Super Chick

The largest breasts I have ever seen!
Really ginormous...
I mean really scary colossal...

...for a chicken. I am purchasing more and more organic, grain fed meat. Organic cost more, so we will just have to eat less meat in order to eat the best meat. And tonight's baked chicken proves why we need to do this. I had to slice the breasts in 3 sections in order to expect them to cook in a reasonable length of time. Years ago I simply placed the breast portion in the casserole as is.

Did you know?

The discovery that low doses of antibiotics make chicken grow faster was made in 1950. Since then, practise of mixing antibiotics (up to a dozen different types) in animal feed has become quite common, and scientist estimate that 70 percent of all antibiotics consumed in the United States are used for livestock production.

It's important to note that these low-dose antibiotics added to feed are not necessarily used to treat diseases or infections. Over 90 percent of the antibiotics used in livestock production are for "non-therapeutic" purposes, merely to enhance growth and weight gain in the animals.

Non-therapeutic usage of antibiotics has been especially common in poultry production. Since the 1980's, annual antibiotic usage in poultry production has increased from approximately 2 million to 10.5 million pounds, an increase of more than 300 percent! Although this is due in part to the overall growth of the poultry industry, that's still a lot of antibiotics used to make chickens grow faster.*

There was a time when fried chicken was a Sunday Dinner treat. We can now consume fried chicken every day if we wish (to have a heart attack at an early age). It should take a chicken approximately 8 months to mature (contingent on type and nutrition). To meet the demands of food production today a chicken can be ready in a matter of weeks. And they are bred to have larger breasts since that is what all the restaurants want for nuggets and strips.

Can we place all the blame on the Poultry Industry? What role does our own greed and impatience play in this? We want/we demand, without regard to our future or the world's. Our bodies not only grow larger but become resistant to antibiotics when we may need them to protect our health. This is a widely known issue that most of us continue to ignore.

*http://www.circleofresponsibility.com/page/19/poultry.htm


*note...
the Super Bowl and commercials were sadly lacking in originality so I had time to think about this.