow. This meant that large numbers of animals could be raised indoors year-round. The problem with raising animals indoors was the spread of disease. So antibiotics were added to the feed.
Chickens in a standard factory farm shed.
Compare a standard factory-farmed chicken and a free-range chicken: Here.
Whether it is free range, organic or farm raised, it will behoove you to know if you’re meat has been raised compassionately. Think it doesn’t matter? Consider how stress releases certain negative chemicals into a body’s system. Then think about biting into a nice chicken breast in which these chemicals, as well as pesticides (from food), antibiotics, hormones, and animal by-product meal are present.
Just knowing that makes me want to become a vegan. And yet, I am a huge chicken fan. As a meat it’s as versatile as food comes. And since more small organic farms have made good, healthful produce and meats available, I’m eating a bit more meat and poultry than I have since I was a child, and who knows what was in that food. By the post-war years people were more concerned about convenience (cans, tv dinners) and ease than health and sustainability. My family though we had chickens (for eggs) and a large vegetable farm was no different.
When I know a chicken has been raised compassionately than I am more willing to eat it, now that its dead anyway. Could I kill it myself as Barbara Kingsolver learned to do on her farm and then wrote about in Animal Vegetable Miracle? If I lived that way, maybe. But I live in an area where we have a really good on-line farmer’s co-op, as well as two weekly farmers’ markets.
Naturally raised chickens on a farm in Idaho.
