[HN Gopher] Today we're eating the winners of the 1948 Chicken o...
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Today we're eating the winners of the 1948 Chicken of Tomorrow
contest
Author : vikrum
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-06-16 20:35 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (modernfarmer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (modernfarmer.com)
| shrubble wrote:
| A farmer friend of mine told me that the chickens must sent to
| the slaughterhouses at a certain time, since beyond that, the
| chickens have heart attacks... the heart can't support the load
| placed on it.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I somehow doubt that. My mom raises chickens for eggs and they
| live a couple of years. She used to free range them but lost
| too many to coyote attacks, so now she keeps them cooped.
| shrubble wrote:
| Sorry for not being specific: I am referring to those
| chickens that are factory-farmed under confinement rather
| than free range.
| VoiceOfWisdom wrote:
| The chickens kept in a factory farm are different from what
| most people keep at home.
| slacktide wrote:
| The ENTIRE point of the story is that industrial meat farmers
| raise a breed of chicken which has been engineered to only
| live a short lifespan before consumption. Laying hens are a
| completely different breed, so your mother's experience is
| not relevant.
| blakesterz wrote:
| If this story is interesting to you, Gastropod did a really
| interesting episode on this a while back: The Birds and The Bugs
|
| https://gastropod.com/the-birds-and-the-bugs/
| beebeepka wrote:
| I gave up on chicken years before I went vegie. They we treat
| these creatures is disgraceful and disgusting.
|
| Now, I am not the type to advertise my diet unless it comes up at
| lunch with people who don't know me or something like that. But I
| am not ashamed to share that cultured meat is something I've been
| looking forward to with great interest for all sorts of reasons.
|
| Do what usually happens is there's at least one person to point
| how unnatural cultured meat sounds and that I will never work
| because it's disgusting.
|
| Can't help but lol every time. I guess eating sick young
| chickens, who have never seen the sun, is more natural an
| healthy.
|
| But I know I am not the crazy one. They are
| HuShifang wrote:
| Here I thought this was going to be a literally true headline,
| i.e. a report on a taste test of a new cell-ag product wherein
| preserved tissue samples from the 1948 chickens were used for the
| cell line that was cultured into the reporter's meal. It'd be a
| happier story, too.
|
| (One of the chickens who contributed tissue for Eat Just's
| cultured chicken product lived out his life at an animal
| sanctuary near the Bay Area. But due to the breeding practices
| referenced in the article, it was, sadly, a short life.)
| seanwilson wrote:
| > And that life keeps getting shorter and shorter - four to seven
| weeks, to be exact. In the 1950s, a broiler chicken lived a full
| 16 weeks. The faster and heavier method that won the contest was
| amplified by confinement, and while the chickens come out of
| those cages fatter, they tend to get sicker, too. They have
| insatiable appetites, which leaves them stressed, as evidenced in
| their poor reproduction capabilities, cardiovascular failure and
| skeletal problems. They've been pumped with so many antibiotics,
| they've developed resistances. The chickens' weak legs and
| overworked hearts strain every week their lives are extended.
|
| Chickens are meant to be able to live to around 10 years old as
| well which makes this even worse to me. There's nothing humane or
| natural about it. I think consumers need to take more personal
| responsibility in what kind of practices their wallets are
| supporting.
| codeulike wrote:
| Its so fast now, we're killing 50 billion chickens per year to
| eat. 136 million per day. 1585 per second. More than 1 chicken
| per millisecond. Start the stopwatch on your phone and watch
| those milliseconds fly by. Living breathing creatures raised in
| tiny cages and never seeing the sky or scratching dirt with
| their feet.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| I don't doubt it, but what is the source of this figure?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/chart-of-the-day-
| this....
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| We can barely get people to care about their fellow man, I'm
| pessimistic about getting people to care about the genocide
| we commit towards animals on an hourly basis.
|
| Edit: And for the record I'm vegan.
| qq4 wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder how many microorganisms I kill when I wash
| my hands.
| amirkdv wrote:
| I get that this is probably mostly sarcastic humour, and
| I'm not trying to dispute the kernel of truth. No serious
| person loses sleep over our mass murder of malaria-carrying
| mosquitoes.
|
| But there is a line _somewhere_ on the natural spectrum of
| life forms, from microorganisms, to plants, to bugs and
| vermin, to dogs, pigs, primates, and humans, where our
| attitude about loss of life and/or a miserable life
| changes. Where are you suggesting we put that line?
|
| EDIT: wording
| codeulike wrote:
| Well at least those microorganisms had a chance of a normal
| life, and you did the killing yourself. What gets me about
| factory farming is the complete hopelessness of an animal
| born into a factory, reduced by us to being an inconvenient
| ingredient and nothing more, and how all of that is hidden
| from the consumer as much as possible, outsourced to a
| faceless machine.
|
| Here you go; the chicken scene from Baraka
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFQhn8RW0Nk
| qq4 wrote:
| What's a normal life? I've seen the chicken scene, and
| I've killed a chicken with my bare hands. I've clubbed a
| fish and cleaned it. I'm not afraid of where my food
| comes from. Chickens don't have hope, and I don't project
| that feeling onto them, just like I don't with
| microorganisms. Why do you think what you're saying is
| negative? If this trend tends to infinity we raise
| chickens instantly and vaporize them into cooked chicken
| in a blink of an eye.
| codeulike wrote:
| Chickens want things. They want to walk around the
| scratch the ground. If you make a noise they'll run away
| from you - they dont want to get eaten by a fox.
|
| Your comment about microorganisms is about 'where to draw
| the line' and your comment about 'tend to infinity'
| implies you like the 'appeal to extremes' form of
| argument.
|
| I'm interested in what we're doing in the world now and
| I'm happy to suggest where a line should be drawn. I'm
| not worried about absolutes.
| qq4 wrote:
| > Your comment about microorganisms is about 'where to
| draw the line' and your comment about 'tend to infinity'
| implies you like the 'appeal to extremes' form of
| argument.
|
| I would say that's accurate. I think extremes can bring
| out honest positions in an argument. Where would you
| suggest we draw a line? How long should a chicken live
| before we decide to kill it?
| codeulike wrote:
| We could do a lot worse than go with EU Regulation
| 889/2008 (i.e european definition of organic)
|
| See Article 12 for poultry. There are details about how
| they should be kept, density, materials (e.g. straw or
| turf), lighting conditions, access to perches, access to
| outside space. Minimum age at slaughter is 81 days.
|
| https://eur-
| lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:...
| slacktide wrote:
| I say we engineer a breed of Mike the Headless Chickens.
| Just enough brain stem to stay alive, not enough brain to
| care.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
| codeulike wrote:
| Or, Lab grown meat would be a good solution.
| slacktide wrote:
| Sure, you let me know when we can grow a decent drumstick
| in a petri dish.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| Chicken is relatively friendly to climate. I would consider it
| a good thing if people ate more chicken and less red meat. They
| are our top animal protein source at scale for least greenhouse
| gas emissions [1].
|
| [1]
| https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=B1...
| codeulike wrote:
| Even the most sustainable meat is worse for the environment
| than plant-based protein
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90461008/this-graph-will-show-
| yo...
| moistbar wrote:
| Do plant-based proteins have the B vitamins that most of
| the world is deficient in?
| jfengel wrote:
| Ummm... yes.
|
| https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/impossible-
| burger#what-...
|
| The Impossible Burger is supplemented with a ton of B
| vitamins (for thiamine, several weeks' supply).
|
| Most vegans eat lots of other B containing foods,
| including yeast (which is after all how plant-eating
| animals manufacture B vitamins in the first place, by
| fermentation during digestion). But for those who want to
| get it along with their protein source, the plant-based
| meat-simulacra also contain it.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| Vitamin B12 is produced only by bacteria. Not yeast.
|
| It's incredibly difficult to get sufficient quantities of
| B12 outside of meat products or manufactured supplements.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| This is silly. The solution to a vitamin deficiency is
| vitamins. Clearly they're deficient while eating meat
| too, so that doesn't seem like a strong argument against
| plant based proteins.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Yes, except that's not practical. I don't want to give up
| meat but I'll give up beef and pork.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| That does not seem to be a matter of 'practical' but
| rather a matter of eating preferences.
|
| Honestly our food habits are just out of whack. If you go
| to any Asian or African country (outside the touristic
| areas) you'll find how many classical/common dishes taste
| great without meat. From Chinese noodle soups to Thai
| curries to Ethiopian bean dishes or Indian anything, you
| miss neither nutrients nor flavour without meat.
|
| I would argue the vegetarian movement has made a huge
| impact in reawakening many 'western' recipes which
| disappeared when near became cheap. From beetroot to
| Brussels sprouts to pickles to lentil stews and grilled
| vegetables - lots of things are back on the plate.
|
| All that long said for a short message: yes it can be
| very practical if we collectively (or individually) want
| it to be.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I already cut meat out of my lunch and I don't eat a
| breakfast during the week. No thanks.
|
| It's not practical to demand the entire planet become
| vegan.
| snet0 wrote:
| So it's not practical _and_ you don 't want to do it
| anyway?
| throwaway20234 wrote:
| You get slammed for people not liking your response, but
| yet your point is spot on. The number of vegetarians has
| been pretty steady over the last decades in the US.
| Hoping people become all vegetarien isn't practical. If I
| was a dictator I'd ban meat eating, but I am not and
| that's good.
|
| As always: it's not allowed to ask for better people! We
| need to create a system that makes the wrong people do
| the right thing.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| People aren't liking the response because it seems like
| it is saying "it isn't practical for me to take on this
| tiny inconvenience for the betterment of the world".
| nitrogen wrote:
| _We need to create a system that makes the wrong people
| do the right thing._
|
| Or even better, a system that makes the "wrong" thing
| right (e.g. lab-grown meat).
| mantenpanther wrote:
| That's a simple and too narrow take. In my area (mountains)
| it makes a lot of sense to cultivate cattle.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| > I think consumers need to take more personal responsibility
| in what kind of practices their wallets are supporting.
|
| Consumers aren't making the choice to treat the animals that
| way, the business are. And (most likely) without regulation,
| that will not change. Not enough people/consumers have enough
| discretionary spending to make a change (I believe). I for one
| don't even know where I can buy meat from well-treated
| chickens. Sure I can look it up, but most consumers will need
| to as well, which will probably not happen. It's about high
| time we stop putting things on the consumer (see recycling) and
| make the businesses do better for our ecosystem. I hope not to
| add too many more regulations, the fewer the better IMHO, but
| damn, there still needs to be some.
| jfim wrote:
| That's the price we pay for making everything an
| interchangeable commodity.
|
| If you go to the grocery store, there might be some organic
| chicken and non organic chicken, but not that much of a
| choice otherwise. There's no real way to know whether the
| place treats their chickens and workers well, what kind of
| feed or environment the chickens live in, if it's a local
| farm or a mega factory, and so on.
|
| On the upside, the prices are lower and we get any kind of
| produce year round. On the downside, that produce might come
| from across the world, be specific breeds that survive
| shipping well and look good at the expense of taste, and
| generally not come from local farms but rather large factory
| farms.
| mosseater wrote:
| Consumers are totally making the choice. You could make the
| same argument that the consumer's demand for lots of meat is
| causing the businesses to have to do this.
|
| In reality it's a chain of choices made by multiple groups of
| people. The consumers, the industry, and whatever
| governmental regulatory bodies are involved. One group can't
| just give up responsibility of the choices they are making.
|
| In the end, consumers drive the market. If there's no
| consumers of unethical meat, no one will unethically raise
| meat. Out of the groups of people involved, it's only the
| consumers participation that keeps the cycle alive.
|
| Eating meat isn't a required activity for humans. If the
| treatment the chickens are going through doesn't seem ethical
| to you, continuing to eat it is hypocritical. You can totally
| reduce your meat consumption in order to afford eating
| ethically raised meat, or just not eat meat at all.
| oivey wrote:
| Consumers have driven the market into a race to the bottom.
| There is effectively no way for the consumer to really know
| about the comparative difference in living conditions
| between two packs of meat. There is really no way at all to
| know the provenance of chicken from a restaurant. Expecting
| consumers to either do this research or not eat chicken at
| all is completely unrealistic. If we want to fix this
| problem it will have to be through regulation. A start
| would be nasty labeling on unethically generated foods,
| like the surgeon general's warning on cigarettes.
| N1H1L wrote:
| No they are not making the choice. There is way too little
| information to make that choice. Which chicken package
| tells you how many weeks the chicken lived?
|
| And this type of demand is pretty inelastic. You can make a
| pound of chicken 25 cents cheaper or expensive an demand
| won't budge at all.
|
| What you are subscribing to is market fetishism - something
| that works only in Econ 101 classrooms, not the real world.
|
| _Consumers want rainforests to not be destroyed for
| example. But how many consumers know that they are
| destroyed due to palm oil production? And which customer
| has the ability to track down globalized supply chains when
| choosing an ice cream, when their kids are screaming
| nearby?_
| mattmanser wrote:
| There are literally 10s of thousands of little things like
| this in your life. Most of them you will not be aware of.
| Some of them require huge amounts of effort to figure out.
|
| On top of that what you're saying isn't true for huge
| swathes of the population. They can't afford to eat
| ethically raised meat, they can't afford to not eat meat
| protein, and even if there is some (probably imaginary) way
| for them to do that, it requires a disproportionate amount
| of effort for them to do so.
|
| Most people will think chicken is just chicken. They may be
| peripherally aware that there's some sort of intensive
| farming going on, but not really what that entails, or how
| horrific it is.
|
| And so some governments around the world have stepped in
| and stopped those practices.
|
| But not the US. Hence the trade arguments you may have
| heard about chlorinated chicken. It's not the chlorination
| that's the problem, it's WHY they need to be chlorinated.
| Because you need to do that to chicken to make it safe to
| eat if you grow them in those sort of horrific conditions.
|
| So next time you think about blaming the consumer, stop and
| think. You've been dead wrong once. Government intervention
| works.
|
| Are you wrong again?
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| >they can't afford to not eat meat protein, and even if
| there is some (probably imaginary) way for them to do
| that, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for
| them to do so.
|
| Didn't know eating beans instead of meat for protein was
| a disproportionate amount of effort. It's even cheaper to
| boot. Those people are not invalids, they just don't care
| about the lives of farm animals. They may say they do,
| but their actions prove otherwise.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| While you are not wrong about beans as a protein source,
| this argument always strikes me as a sort of "let the
| poor people eat bland mush their entire life, and if they
| want better food they can get rich like me and have meat
| from ethical sources." A large part of why factory
| farming exists is to drive down costs as demand rises,
| but you gotta keep in mind that the demand rises because
| eating beans and rice for every meal your entire life is
| _miserable_.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| I'm a vegan so they would be eating the same food I do. I
| never eat out and barely ever try the expensive vegan
| faux-meats.
|
| Adding a few spices and a can of tomatoes make beans and
| rice delicious. Chana masala, black bean bowls, navy bean
| soup, the number of dishes you can create from a base of
| rice and beans is innumerable and they're all relatively
| simple.
|
| The same could be said about unseasoned chicken meat on
| rice.
| hourislate wrote:
| Just changing that around a little kind of reflects what's
| happening in the office the past few decades.
|
| >amplified by confinement, and while the developers come out of
| those cubes fatter, they tend to get sicker, too. They have
| insatiable appetites, which leaves them stressed, as evidenced
| in their poor reproduction capabilities, cardiovascular failure
| and skeletal problems. They've been pumped with so many
| antibiotics, they've developed resistances. The Developers weak
| legs and overworked hearts strain every week their lives are
| extended.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It's just one step on the way to growing muscle tissue in a
| controlled environment without the actual animal.
|
| But, not be pedantic, but chicken evolved as a domesticated,
| food-producing animal. They're "meant" to make food, either via
| eggs or meat, not to have a specific lifespan.
| amirkdv wrote:
| > They're "meant" to make food, either via eggs or meat, not
| to have a specific lifespan.
|
| By this standard, there is no such thing as abusing a
| domesticated species. They're "meant to" satisfy human need
| X, and everything else is irrelevant.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > But, not be pedantic, but chicken evolved as a
| domesticated, food-producing animal. They're "meant" to make
| food, either via eggs or meat, not to have a specific
| lifespan.
|
| I think it's slightly more complicated than that. The history
| of domestication is one of long-term relationships: we have
| historically bred animals not only to produce food, but also
| to serve roles (foodwaste removal, fertilizing, haulage) that
| aren't necessarily best served by rapid growth. Industrial
| agriculture has removed the need for most of those roles, but
| they're still very visible in the selected features of
| popular breeds.
| gruez wrote:
| >I think it's slightly more complicated than that. The
| history of domestication is one of long-term relationships:
| we have historically bred animals not only to produce food,
| but also to serve roles (foodwaste removal, fertilizing,
| haulage) that aren't necessarily best served by rapid
| growth.
|
| What can you do with a pig other than eating it? As for
| chickens/cows, I'm fairly certain that the males are
| basically only useful for meat.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Pigs have historically served foodwaste and sanitation
| roles. But you bring up a great point, and it's one that
| anthropologists have remarked on as a potential source
| for religious taboos around pork (pigs just aren't _that_
| useful compared to other animals).
|
| Male cows are best known in their neutered form (a
| surprising number of people think that oxen are their own
| species). They're instrumental beasts of burden. But
| again, industrialized agriculture doesn't have much use
| for them.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| " I think consumers need to take more personal responsibility
| in what kind of practices their wallets are supporting"
|
| Ok. So, has the market gotten to the point that even in small
| towns, people can choose more humane meat? They have "free
| range eggs", and I pay for, basically, "free range plus", but
| these aren't _really_ humane, only better: Are there other
| commonly available options? (I _m personally pescetarian
| leaning heavily into vegetarian: I don 't know about meat
| options available)
|
| I don't think everyone is going to go vegan (it is hard to
| balance the nutrition) and even vegetarian isn't going to be
| everywhere if there is a culture of meat-eating, so the best
| thing we can do is _less* meat, and the meat we have is humane.
|
| But we are back at the beginning: There is realistically no way
| to speak with your wallet since a lot of places simply have no
| choice - and no way to verify claims (they might be as
| misleading as free range eggs).
|
| This pretty much put us at the point where if you are moneyed
| enough, you can source it: Everyone else has to hope that
| government changes rules enough so that everyone can choose
| humanely produced meat.
| codeulike wrote:
| _So, has the market gotten to the point that even in small
| towns, people can choose more humane meat?_
|
| Yes, at least in Europe. Organic meat comes with certain
| rules about the treatment of the animals.
|
| edit: see Article 12 of EU Regulation 889/2008 for organic
| poultry standards - https://eur-
| lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:...
| jghn wrote:
| I get my meat/eggs as a monthly farm share. The animals are
| treated humanely. One can visit the farm if they so desire,
| to see the conditions.
|
| The downside? It's expensive. Most people, even those who
| care in principal, don't care enough to pay 2x, 3x, or more
| than the grocery store prices.
| mc32 wrote:
| Chickens can achieve the age of ten under special circumstances
| (pet chicken protected from predators)
|
| Chickens in their wild habitat will live a year, two maybe
| three before succumbing to predators or disease.
|
| So if you have a hen and it's over 3 years old, it's older than
| most chickens in the wild. You should feel as guilty as a fox
| feels if you have it for dinner.
| rdtwo wrote:
| If you have ever killed and eaten a laying hen you would know how
| tough that meat is. We definitely bred some mighty tasty
| chickens. I do think we could maybe refine them a bit for flavor
| and extend the time a bit more or less to get a more or less
| gamey flavor depending on preference.
|
| Also air chilled chicken is where it's at. So much better than
| the water bath cooled ones
| [deleted]
| narrator wrote:
| Aurochs[1] were large wild cattle that went extinct. The meek
| domesticated chicken on the other hand has done extraordinarily
| well, evolutionarily speaking. The same goes for corn, which
| couldn't survive in its current state without human cultivation.
| If rhinos and other threatened species were somehow domesticated
| to be used for food or leather, like cattle, we'd probably have a
| lot more of them around.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
| snet0 wrote:
| I am not sure that the lens of what you label "evolutionary
| success" is useful in any way. Would you rather a billion
| humans in Elysium or a trillion humans in Hades?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The big question: did we cultivate agriculture or did
| agriculture cultivate us? There wouldn't be 7 billion humans
| without industrial agriculture. You wouldn't exist. I
| wouldn't exist.
| narrator wrote:
| Ants have a symbiotic fungus in their gut that they use to
| digest food. We have corn that we use to digest sunlight.
| Chickens that could not survive on their own now are the way
| we can turn carbohydrates into protein. Computers turn
| electricity into cognition. We will probably take chickens
| and corn with us to other planets.
| breput wrote:
| Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing on the Chicken Of Tomorrow
| documentary:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G0stojwYjI
| guardiangod wrote:
| A result from today's fast-grown chickens is the epidemic of
| 'woody' chicken breast.
|
| https://holistickenko.com/woody-chicken-breast/
|
| _An increase in size and growth rate has caused the meat of the
| muscles to become harder and rigid in texture, giving a
| distinctive bulge to the breast and becoming known as woody
| breast chicken. The chicken, even when cooked well, is harder and
| chewy._
|
| _The white stripes that occur visually look like white lines
| running across the breast, tendons and thigh. A woody breast will
| feel firmer, like an incredibly tough muscle. When touching
| regular chicken breast the flesh is soft, you can press into it.
| Woody breast is simply firm to the touch, you cannot press into
| it (Kuttappan, V.A., et al., 2016). Occurrences of the woody
| chicken breast, as well as white stripes on chicken, have
| increased from around 1.4-8.7% in 2012 to a shocking 25.7-32.3%
| in 2015._
| ianlevesque wrote:
| It's really hard to avoid. It seems like every package of
| chicken has one of these thrown in with a few good ones. I
| usually end up checking them all and throwing the bad one out.
| It's terrible.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| After learning about this and how to look at it I look at
| chicken closely now before buying. Most of the time I can't
| even get chicken that isn't woody, just less woody than the
| other packages around it. Even the more expensive "organic"
| chicken seems to suffer from it.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I really miss the print edition of 'Modern Farmer'.
| InsaneOstrich wrote:
| The past's chicken of tomorrow is the chicken of today
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(page generated 2021-06-16 23:01 UTC)