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Chicken is Bad
for Your Health

by Michael Worsham

Last month's excellent Touchstone article by Mark O'Connor about Sanderson Farms convincingly illustrated why the B-CS community is better off without a new chicken plant. This article should add to the economic, environmental and labor arguments against a plant, and hopefully, convince readers not to eat chicken, regardless of where it comes from.

WARNING: Do not read past this point while eating.

In 1991 the Atlanta Constitution did a special report on the poultry industry. Of 84 federal poultry inspectors interviewed, 81 said that thousands of birds tainted or stained with feces which a decade ago would have been condemned, are now rinsed and sold daily. Seventy-five of the inspectors said that thousands of diseased birds pass from processing lines to stores every day.

Poultry plants often salvage meat, cutting away visibly diseased or contaminated sections, and selling the rest as packaged wings, legs or breasts, said 70 inspectors. Richard Simmons, inspector at a ConAgra plant said "Practically every bird now, no matter how bad, is salvaged. This meat is not wholesome. I would not want to eat it. I would never, in my wildest dreams, buy cut-up parts at a store today."

And just listen to USDA Inspector Ronnie Sarratt: "I've had birds that had yellow pus visibly coming out of their insides, and I was told to save the breast meat off them and even save the second joint of the wing. You might get those breasts today at a store in a package of breast fillets. And you might get the other in a pack of buffalo wings."

Previously, inspectors used to condemn all birds with air sacculitus, a disease that causes yellow fluids and mucus to break up into the lungs. In an 1989 article in Southern Exposure, USDA inspector Estes Philpott of Arkansas estimated that he was forced to approve 40 percent of air sac birds that would have been condemned 10 years ago.

Pat Godfrey, an inspector at Tyson's Springdale, Arkansas plant says: "Would you want to go out to a pasture with a chicken, cut him up, then drop him into a fresh manure pile and eat him? That's what the product is like coming from chicken plants today."

Technology Overload
The technological revolution in the poultry industry reduces human beings to a cog in an a ruthless killing machine. It also increases contamination. One example is eviscerating machines. Mechanical eviscerating machines are supposed to rip intestines from the carcasses, but often rip them open and spill feces all over the body cavity. This is partly due to the machine speed, run from 70 to 90 birds per minute. This is nearly three times faster than a decade ago.

Contamination is also increased by technological developments like feather pickers. These machines have rubber "fingers" designed to pound off feathers. Unfortunately, they also pound dirt and manure into the skin pores.

Salmonella
Salmonella contamination has steadily increased from an official rate of 29% of all USDA-approved broilers in 1967 to 37% in 1979. USDA eventually stopped reporting the levels. Some surveys revealed contamination levels at some plants of 60 percent. Dr. Douglas Archer, FDA Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition has identified some of the source: "There's no question that the extent of the salmonella contamination is due to the way the chickens are raised, the crowding and stress."

Then there is "fecal soup." Thousands of dirty chickens are bathed together in a chill tank, creating a mixture known as fecal soup that spreads contamination from bird to bird. Consumers pay for this fecal soup when they buy chicken, since up to 15% of poultry weight consists of fecal soup. USDA released a study in 1988 that conceded that washing does not adequately remove salmonella germs left behind by fecal contamination, even after 40 consecutive rinses.

One critic complained, "It's not fair to expect consumers to behave as if they're decontaminating Three Mile Island when all they want to do is cook their Sunday dinner."

Cruelty to Spare
The disregard for plant workers and growers detailed in the last issue of The Touchstone is a natural outgrowth of the chicken plant mentality: it is no coincidence that the system that treats one form of living beings (chickens) so grossly inhumane also treats humans so callously. Whistleblowers describe the work as modern slavery.

Since employees are not always allowed to leave the line to go to the bathroom, they sometimes go on the floor. Chickens that fall in the urine and excrement are routinely picked up and returned to the line. According to inspectors, at one Southern poultry plant the management would not stop the line after a pregnant woman vomited on it.

Poultry plants also use chlorine to wash chickens. One company used up to 70% chlorine to bleach feces it refused to remove from the carcasses. The heavy fumes from the solutions caused workers' eyes to water, skin to peel from their hands, and the development of lung problems, chronic headaches and sore throats.

For the birds, although their ultimate fate at a slaughterhouse is preordained, their short "life" while alive is nothing short of hell. Chickens bleed, hurt and cry just like other creatures.

Imagine a 42-day-old skeleton being forced to carry an 84-day-old body weight. According to Paul Miler, D.V.M., Georgia Poultry Diagnostic Laboratory, "Broilers are born to die, they stress so easily. The chickens today have a lot of health problems because they were forced to grow too fast. You'll never get anyone to admit it, but the reason they have leg problems is because their muscular system is growing much faster than their skeletons, so they can't support their own weight. Everyone in the industry knows this for a fact, but no one talks about it."

This cruelty occurs simply because to date, there are no federal welfare laws governing the raising, transport, or slaughter of chickens in the U.S. The 7.5 billion birds slaughtered each year in the U.S. (30 million per day) are excluded from the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958. A bill has been introduced in Congress to address this, H.R. 264, the Humane Methods of Poultry Slaughter Act of 1995.

Everybody in the car for some Chicken McNuggets! The only sensible choice is to stop eating chicken. The typical American diet includes too much protein, fat, and cholesterol anyway. The USDA, like all too many (most) federal regulatory agencies, is in bed with industry. Chicken is not going to be safe to eat anytime soon, if ever. If you need further convincing, consider the unhesitating condemnation of chicken by former supervisor of U.S. Poultry inspection Rodney Leonard: "I don't eat chicken anymore. I won't eat it. I won't allow it in my house."

Also note that in addition to being a health hazard when eaten, chicken production stresses the environment: it takes 815 gallons of water to produce a pound of edible chicken, versus 23 to 33 gallons per pound of tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, wheat and carrots.

In the last few years there has been an explosion of new vegetarian foods appearing in natural food stores. Some items are now even in some mainstream supermarkets. Seek them out! You will help yourself, the suffering workers in the filthy and dangerous slaughterhouses, the environment, and of course, the billions of chickens who have a role and purpose in life on this planet other than just to be another (unhealthy) menu item.

[Click here to read an article on why you should eat "clean" chicken if you're not going to become a vegetarian. -- Chet]

References:
1) "The Fox Guarding the Hen House", Tom Devine, Southern Exposure (Summer 1989), pp. 39-42.

2) "Realities For The 90's", EarthSave Foundation.

3) "Chicken: How safe?", Atlanta Constitution (May 26, 1991).

4) Karen Davis, President, United Poultry Concerns, letter to "48 Hours," January 14, 1994.

5) Poultry Press, 5,1 (Winter/Spring 1995), p. 3.

6) VIVA VINE, newsletter of the Viva Vegie Society, by Pamela Teisler, undated (circa 1994).

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