You (and) Chicken

You (and) Chicken

    Used to be a term used like that, a sign of cowardice or fear or hesitation; and it's true that most of us just don't want to know.  But 48 million?  That's a lot.  Okay, upfront.  I don't eat chicken.  Haven't done so since May of 1978 (at least not knowingly).  But that's my thing.  I don't preach.  To each his or her own.  Besides, chicken is everywhere.  Even in dog food.  Just try and find any can of dog food (beef and lamb included) that doesn't have chicken in it.  Funny, huh?  What else has chicken?  Turns out, lots of stuff.  But then the flu came.  Again.  And that was it.  48 million plus.  Adios.  Just a precaution.  Which is even funnier.  FDA and FSIS (Food & Safety Inspection Service) have almost no authority to issue a recall of tainted chicken.  So it keeps coming.  And what exactly is this type of writing?  Jonathan Franzen?  Not me.

   Okay, enough of that.  Sadly though, the above is true.  The chickens affected this time (for bird flu has hit the industry many times before) were primarily egg layers, and mostly in the north central part of the U.S.  That 48 million represented just 11% of the number of egg-laying chickens, however (the number of chickens grown for meat is far greater with about 23 million of those birds slaughtered each day).  Those chickens made 242 million cases of eggs, with each case containing 360 eggs; do the math and you come out with one heck of a lot of eggs (over 87 billion), most of which went to stores but over 30% went to food processors, manufacturers that make everything from high-gel egg white solids to enzyme-modified whole egg solids.  And the top four egg-producing states?  Other than Iowa (#1) any guesses?  In order: Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania (#5 is Texas).

   And the part about the inspections and recalls.  Sadly, that part is true as well.  The case of bacteria tainted meat and chicken is leading many producers to add "broth" to their packaged meats, basically a massive dose of sodium solution, sometimes mixed with an antimicrobial agent.  Sometimes, the amount of broth added can be quite high, accounting for up 15% of the total weight, says a piece in Mother Earth News: Needle-injected meat has also been red-flagged by the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) as a high-risk carrier of E. coli.   The needles that insert the salt solution can push bacteria on the surface (where bacteria is typically found) deep into the meat, where cooking may not kill them.  To prevent this, FSIS recommends (not requires) that processors apply “an allowed antimicrobial agent to the surface of the product prior to processing.”  These approved agents include a number of ingredients (and processes such as irradiation) that most consumers would likely find far from “natural.”

    E. coli, listerian norovirus and salmonella all help to sicken 48 million Americans each year, said an article by Wil. S. Hylton in The New Yorker.  A recent U.S.D.A study found that twenty-four per cent of all cut-up chicken parts are contaminated by some form of salmonella.  Another study, by Consumer Reports, found that more than a third of chicken breasts tainted with salmonella carried a drug-resistant strain...Federal law permits a certain level of salmonella contamination in raw meat.  But when federal limits are breached, and officials believe that a recall is necessary, their only option is to ask the producer to remove the product voluntarily.  Even then, officials may only request a recall when they have proof that the meat is already making customers sick.  As evidence, the F.S.I.S. typically must find a genetic match between the salmonella in a victim’s body and the salmonella in a package of meat that is still in the victim’s possession, with its label still attached.  If the patient has already eaten the meat, discarded the package, or removed the label, the link becomes difficult to make, and officials can’t request a voluntary recall.

    In case you missed it, the key word is "voluntary recall."  In other words, there is little that the government can do, primarily because Congress has blocked such efforts despite a plea from the President (the newest revised proposal in Congress has only entered the "introduced" stage in May of this year).  The article by author Hylton continues: When another court ruled in favor of the F.S.I.S. decision to declare E. coli an adulterant, the ruling included a passage to prevent the F.S.I.S. from applying the same label to other bacteria: “Courts have held that other pathogens, such as salmonella, are not adulterants.”  In response to that decision, in 1996 the F.S.I.S. enacted a series of new rules to curb pathogens like salmonella.  For whole chickens, the salmonella “performance standard” was set at twenty per cent, meaning that one in every five bird carcasses could be contaminated.  That standard has since been lowered to 7.5 per cent, but the performance standard for salmonella in ground chicken is much higher—44.6 per cent—and for ground turkey it is 49.9 per cent. “Which means that almost half of all your ground chicken that goes off the line can actually test positive for salmonella,” Urvashi Rangan, the director of food safety at Consumer Reports, told me...Some products, such as cut-up chicken parts, have no performance standard at all.  A hundred per cent of the product in supermarkets may be contaminated without running afoul of federal limits.  Rangan told me that she was stunned when she discovered this, just recently: “We’ve asked the U.S.D.A. point blank, ‘So does that mean there aren’t standards for lamb chops and pork ribs?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we don’t have standards for those.’ ”

Photo from United Poultry Concerns

    If you've ever read or viewed photos of today's modern chicken rearing practices, it isn't pretty.  Here's just one glimpse of what egg-laying chickens go through, from the animal rights group, United Poultry Concerns:  The modern hen used for egg production is far removed from the active Southeast Asian jungle fowl from whom she’s derived and from the active farmyard birds of the more recent past.  She is a painfully debeaked, tortured bird who is jammed in a wire cage for a year or two, squeezed together with 8 or 9 other tormented hens in sheds holding 50,000 to 125,000 terrified, bewildered birds...A small bird, forced to churn out huge numbers of large eggs, this hen is prone to a cruel condition known as Uterine Prolapse.  When a small chicken pushes and strains day after day to expel large eggs, her uterus pushes out through the vent area leading to painful infection and a slow, agonizing death.  The egg industry deprives hens of all food or severely restricts their rations from one to three weeks straight to manipulate egg laying and market prices, and to “save feed costs.”  This practice is called Forced Molting...Cooped for life without exercise while constantly drained of calcium to produce egg shells, laying hens develop osteoporosis, a mineral depletion and breaking of the bones from which many hens die miserably in their cages, often with their heads trapped between the bars.  This disease of imprisonment is called Caged Layer Fatigue.  Approximately 300 million hens are caged for egg production in the U.S. each year, 26 million in Canada, and 40 million in the U.K. Worldwide, about 5600 million hens are living in cages.  The lives of chickens raised for meat (they are only alive for a month and a half before being slaughtered) is even worse (baby male chicks are considered worthless so are immediately shredded or suffocated).

    Sounds terrible, which it is.  But for the factory farmers, that is the franchisees trying to comply with the demands of the big corporate owners such as Tyson, Perdue and the Koch brothers (those are the largest in the U.S., although the farms of Brazil --think Pilgrim's Pride-- and China outproduce those of the U.S.), life is quite difficult as well.  All the chicks, feed and medicine are controlled (the franchisees provide the housing, fans for cooling and scheduled feeding).  And at the end, the result is a pyramid of payment.  Fail to produce and your return might be just 5 pennies per pound (or sometimes none at all);  the highest producer receives the most.  This causes competition but also a lot of resentment as witnessed by a recent spate of henhouses sabotaged in South Carolina and grippingly told in Bloomberg Businessweek: The tournament, like so much in the chicken business, is controlled by the integrators.  When a group of farms delivers birds to a Pilgrim’s slaughterhouse, the company gathers them into a tournament pool.  Then it tallies how fat each farmer’s birds got and how much feed the animals ate.  Pilgrim’s crunches those numbers to arrive at a figure that measures “feed conversion,” or how much weight the birds were able to gain based on the feed rations Pilgrim’s provided.  The company ranks each farm’s feed conversion against the others.  Farmers who rank at the top get a bonus; farmers at the bottom get a pay cut...The farmers, however, don’t control the main factors that determine success in the tournament, which are the health of the baby chicks and the quality of feed the integrator delivers.  For this reason, the tournament feels more like a lottery, with farmers praying for healthy birds.  And it’s a zero-sum game: The bonus for the top farmer is taken from the paycheck of the bottom one.  The feed conversion gap between top- and bottom-performing farms is often small, but the penalty can be large. A  recent tournament sheet for a Pilgrim’s farmer in the Sumter area shows a difference in feed conversion between the top and bottom farm of just 3.6 percent, but the pay difference between them was 10.2 percent.  Placing at the top or the bottom of the tournament can mean the difference between profit and bankruptcy...By discouraging collaboration and partnership, the system has a chilling effect on farmers’ relationships.  If someone kills your chickens, even 300,000 of them, they are still counted on your tally sheet, adding to your losses.  As the article adds: The Obama administration tried to ban the system in 2010 as part of a broader antitrust effort against meat companies.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed a rule that would give farmers a base pay level that couldn’t be undercut by the tournament rankings.  The companies would be able to offer bonuses but couldn’t dock a farmer’s pay for poor performance.  Congress voted against the measure.

    For the chickens, things are looking worse.  Breeding stock, as with agricultural commodities, are diminishing so one virus can wipe out millions...which means more antibiotics or other preventative measures placed into the feed or into the chickens themselves, either when they are alive or dead and processed.  And ironically, as more happens on the production end, fewer and fewer regulations or controls are being approved on the inspection end (Congress has further cut the budget for additional inspectors, both in the production factories and the slaughter/packing houses...Denmark has done the opposite, increasing inspectors and their disease-infection rate from chicken consumption has plummeted to about 2%).  But then chicken is everywhere in the world, and apparently will continue to grow in demand and consumption.  They're easy to raise, and more importantly, inexpensive.  Eggs are cheap.  KFC and chicken nuggets are cheap.  Chicken dinners at restaurants and at home are cheap.  Life is cheap.  But if that's truly the case, then perhaps it's time to wonder how we got to this point...