Today We’re Eating the Winners of the 1948 Chicken of Tomorrow Contest
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
If you're interested in chickens, here's my favorite subreddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/BackYardChickens/
My baby girls:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/14826096908/
They are: a Black Australorp, a Dominique, a Rhode Island Red, and an Easter Egger.
(I've never had a Cornish Cross live long enough to lay an egg.)
The eggs also taste different, much richer and a different color yolk from what I remember.
Oh and they don't need to be refrigerated; and some of them still have chicken poop on them.
Overall I like them much better.
Can't reply in-line to the child post, but this is a cultural difference. In Europe, eggs aren't refrigerated at all, and they're not washed. In the US, eggs are washed and they're sold in chillers. The reasoning behind this: http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-heres-why-we-nee...
Denmark - European - refrigerated eggs.
See also: Every other discussion about refrigerated eggs on HN.
As far as I know, once refrigerated, always refrigerated. But if your eggs have never been refrigerated there is no need to.
I don't know about non-refrigerated but I would guess they can't be stored as long.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing (not that you were saying it is). I've enjoyed venison burgers/steaks, but most the time I'd rather taste the seasoning or the rest of the dish that I add meat to. I don't need flavor from meat, just that good ol' umami.
I have similar variants for sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.
I pay $5 at Costco and maybe like $8 at the grocery store. $13? Holy crap. That had better be some really good chicken.
So I'm now genuinely curious what other people pay.
Literally.
If moving to a plant-based diet is too extreme, buy organic meats, or locally-raised meats, or have half a steak (chicken breast) at each meal and increase your vegetable and whole grain brown rice portions.
Do something.
Something being organic itself doesn't necessarily help living conditions, so good point to bring up. My understanding is that even most grassfed beef in the US is brought into the factory farming system and grain-fed the last few months of its life (a process grimly known as "finishing")
You can drive to a free-range chicken farm in the countryside and pay double the store price for a raw unplucked chicken... but why would you? When the ones at the walmart across the street from your house are fully defeathered, cooked, and seasoned for $7.87.
But I also know that this is a luxury that I can afford because I"m lucky enough to work in a high paying job. I don't believe it's possible to feed everyone organic free range chicken and I appreciate how lucky I am.
Normally the process is to pop them upside down into a cone, kill them, put them in a plucker, then cut off the neck and remove the innards. It's hard to to that unplucked.
Yes, it's more expensive, but I don't really see how any meat raised in decent conditions can cost anywhere near $1/lb.
Fight laws designed to silence those who seek to promote transparency in ag business?
Raise your own chickens or buy from farmers you know and trust?
The industry may be a giant, but they still have to respond to market forces. If people don't buy products raised in bad conditions they will adapt or their competitors will.
In my view, every time you choose to consume (purchase) a chicken that is treated in a way you disagree with, you are responsible for producing a new chicken treated the same way. And every time you choose not to consume a chicken that is treated in a way you disagree with, you have prevented a chicken from being produced under those conditions.
Of course many people will conclude that they'd rather have cheap chicken than treat chickens well, and many more people will simply not think very much about it. But if you are personally troubled by how chickens are treated then I think it's worth thinking about your role in causing that.
Sorry if all that is obvious and you really just meant you don't feel like there is anything you can do to affect greater change. I am only posting it because I have talked to people who feel a lack of control because they don't believe that their personal consumption has a direct impact on production, which I believe to be incorrect.
What about eating, say, a carrot instead of a bag of chips? I can buy 2 pounds of organic carrots for ~$2.50 (probably cheaper non-organic). How does that compare to the average bag of chips?
It's often expensive to be poor.
Vegetarians do #1, but not #2 - which doesn't encourage a change in practice at all, just a reduction of amounts.
It can be hard to stick to #2 when faced with a $20 roasting chicken, but that's the nature of this sort of change.
editing additions (above is unchanged) because I was obviously not clear enough.
I was responding to a post asking what can be done to change a market like that, not saying anything about the choice of being vegetarian itself.
If you decide to become vegetarian for whatever reasons, that is a market signal. However, it is not a market signal to change how meat is being processed, it is a market signal to reduce how much is being produced under any method.
DeusExMachina's point is fair, eggs are a valid (for some versions of "vegetarian" [1]. The rest of his comment is exactly the same as what I'm saying - by participating in the market but choosing to buy products that are more expensive because of the way they are raised, you are signalling a value for that practice. This is much more effective for change in how that market produces goods than simply not participating.
So to be clear - I'm not making a value judgment on choosing to be a vegetarian, I'm just pointing out something fairly obivous - that not participating in a market is not a very effective way of changing how that market produces things.
[1] in my lexicon vegetarians don't eat cheese or eggs either, which is different from vegan's who wouldn't eat honey for example - but that's not really important
Second, it's not even true that they don't buy more expensive products. I'm vegetarian (not vegan) so I eat eggs, but only if they are biological and from free range chickens. Yes, they cost more, but vegetarians don't buy only on cost.
Aren't all eggs biological?
But, yes, all eggs are both "biological" and "organic" in the more general sense of those words.
But one of the reasons I'm a vegetarian is not to effect change (because it probably won't) but to simply not participate. I choose not to pay people to torture animals for me by proxy.
It's all philosophical differences, IMO. Fact remains that there are far more people out there that are concerned about saving fifty cents on their next roaster. But choosing not to play is as valid a reason as any, even if it's just so one can sleep better at night.
I think you are exactly wrong about the effect of buying the expensive version of something early on if it meets your needs. I think of this as necessary but not sufficient to change. Typically these sorts chickens, to stay with the example, are expensive because they are being raised in small numbers, without the advantages of scale and the sort of research that goes int the big producers. Sometimes the farmers themselves haven't really worked out how to do this as well as they can yet, too. If some people who can afford to don't choose to support these people at the price that makes it viable for them, then it will never get past this point, period. If enough people support it though, the interest will be noted, the scale will start to get better, and the price will come down a bit. Not, obviously, to the levels of the price-is-everything practice, but cheaper.
Much like some tech will never really get off the ground without early adopters supporting it.
Everyone participates in the market for buying food. There's probably someone out there who has the very narrow goal of changing how meat (and only meat) is produced, but for everyone else this is a strawman argument.
We want to change food production, and overpaying for similar products is obviously going to be less of a signal than larger dietary changes.
I wasn't addressing at all the issue of whether some group of people want to get rid of a product entirely which I had hoped was clear.
"The market for food" is a very broad category and contains many markets.
In practice this will probably reduce your meat consumption quite a bit, which is a good thing. Good for you, and good for us.
And neither are the other half a billion vegetarians.
What if we replace "vegetarian/vegan" with "homosexual" or "transsexual?" How is trying to bash the idea that vegetarians/vegans "announce" themselves any different than straight conservative people bashing Gay Pride because it "puts their sexuality in my face?"
The reality of "spot the vegetarian/vegan" complaints are usually due to disagreement with vegetarianism/veganism. This is much the same way that people that complain about gay people "announcing themselves" is due to either disagreeing with homosexuality, or just plain being uncomfortable with the idea that it exists.
I don't always get provoked but this one piqued me.
- Vegetarians aren't denied fundamental human rights. - Vegetarians have never been denied a security clearance. - Vegetarians were never thrown out of the military for being a vegetarian. - Vegetarians can marry whomever they want (assuming that person wants to put up with a vegetarian). - Noone ever beat a vegetarian to death for being in a bar and being a vegetarian. - The police have never raided a place vegetarians hang out and made a public display of humiliating people for being vegetarian. - No vegetarian has ever been blackmailed for being a vegetarian. - No law has ever been passed making vegetarianism punishable by jail, or death.
I could go on for quite a while. So you get all butthurt because someone said "LOL veggie", and suddenly your righteous indignation makes you morally equivalent to people who have had to fight just to be treated as human for decades. For future reference, that's what a "false equivalence" is. Stop it.