by SurvivalBackpack
(Monica Potts) If you
buy your chicken from the supermarket, here are a few things about
its life that might make you less eager to eat it. As a chick, your
chicken’s beak was cut off so that it wouldn’t attack other
chickens in the overcrowded cage in which it was raised.
Your chicken was fed so
much grain so quickly – supplemented with antibiotics – that, by
the time it was ready for slaughter at the age of five weeks, its
breasts were swollen and disproportionately large, rendering it
unable to walk. Once your chicken was slaughtered, it was tossed into
a chlorinated bath or doused with other industrial-grade chemicals so
that your chicken would reach you “clean”.
But “clean”, when
it comes to meat, is a relative standard. Most chickens spend the
bulk of their short lives covered or standing in feces (to say
nothing of the conditions in which cows, pigs or even turkeys are
raised), and the way in which they are dispatched in the modern era
is so sordid that farm states are actually passing laws to keep you
from ever bearing witness to the slaughter.
Old Macdonald had a
farm – once – but corporations interested in maximizing profits
bought him out.
The one small hope for
human health has been that the US Department of Agriculture has
inspectors to watch over those processing plants and make sure we
don’t eat sick chickens or chickens covered in their own feces as
they make their way through the processing plant. That is, it’s
been the one hope until now.
The USDA is moving
toward final approval of a rule that would replace most government
inspectors with untrained company employees, and to allow companies
to slaughter chickens at a much faster rate. (The rule is called the
“Modernization of Poultry Slaughter Inspection”, but advocates
like the Center for Food Safety and Food and Water Watch are calling
it the “Filthy Chicken Rule”.) It could be approved as soon as
this week.
This “modernization”
of inspections through privatization is likely to cause more problems
than already occur because the company employees will be disinclined
to cost their bosses money by slowing down, stopping production or
removing chickens when there’s a problem. “It’s really letting
the fox guard the chicken coop”, says Tony Corbo of Food and Water
Watch.
And there are already
plenty of problems. The rule comes in the midst of a years-long
increase in the number of food-born illnesses, driven in part by a
shortage of government inspectors.
As the International
Business Times reported:
An increase in the
incidence of salmonella in the U.S. could have a real impact on
consumers, as the pathogen already represents a major threat to
public health. Salmonella ‘is estimated to cause 1.2 million
illnesses in the United States, with about 23,000 hospitalizations
and 450 deaths’ each year, according to a recent report by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A study of more than 300
raw chicken breasts released by Consumer Reports earlier this year
found that 10.8 percent harbored salmonella, while 65.2 percent
tested positive for E. coli. Overall, about 97 percent of the breasts
tested contained harmful bacteria, according to the study.
And salmonella isn’t
even one of the diseases the USDA can currently regulate by stopping
production if diseased or feces-covered birds make it into the
production line.
It’s hardly better
elsewhere: the Guardian just released the results of a major
investigation into chicken factory farming in the UK, and found that
poor hygiene and spotty adherence to the rules makes 280,000 people
sick there each year.
Advocates had been
working to make the American regulatory system more comprehensive,
supporting bills like one introduced by Congresswomen Rosa DeLauro
(D-CT) and Louise Slaughter (D-NY) that would have allowed USDA
inspectors to make sure that birds infected with salmonella didn’t
make it into our kitchens. Instead, the Obama administration is
making sure we’re getting a less powerful USDA altogether.
Of course, chicken
processors are hardly the only offenders. Almost every kind of animal
slaughtered in the United States is pumped full of drugs and raised
in unsustainably large factory farms. It’s incredibly bad for the
environment, not to mention our stomachs.
But processing
companies are uniquely powerful in the poultry industry. They’ve
devised a system that sucks money from farmers, making them poorer
every year, and sells increasingly cheap and unhealthy meat to
consumers. And, with the new rule getting rid of government
inspectors, companies stand to earn even more profits. (Estimates on
the new rule place savings for those companies at about $256m per
year.)
It’s particularly
disappointing seeing this rule from the Obama administration, which
many food-safety advocates had hoped would improve the quality of the
food we eat, rather than degrade it. “They’ve gone out of their
way to cater to the industry on this,” Corbo says. “This is a
gift to the poultry industry.”
Unfortunately, the cost
of that “gift” could be human health.
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