Many poultry growers in southern states are also beef producers. In both cases the packers hold the cards in the game and no one to call them on the frauds they do:
Tex
By amy.tennery - The Big Money
America's favorite meat is in a foul state these days. Just a few years ago, chicken became the most produced meat in the United States, yet the sector today is struggling. Pilgrim's Pride, the nation's largest poultry producer, filed for bankruptcy protection last December, after fluctuating feed prices crippled its business.
Industry analysts claim that chicken won top place in U.S. meat consumption thanks to an increased interest in our diet. Yet the chicks are about as healthy as their industry. Last Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Protection named poultry the No. 1 source of food-borne outbreaks.
And the sector doesn't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to employee care, either. Seventy-one percent of U.S. contract poultry farmers earn subpoverty-level wages, according to a 2005 report from the United Food and Commercial Workers.
So what happened? And why is the chicken industry floundering on all fronts?
Post-War Processed Products
Chicken knew its place at the American table until after World War II, when consumers started gobbling up the meat at an alarming rate. From 1945 on, consumption skyrocketed, due to an increased affluence and culture of domestic convenience. From the 1990s, poultry consumption outpaced pork. And chicken's hot spot on doctors' golden lists gave the industry an even greater incentive to feed demand with new, jazzy products. Health could deliver wealth, and poultry magnates were willing to do whatever it took to get their share of the profit.
Eventually, chicken paid off—in 2008 U.S. producers made more than $24 billion.
In his 2005 book, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food, Steve Striffler argued that chicken evolved from a heart-healthy product to a poked, prodded, and manipulated commodity in the quest for greater profits. "It's not that profitable to sell the same old chicken," said Striffler. "The way you make money is to create new products." In the late 1970s, Tyson sold fewer than 20 different chicken products, he said. Today its Web site advertises nearly 80 different products, most of which are precooked, frozen, or laden with additives. Ranch Flavored Chicken Fries, anyone?
As the demand for chicken grew and corporations took hold, "there's been a general increased mechanization," Striffler says. Speed and size drove production—and making fatter birds topped the agenda. A report from the Economic Research Service with the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that chickens slaughtered in the late 1990s were a full 1½ pounds heavier than their 1960s counterparts.
Eighty-five percent of chicken sold in the 1970s and '80s was sold in its "unprocessed" form, and 15 percent was sold in processed varieties, according to Striffler. "By the end of the 1990s the numbers were completely reversed."
And, of course, the adverse health effects that processed foods bring are well-documented.
Federal Regulations
As the New York Times article mentions, the main reason people get sick from chicken is consumer misuse. Basically, buyers undercook or fail to wash their hands after preparation. But federally sanctioned industrial practices in the United States do little to reduce the likelihood of chicken contamination. Regulations do not require you to date chicken products. And the use of antibiotics on chicken is legal, despite numerous claims charging that their use can create a stronger strain of resistant bacteria in the birds.
This issue has drawn such vitriol from consumer advocates that Tyson even tried to herald its supposed "antibiotic-free" status as a selling point in advertising. That ended, though, when competitors called foul and Tyson came clean about its true antibiotic policies. (Hint: It puts ionophores in grown chickens' feed and injects its eggs with antibiotics, too.)
Just as key to our country's grody chicken scenario is the process by which we slaughter the birds. (Warning: If you're eating lunch, stop reading here.) After birds are slaughtered, workers must chill the carcasses so that they don't decompose—and while U.S. and European slaughter techniques are similar in some regards, the cooling processes on the two continents are very different. In Europe, workers chill the postmortem chickens by placing them in a cooling chamber, where the birds are chilled via cold air. This is required by EU regulations. In the United States, things go a little differently. After slaughtering, scalding, and plucking, chicken processors place all the carcasses in giant tanks of cold water.
The problem with this is that if one chicken has bacteria or disease, all the chickens in the tank are exposed. These cooling tanks hold what Striffler—and plenty of other people—call a "fecal soup." (For their part, the National Chicken Council argues that water chilling is safer than other methods.) Some of that water used to chill chickens is actually carried with the product to the supermarket. That little pool of liquid settled in your chicken's packaging? That's from the tanks Unfortunately, buying "organic" chicken doesn't solve this problem. Organic describes only the feed supplied to chickens during their growth—not the means by which they were handled after slaughter.
Corporate Consolidation
And then there's the impact on chicken workers. Since the 1950s and '60s, the business model for chicken slaughterhouses changed. What was once a welcome industry for small farmers became a field controlled by production groups.
And even earlier, poultry corporations were instrumental in the charge to use cheap, uneducated, and nonunionized labor among meat producers, said Striffler. While beef and pork processing has its origins in cities—where unions were common—poultry production occurred more often in impoverished rural areas. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle revitalized meatpacking groups in urban regions, leading to safety legislation as early as 1906. But that kind of revolution had little sway on chicken processors at the same time.
"There was never a golden era for poultry workers," said Striffler. Today, complaints of cruel supervisors and massive cover-ups of employee injuries abound. The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a laundry list of violations to educate workers.
Tex