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Comment by _hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I travel outside the US, I'm always struck by how different the chickens look. Chickens in the US have a pale appearance, with flabby, almost mushy meat. They look as if they were grown on a tree, never alive and running. While chickens in say, Italy or Mexico tend to look like they were alive at some point. There's color in the meat, often a yellow tint. Their skin and muscle look used and not atrophied.

I wonder how these differences extend to nutritional value?

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It certainly extends to taste, I wouldn't be surprised if nutrition also.

I don't think you can be as simplistic as "US chicken bad" though. The US has a very well established industrial food chain that reaches everywhere, but it's not the only thing going on. The US industry has some economies of scale that work for it too.

Quick-cheap-and-nasty chicken in the UK is just as flavorless as in the US. And you can find better stuff in the US, albeit at higher cost. But the same can be said of flavorless but cheap Holstein milk & butter, or basically anything that has been subjected to aggressive optimizing for cost per unit/volume whatever. Applies to factory bred chickens, but also tomatoes designed to ship well.

The end result is usually pretty cheap, and pretty bland at best.

I've noticed the same thing with tomatoes and apricots. I've got a good friend whose family have an apricot farm in the Kurdish part of Turkey, and their apricots are amazing, but the same variety grown in Western Washington tastes like plastic. There's something seriously pathological with the "terrior" in the western part of north America. (Luckily it doesn't extend to wine.)

It could be over-watering. Overwatered produce often looks the same, but lacks in flavor, texture, etc. Makes sense if you have cheap agricultural water and want to sell more low quality fruit.

I’ll push back on that a bit.

(A) The terroir for wine is probably the pickiest of all mass produced fruit, at least according to White’s Understanding Vineyard Soils.

(B) The soil of the Western US is extremely varied but it’s hardly the only factor involved in the taste and cultivation of fruit. The most obvious wildly differing factor is climate. The high deserts of E. Oregon would produce very different fruit compared to Washington’s coastal region even if you used identical soil, due to rainfall, mean/median temps, diurnal temp variation, etc.

The bulk of the video is a british chicken farmer explaining the economic realities. I don't think bad chicken is unique to the US; I suspect cheap meat is about the same everywhere.

It's about the same everywhere that has industrial scale farms that breed chickens through enclosed spaces with limited sunlight and processed feed :D. That's not every country.

However I suspect it's especially bad in the US as the video did casually mention battery cages were made illegal in the EU. Furthermore, that chicken farm was a lot less crowded than some of the Purdue farms filmed in activist videos.

Anecdotal, but from watching food/travel videos on YT, meat in general outside of the U.S. tend to taste better too apparently.

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