> 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.<p>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.
A result from today's fast-grown chickens is the epidemic of 'woody' chicken breast.<p><a href="https://holistickenko.com/woody-chicken-breast/" rel="nofollow">https://holistickenko.com/woody-chicken-breast/</a><p><i>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.</i><p><i>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.</i>
I gave up on chicken years before I went vegie. They we treat these creatures is disgraceful and disgusting.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Can't help but lol every time. I guess eating sick young chickens, who have never seen the sun, is more natural an healthy.<p>But I know I am not the crazy one. They are
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.<p>(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.)
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.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs</a>
Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing on the Chicken Of Tomorrow documentary:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G0stojwYjI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G0stojwYjI</a>
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.
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.<p>Also air chilled chicken is where it’s at. So much better than the water bath cooled ones
If this story is interesting to you, Gastropod did a really interesting episode on this a while back: The Birds and The Bugs<p><a href="https://gastropod.com/the-birds-and-the-bugs/" rel="nofollow">https://gastropod.com/the-birds-and-the-bugs/</a>