October was a bad month for Big Chicken. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people in 17 states got very sick from eating processed chickens, slaughtered in filthy and flawed U.S. poultry plants that remain open and unchanged.
Big deal, you might say, tired of all the media squawking about the astounding number of people who get sick every year from food-borne illness (48 million and rising). It’s just another salmonella scare. It happens to spinach, too.
Yes, but what’s happening to chickens shouldn’t happen to a dog.
Never mind that the vast majority or the 300 million egg-laying hens raised in the U.S. are kept in cages too tiny for them to spread their wings. Or that 87 percent of all chickens test positive for E. coli before they’re sent to stores. Or that chickens are known to break their own bones struggling to escape from slaughterhouses, where they live in chronic pain and disease.
Nothing new here. Big Chicken has been getting away with murder for a long time. But conditions are now so bad, and so many antibiotics are being fed to the chickens, that they are coming to us laced with antibiotic resistant pathogens.
And that’s why a whopping 42 percent of the people who got sick in the October outbreak ended up in the hospital. The normal antibiotics usually effective against salmonella in chickens aren’t working so well anymore.
In short, the salmonella strains are getting smarter, the number of food and safety inspectors is declining, and eating a chicken leg — even a kosher one — is getting to be a real crapshoot.
But wait! We’ve always been told that if you heat a contaminated chicken to 165 degrees, it kills the bacteria and you’re safe. Probably not. This new super strain of salmonella reportedly survives higher cooking temperatures.
So the home cook can do everything right: wash it clean; cook it well; and still, you can wind up in the hospital with a serious blood infection that can’t be stopped and can leave you brain damaged. Or dead. Yikes.
All this is scary stuff, but the perils and pitfalls of eating factory-farmed chicken have been well-known for ages. If you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food,” please do.
What is news this October, is that for the first time the USDA is going to allow chickens slaughtered in the U.S. to be processed in China, then returned to the U.S. be sold to, and eaten by, Americans. The word “China” won’t appear on any label.
Think about it. Poultry processing plants in the U. S are bad enough. Now we’re outsourcing it to plants in China that are notorious for an anything-goes business ethic, where we have no authority, no regulation at all.
“No USDA officials will be onsite at the Chinese chicken processing plants,” reports Martha Rosenberg in a hair-raising article on AlterNet. org called “7 Horrifying Things About the Chicken You Eat.”
Instead, the Chinese chicken plants will “self-verify” that conditions are up to snuff. Hmmm… this from a country where a recent bird flu outbreak has already caused 44 deaths and tainted pet treats have killed thousands of dogs and cats.
This new and controversial policy leaves the Obama administration with a ton of egg on its face. The Center for Science in the Public Interest already considers chicken to be the No. 1 riskiest meat.
Which brings us to the worst of the worst: chicken nuggets. Rosenberg calls them “chicken yuckets,” reporting that even now, before the Chinese have their way with them, many nuggets are a gross mix of fat, guts, blood vessels, cartilage, nerves, and bone, with only 40 percent actual chicken meat.
What else is in chicken nuggets? There’s a video making the rounds this October that is astonishing. Try watching “McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets revealed under the microscope” on www.Minds.com. Corral your kids into watching, too. If this doesn’t make you all go cold turkey, nothing will.