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KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge
- pstuart 8mo agohttps://archive.is/ro1oe https://archive.is/ro1oe
- josefritzishere 8mo agoIt's a shame. Perdue managed to get wway from antibiotics but KFC went the other way.
- riku_iki 8mo agoMaybe it is not a big deal? Chicken goes through withdrawal period and level of residue is tested in end product, supposedly..
- hermitcrab 8mo agoIf you pump livestock (chicken, cows or pigs) full of antibiotics, surely they are going to piss/crap a lot of it into the environment, hastening antibiotic resistance.
- riku_iki 8mo agobut it will be localized farm environment only.. Its just question of risk/benefit ratio, benefit is clear: cheap meat, because producers will be less impacted by deceases. Risks are not so clear in this case.
- armoredkitten 8mo agoIt doesn't stay localized; runoff from farmland is a major issue. In other words, the farm animal poops out a bunch of antiobiotics, then it rains and that poop ends up washing into the river/lake/water table. That's already something that happens with situations like E. coli contamination. Things that happen on the farm don't stay on the farm.
- riku_iki 8mo agoOk, still focus could be not on avoiding antibiotics completely, but preventing runoff, or finding types which decay faster in environment. Do we know even if we can build sustainable large scale industry without antibiotics?
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoI was reading today that we have managed to grow chickens with so much fat that the meat is less healthy than red meat.
- advisedwang 8mo agoCan you share a link to what you were reading?
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agohttps://nutritionfacts.org/book/how-not-to-diet/ https://nutritionfacts.org/book/how-not-to-diet/
- mrguyorama 8mo agoInteresting that the pledge is about fast growing vs normal growing chicken. Does the UK not have the overcrowded cage conditions we have here in the US? The complaint is about these companies not wanting to reduce their profit margins, but how slowly do the other chickens grow? Are we doubling maturity time or increasing it by 10%? Doubling would probably impact consumer prices beyond what could be absorbed by eliminating the margin. Most lay opinions I can find online claim the fast growing birds to have inferior meat quality. I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test.
- youngNed 8mo ago> I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test I find it genuinely baffling that that would be the point.
- tiew9Vii 8mo ago> Most lay opinions I can find online claim the fast growing birds to have inferior meat quality. I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test. It’s easy to distinguish. The fast growing birds are much larger, breasts at least 2x the size of normal chickens. The larger breasts you notice when cutting them when raw, they often have a tough texture and meat inside like strands. When cooked and chewing it’ll have a hard chewy texture, sometimes feeling raw/uncooked. This is called woody breast. If you have a standard small chicken breast, the texture feels much more pleasant when eating, like chicken. I always try to avoid large chicken breasts and get the smallest possible but it’s virtually impossible now unless you live near high end low volume butcher with their own independent supplier.
- cucumber3732842 8mo agoYou see the same fibrous crap in tenders. It's like eating a wet (chicken flavored) rope.
- sevenseacat 8mo agoohhhh I've had some chicken like that before, it was awful
- 8mo ago
- spiderfarmer 8mo agoI recently had a discussion with my wife and we check our bank records to find out how long it's been since we've been to a KFC, McDonalds or Burger King. Apparently it's been 16 months now. It's overpriced, unhealthy and American. Enough reasons to not go.
- kmeisthax 8mo agoAs an American I also have not gone to any of those restaurants. The thing is, America is the China of food[0]: we make shittons of unsafe, dangerous product and foist it onto the market by burying the market's pricing mechanism under a mountain of garbage until nobody else can compete and we dictate the price. People will note that China makes plenty of safe, normal products too. The same applies to American agriculture, but that doesn't matter. The problem is mainly that the industry has absolutely no standards. If they can go a few cents cheaper, they will. [0] And, prior to this century, we were also China in general - a lot of our manufacturing was stolen from Britain and ran for far cheaper.
- nickff 8mo ago>"If they can go a few cents cheaper, they will." What I find most interesting about the USA is the variety; yes, there are low-cost (often unhealthy) options, but there are also a wide variety of wonderful restaurants which are not pinching pennies on their costs, even amongst national chains.
- spiderfarmer 8mo agoKids are singing mandatory pledges of allegiance in school, but the government itself doesn’t want to give anything to gain their trust. They’re even rebooting unhealthy coal plants. They don’t care about any of you.
- 4b11b4 8mo agoFuck these companies, just fucking killing the planet and anyone that touches their food
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo agoHigh streets are dying, pretty sure half the restaurants closest to me are either closed or going to close down soon. Coming back from Japan it was certainly a whiplash to find just a row of fried chicken shops and empty restaurants. It made me rethink how great of a signal GDP growth really is on how good things are economically.
- kmeisthax 8mo agoThe arithmetic mean is one of the great tools of statistical lies. You can sweep so much sample variance under the rug with this baby!
- bubblewand 8mo agoIt really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good. I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that (see also: the significant multiple more that we pay for most infrastructure compared with peer states). It would help explain why a lot of "poorer" countries reportedly don't feel poorer to live in, for a normal family, than the US.
- georgefrowny 8mo agoGDP is a useless metric when so much of it basically wash trading. It's always been a dodgy metric and susceptible to gaming. But now that money is less and less connected to useful value, it's almost a sick joke.
- bombcar 8mo agoGDP is also useless in that it values doordashing cold fried chicken as more valuable than cooking and eating one you hand raised at home.
- 8mo ago
- georgefrowny 8mo agoFunny how across the board we have a relentless march of innovation, invention, discovery and technical prowess and yet almost everything seems constantly gets more expensive and/or worse.
- tsol 8mo agoThe incentive isn't to make a better product, it's to make a more profitable product. Sometimes that leads to improvements in quality but much of the time it's the opposite
- slifin 8mo agoBefore we started colonial capitalism there already was total abundance for everyone and for those not born yet The common lands were for everyone, given a few sheep, vast grasslands and a dog you had self sufficient milk, meat, wool etc People used to be nomadic with their animals, capitalism doesn't work when there's total abundance so the playbook was to kill the animals, install farms, enforce land rights by force Only when the workers have no other choice can they be forced into the factories We could return to abundance if we could get rid of the personality types who require attention and power over the rest of us to temporarily satisfy their narcissistic wounds Reinstate common lands and bring back self sufficiency, capitalism is a squeezing device, innovation happens despite it not because of it
- ramesh31 8mo agoWell this is probably why KFC chicken has become inedible. I don't know what they are doing to those things but they are practically a different species at this point. I love fast food and eat it all the time, but KFC "chicken" is just a disgusting grey slimey pile of garbage.
- whalesalad 8mo agohas it ever not been inedible?
- ramesh31 8mo ago>has it ever not been inedible? No restaurant ever makes it big without being good to begin with. I remember the chicken being on par with any other fast food as a kid, they just fell off hard in the 2000s. I'm really not sure who is still buying their buckets.
- cucumber3732842 8mo agoTo be fair, KFC "made it big" 3/4 of a century ago.
- bediger4000 8mo agoI raised chickens as a teenager, mostly for eggs, but also meat. Chickens are terrible, I hate them. They're mean, cannibalistic, and I can easily see them evolving gigantism like other theropod did and becoming apex predators. I honestly think eating them isn't bad. Nevertheless, encouraging cruelty in poultry keepers is a bad thing. Casual cruelty has a corrosive effect on people.
- lofaszvanitt 8mo agoI protest. They are cutie pies.
- acheron 8mo agoI wouldn’t say our chickens are mean. They are incredibly stupid though. Some kinds of birds can be smart, but chickens aren’t one of them.
- merry_flame 8mo agoNonsense. I've even had hens that paired together to open doors – one flying repeatedly on the handle, another one pushing the door. And those were reform hens that seemed particularly blunt relative to their peers.
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo agoMost research on animals is conducted after we’ve placed them in mind numbing cages and in non social environments (and if they are with other animals they’re crammed in together). Imagine living your entire life either in solitary and/or packed in a Japanese subway car, and someone doing research being shocked you’re acting in anti-social ways.
- ekropotin 8mo agoAs a huge eggs lover, who eats at least 3 eggs a day, I dream that one day I can raise chickens to have infinite supply of eggs.
- Affric 8mo ago
- pipeline_peak 8mo agoYou can’t have cheap fast food made from humanely raised livestock. Nando’s however is even more despicable. Here in the US they aren’t cheap.