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Comment by curun1r | Hacker News Reader

Yeah...I don't see too much to be outraged about here. If you want to be upset about adding soy to the chicken you eat, be upset about the soy they add to the chicken before they kill it. Soy isn't part of the natural diet for chickens, so feeding it to them means also feeding them antibiotics. If anything, lowering the percentage of chicken that's raised in that way would make it healthier.

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My father in law raised chickens 40,000 at a time. He made good money doing that because he was early in taking advantage of new chicken breeds and knowledge of chicken nutrition and disease control. E.g., since he was raising chickens indoors, he had to supply vitamin D that chickens would otherwise get from the sun.

IIRC, in the wild, chickens ate seeds, insects, and maybe more. They might have eaten a soy bean if they had found one. IIRC US soy beans were imported from Asia; so, maybe chickens and related birds in Asia ate soy beans.

He also fed his chickens anchovies: So, in Chile, they would catch tons of the little fish and sell them cooked in 55 gallon drums. He said that the anchovies were an astoundingly good growth factor. The faster can get the chickens to grow, the less number of days have to feed them just to stay alive; so rapid growth is important.

He never mentioned that he gave anti-biotics because he fed soy beans.

For the soy beans, he grew a lot of those himself.

Eventually the big margins went out of the chicken business. He was in northern Indiana where the winters can be just darned cold, e.g., -40 F and 50 MPH winds, and that was cold the day I was in it. So, in the US, raising chickens moved to the US South where there were warmer winters and longer growing seasons for more soy beans.

When I asked him about some of the issues in raising chickens I read in the news, his answer was fast: He asked "Did the whole chickens I bought have any fat?" I said "Yes". And then he said, "Then they had to have been healthy." First cut, he was probably right. He also knew what a sick chicken was: Each day he had to walk through his big chicken houses, gather up the birds that died during the night, and toss them into a big trench that he dug and covered over occasionally.

I think there's still something to be outraged about if they are selling "chicken" that is only 50% chicken. When they advertise something called "oven roasted chicken", it should be nearly all chicken.

Semantics. It _is_ still "oven roasted chicken"..."chicken+"

Marketing trust is out the window; if it doesn't explicitly say its 100% fresh whole-piece chicken, cooked today, it might as well be meatloaf or McDonald's "shakes"

Well fine, tell me it's half chicken and half soy, and I'll make an informed decision.

By that logic, you'd be okay with steaks that are 50% beef and 50% corn.

Or even better, 50% beef and 50% grass.

My point was that even the chicken breast you buy in the supermarket is, unless it's antibiotic-free, not really 100℅ chicken either. Choosing this (Subway adding soy to the chicken) as the line that was crossed seems arbitrary. To my mind, the line was crossed a long time ago. It's why I only eat meat a few times per year and I ensure that it's the expensive all-natural variety. I'd rather eat vegetarian than the frankenmeat that's most common in this country.

> Soy isn't part of the natural diet for chickens, so feeding it to them means also feeding them antibiotics.

Do you have any more info on this? I was under the impression that giving chickens antibiotics was illegal and so feckless that it isn't even worth breaking the law for. I could be wrong as well, honestly.

No, it's growth hormones, not antibiotics that are illegal, and would be quite pointless even if legal - that's the urban myth you're thinking about. Antibiotics are legal and are still being used with abandon.

Antibiotics can be used in poultry feed, but must be phased out prior to marketing such that there are no detectable levels in the meat.

This addresses concerns over antibiotics in the consumed product, but not the problems of antibiotic resistance promoted through use in animal feed, which really must stop.

https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm378100.h...

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