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Comment by mostertoaster | Hacker News Reader

I’m assuming this keeps chicken prices lower.

Is this a bad thing?

I guess it could be if it is because of gnarly things they’re doing, but if it is primarily breeding larger chickens, well, that sounds ok.

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> Is this a bad thing?

Thread argues that modern chicken is less tasty:

> Modern chicken is notorious for being "dry, "bland," and "flavorless." Contrast this to the 1960s, where chicken was considered a delicacy. "Chicken should be so good in itself that it is an absolute delight to eat as a perfectly plain, butter roast, saute or grill."

Thread also argues that fat profile is out-of-whack due to modern chickens being fed diets that are different from what they ate in nature:

> Conventional Grain-Fed birds have an Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio that can be as high as 17:1. Contrast this to a pasture-raised chicken, which has an Omega 6 to Omega-3 ratio of 6:1.

I haven't heard of this ratio before. Supposedly a smaller ratio between the 2 types of fat is healthier.

"flavorless" is exactly what the industry wants. This allows easy control of the taste during processing. This is why the chicken "wings" you buy in your well-knownfast food restaurant taste the same everywhere and every single day of the year.

That seems backwards and hard to believe. They could use the same chickens and would need less sauce frying and spice

This is backwards for a cook who tries to enhance the intrinsic taste, texture of some good ingredients.

But the industry wants a constant taste, texture on a massive scale. The only solution is to produce on one side the needed spices (easy to control the taste) an apply it on a relative tasteless substrate. It means that you do not need to adapt the recipe during production.

Source: wife worked a couple of years for Unilever, some of my customers are in the flagrance, food additives industry.

It's important that the chicken breast sandwich from McDonald's has exactly the same taste and texture whether you get it from San Francisco or Toronto. Might not be important to you, but it's important to McDonald's.

It's not that I find these arguments false or anything like that but I always notice a seeming lack of awareness that the extra food produced by these chickens or gmo corn or whatever actually saves lives.

Complaining about taste and fat content is a luxury not everyone can afford and I think a lot of the "natural" foods type of people take that for granted.

As an anecdote, I spent time in that margin-- where the presence of mass-produced, 'optimized' food probably meant the difference between my being able to afford enough food vs not-- but I consistently dreaded these sorts of 'inflated' foods, where nutrients had clearly been deprioritized for quantity. This chicken situation is one case, but they show up in a few forms in the US, and are particularly endemic to food deserts, where it can be genuinely hard to find food that hasn't been preserved or 'optimized' beyond the pale. As you said, yes, it certainly beat starving, but I would've rather had better food distributed more effectively. I believe we can have both.

By this logic, complaining about how inhumane and painful it is for these unnaturally bred chickens is also a class luxury.

Does sacrificing food quality for quantity really save lives, or does it just allow for population increase, with similar levels of suffering at the margins?

This is a controversial question. To pick a popular example, estimates of lives saved by the Green Revolution range from the billions to the hundred thousands, and you don't have to look hard to find arguments that this shift in agricultural technology increased the number of people living in poverty. The advent of agriculture precipated explosions in food production and population growth along side a major decrease in living standards that persisted for millennia. One well-documented side effect of this transition is a vastly increased susceptibility to epidemics.

When presented with a surplus of a resource, humans have an interesting tendency to simply use up more of it until a shortage reappears. Maybe this is why I have to use so many electron apps.

It doesn't save lives, it just allows more breeding. As long as the population is growing, we are in a food surplus. More expensive food would just result in people having ~2 kids instead of 3, and the excess famine would resolve itself quickly and return to equilibrium. Likewise, if all food suddenly became half as expensive today, the only thing that would happen is that people would have more children until the food is back to "saving lives".

It really hurts their welfare since their skeletal systems were not designed to handle the additional weight and means they cannot really stand on their own. The chickens will also develop lesions/burns from laying in ammonia-soaked grounds, increasing risk of infection and causing unnecessary suffering.[0]

[0] https://www.aspca.org/sites/default/files/chix_white_paper_n...

If you prefer quantity over quality then probably not. Ever wondered how thousands of chickens can survive in one room. Well this chickens are probably not organic because you need to use something that illnesses dońt spread. And personally I think a chicken that canˋt walk normally is a problem.

The implicit context of this thread (like with a lot of Internet nutrition discussion) is that rising obesity rates over the past half century or so indicate something has gone wrong with our diets. The author is suggesting that this could be one piece of the puzzle.

There is a lot wrong with diets in developed countries, but it's not chicken, or at least chicken is way down the list of offenders.

AIUI the biggest dietary culprit is the insidious infiltration of sugars into the foods that many people eat. Much of the prepared, convenience foods people rely on contain sugars that even dedicated label-readers may not be able to readily identify. A whole laundry list of cane sugar, sucrose, high-fructose syrup, rice syrup, honey, invert syrup, molasses, panela, muscovado, etc.

Unless they're sneaking sugars into chicken, sure doesn't seem that it would be the main problem.

There are quality issues with these chickens: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3277097/

Probably doesn't make a huge difference for your health, but it's not a very nice culinary experience to find a dead/diseased muscle in the chicken you're eating. Consume enough KFC and it will happen.

It looks green, by the way.

It is a bad thing. We should go back to where only the middle class can afford quality protein like chicken.

Let the poor eat beans I always say!

one could also eat less and receive the same nutritional benefits. today's giant chickens do not seem to be nutritionally dense, flavorful and the unnatural steroids and estrogen levels are certainly worse consumed, than not

Today's chickens have more muscle mass. They are bred for this trait.

Are you arguing this larger muscle isn't made of protein? What is it made out of then?

Are you arguing these chickens somehow survive without the nutrients that others chickens need to live? How is that possible?

Those are some pretty tall claims you need to back up.

Are you implying that malnutrition or a nutrient deficiency results in immediate death? Death quicker than the 50 days it takes to butcher the chicken?

Are you implying farmers raise these fast-growing, extra-large birds through "malnutrition and nutrient deficiency"?

Yes, I am. Because I am active in the weightlifting community, I'm aware that muscle size has absolutely no correlation with nutrition or micronutrients beyond protein intake. This is extremely obvious if you ever took steroids, because you can become huge eating McDonald's and instant noodle, but even without them the same effect is observed.

So you're saying it's possible to gain massive muscle mass while being, to quote you - "malnourished and having nutrient deficiencies"?

Yes, it is. Nutrition is more than calories. Just as you can become obese with nutrient deficiencies, you can also become muscular with them.

“Quality” protein is found in plants as well as animals.

There’s no reason that eating chicken is better for a person than eating plants, especially with current state of plant-based foods and recipes that are available making it easy to eat delicious plant-based foods that aren’t just a bowl of beans.

yeah, but protein-dense plants cause flatulence

I never said it was better, I'm in complete agreement it's a preference.

Are you prepared to have chicken at $10/lb? Make it a luxury only the middle class can afford?

The sibling replies here are interesting in that they appeal to personify the chickens

Not sure how "they taste worse" personifies the chicken, nor how pointing out that in fact chickens can suffer personifies the chicken either (well, I guess only people can suffer...).

Chickens are sentient just like us.

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