Maybe Farmers should be required to print a photo of the actual living bird and their habitat on the packaging. When consumers would see those scruffy chicken for $2 compared to the healthy $7 they might choose the organic ones more often.
While I agree with the sentiment, in the long run that would just lead to quick-growing chickens that look nice but are as unhealthy as they are now. See "purebreed" dogs.
This reminded me of the "Colin the Chicken" skit on Portlandia where a couple ordering chicken gets to see its birth certificate, diet, emotional profile, heritage and family...
the trend to "free-range" chicken reminds me of similar half-hearted efforts against the climate crisis; we can't decrease CO2 levels just by collecting plastic trash separately if it is shipped to the incinerator all the same. And despite the animal welfare theatre, the organic farm chicken will be killed just the same. But we feel a bit better about it.
I guess it makes sense, because how else could you keep up with demand, but my view of animal lifecycles only has stuff like bugs fully maturing so quickly.
Interesting stuff.
Now my question is why are bananas so cheap? They come all the way from like Brazil, but they're still cheaper than the apple that is grown just a couple hours from me.
It's really a fascinating but tragic history of the exploitation of "banana republics" where banana exports become so profitable that a US-based company owned more land in some Central American countries than anyone else. They had (have?) huge fleets of ships solely for the purpose of bringing bananas into the US.
It is quite a long and complicated story, and there are more than a few books written about it.
Bananas are very easy & cheap to transport which led to them becoming a more popular fruit, accelerating demand and supply, etc, etc.
They can be delivered while they are green and sturdy and then they are kept in ethylene atmosphere which makes them ripe so they can be instantly sold to the consumers.
You don't know what the word monoculture means until you stand in the middle of a soybean field in the midwest and see nothing but more soybeans (from the same small handful of varieties provided by giant seed companies) as far as the eye can see. Please do not imagine for one second that a plant-based diet increases biodiversity.
Chickens are one the most successful animals on earth! By evolving to become fatter, more succulent, and delicious, they have convinced humans to feed and house them, and in doing so have multiplied to vast numbers and spread their genes almost everywhere across the globe.
black people, too! we were so strong and resilient and good at labor that humans paid for our travel across the seas and gave us the opportunity to help build America! we were fed and housed and everything, oh my! gosh
> Shadow with me while I'm steppin' on my own resentment
> Life scatter in all directions, I was overzealous
> Overcurious, Momma worry her days get better
> I know she heard me, a timid voice in her stormy weather
> And Poppa taught me our ancestors were tarred and feathered
And brought across the sea, bodies swinging from poplar trees
> I wore a modernesque version, my burden haunted me
I cautiously approach the rather daunting sea
> By nightfall I face the man I'm 'sposed to be
All this grief, been eatin' away my stomach lining
> It's hard to eat when my poppa image stuck inside me
I always found it a bit tacky to call it an "achievement" for the animal/plant that humans farm it. Same with "evolutionary" changes due to selective breeding. Both said in the video.
Always feels like someone is trying to spin reality on me. "What? The birds love it! Instead of living in nature in a part of Africa, they are suffering worldwide to the tune of billions!" Their hard work paid off!
What sort of lives do you think birds living "in nature" in Africa have?
Instead of being painlessly gassed to death like farmed chickens they'll be eaten alive by some predator, or instead of being provided with antibiotics as hatchlings perhaps worms will eat most of their siblings alive before they leave the nest.
Romanticizing factory farming is ridiculous, but so is romanticizing the lives of wild animals.
Whenever I travel outside the US, I'm always struck by how different the chickens look. Chickens in the US have a pale appearance, with flabby, almost mushy meat. They look as if they were grown on a tree, never alive and running. While chickens in say, Italy or Mexico tend to look like they were alive at some point. There's color in the meat, often a yellow tint. Their skin and muscle look used and not atrophied.
I wonder how these differences extend to nutritional value?
It certainly extends to taste, I wouldn't be surprised if nutrition also.
I don't think you can be as simplistic as "US chicken bad" though. The US has a very well established industrial food chain that reaches everywhere, but it's not the only thing going on. The US industry has some economies of scale that work for it too.
Quick-cheap-and-nasty chicken in the UK is just as flavorless as in the US. And you can find better stuff in the US, albeit at higher cost. But the same can be said of flavorless but cheap Holstein milk & butter, or basically anything that has been subjected to aggressive optimizing for cost per unit/volume whatever. Applies to factory bred chickens, but also tomatoes designed to ship well.
The end result is usually pretty cheap, and pretty bland at best.
I've noticed the same thing with tomatoes and apricots. I've got a good friend whose family have an apricot farm in the Kurdish part of Turkey, and their apricots are amazing, but the same variety grown in Western Washington tastes like plastic. There's something seriously pathological with the "terrior" in the western part of north America. (Luckily it doesn't extend to wine.)
The bulk of the video is a british chicken farmer explaining the economic realities. I don't think bad chicken is unique to the US; I suspect cheap meat is about the same everywhere.
Land usage per chicken, difference between free-range vs. intensively reared:
1/12 m^2 vs. 1/17 m^2
Consumer cost, difference between free range vs. intensively reared:
4 euros/lb vs. 2 euros/lb.
Does the difference in production costs explain the drastic consumer cost difference between these two methods? Why can't free-range farming be automated like it is in the intensive rearing model?
Chickens do not eat in the dark. That’s why the light in stables for intensively reared chicken is on way longer than the sun is up (I’m not up to date on what’s considered optimal today, but I think 24 hours a day was abandoned because it caused too much stress (and stress harms growth, or even kills chicken) for weird things such as “40 minutes on, 20 minutes off”)
Some of the large factors that affect production costs are feeding the chicken and e.g. capital costs of the stable, but optimizing production per dollar more or less boils down to getting the “feed conversion ratio” down.
If free range chicken makes up 4% of the market, perhaps it’s analogous to a Mercedes Benz...it’s not 4x more expensive to manufacture, but the people who buy it aren’t strictly cost-sensitive.
My guess is that free range chicken should be about 50% more expensive, but the market can handle some aspirational pricing.
Right, but why are they the cheapest form of meat? There’s probably some biochemical or energy utilization reason. Perhaps it has to do with chickens being fairly lean meat. I don’t know, but have often wondered.
thanks to the bland taste of these factory-produced chicken, plant-based meat alternatives become more viable as an alternative. In asian dishes I started to replace chicken with seitan, the differences are too small to notice https://avocadosandales.com/2017/12/17/chickwheat-shreds/
When I went to America, I couldn't believe how cheap chicken was. I once found boneless chicken breast for $1.99/pound. Eggs were dirt cheap as well, sometimes less than $1.00/dozen.
I don't remember ever seeing prices like these in Canada.
My record for a dozen eggs was $0.37/dozen in summer of 2017 at an Aldi in a town go about it 30,000 in Iowa. It was roughly that price the whole summer.
From my understanding, that was below the price of production. 2017 was a very tough year for chicken farmers, with a huge oversupply. The chicken rendering (killing) operations were backlogged by many months. Farmers often had no choice but to raise the chickens they already bought, knowing full well they're going to be sold unprofitably.
That man and his automatic shed. How depressing. I'd much rather pay 3x as much, eat chicken 1/3 as often and actually enjoy it instead of eating it every day and hardly noticing it.
All those cheap chickens may as well have stickers on saying "1/3 the enjoyment"
Our distant relationship with where meat comes from is one of the most bizarre things about humans. Especially next to our psychopathic relationship with our own pets.
I've seen people freak out with disgust because there's a tiny feather or some dirt in their carton of eggs. Or disgusted by the hanging, swinging corpses behind the butcher when they go to order something that's sliced off the corpse.
This is what free market capitalism ends up producing. Not just for chickens, but for any product really. And this man is open and honest about it. Why is this any more depressing than a person working two minimum-wage jobs and barely making due?
If you don't like this type of thing, the other option is to change the entire system, pay ordinary people enough for their ordinary jobs that they can afford to care about animal welfare and the environment and all the other things that get de-prioritized when the option is not putting food on the table for your family.
[+] [-] arendtio|6 years ago|reply
Killed and unfeathered they all look the same.
[+] [-] Epskampie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikig|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4
[+] [-] rmtech|6 years ago|reply
Chicken breast in Europe costs about $7-10/kg. I'm not made of money, I can't afford $30/kg chicken.
[+] [-] konart|6 years ago|reply
I didn't see anything that would've driven me from buying that $2 chicken though.
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wortelefant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandallBrown|6 years ago|reply
I guess it makes sense, because how else could you keep up with demand, but my view of animal lifecycles only has stuff like bugs fully maturing so quickly.
Interesting stuff.
Now my question is why are bananas so cheap? They come all the way from like Brazil, but they're still cheaper than the apple that is grown just a couple hours from me.
[+] [-] anon5579|6 years ago|reply
It's really a fascinating but tragic history of the exploitation of "banana republics" where banana exports become so profitable that a US-based company owned more land in some Central American countries than anyone else. They had (have?) huge fleets of ships solely for the purpose of bringing bananas into the US.
It is quite a long and complicated story, and there are more than a few books written about it.
[+] [-] ymolodtsov|6 years ago|reply
They can be delivered while they are green and sturdy and then they are kept in ethylene atmosphere which makes them ripe so they can be instantly sold to the consumers.
[+] [-] rasengan0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evgen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reason077|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|6 years ago|reply
The world listens to this speech and learns:
- The UFO craze of the mid 20th century was real. Aliens really were abducting and probing humans.
- Their evaluation established that we are not clever or strong enough to be useful, but we are delicious and cheap to feed.
- A fleet of transports will soon arrive to take humans throughout the galaxy to be raised as food.
- The technological gap between us is incomprehensibly vast, so there is no possibility of resistance.
This is the story of how humanity became successful.
[+] [-] IanCal|6 years ago|reply
> By evolving to
Being selected to by us
> they have convinced humans to feed and house them
No, humans have constructed chickens to meet our requirements, minimising the amount we need to house them (e.g. killing them at a few weeks old).
[+] [-] tyho|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfmode|6 years ago|reply
> Shadow with me while I'm steppin' on my own resentment
> Life scatter in all directions, I was overzealous
> Overcurious, Momma worry her days get better
> I know she heard me, a timid voice in her stormy weather
> And Poppa taught me our ancestors were tarred and feathered And brought across the sea, bodies swinging from poplar trees
> I wore a modernesque version, my burden haunted me I cautiously approach the rather daunting sea
> By nightfall I face the man I'm 'sposed to be All this grief, been eatin' away my stomach lining
> It's hard to eat when my poppa image stuck inside me
> I wore his death mask,
> smilin' through the trauma
> In his honor,
> I'm expounding
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
Always feels like someone is trying to spin reality on me. "What? The birds love it! Instead of living in nature in a part of Africa, they are suffering worldwide to the tune of billions!" Their hard work paid off!
[+] [-] avar|6 years ago|reply
Instead of being painlessly gassed to death like farmed chickens they'll be eaten alive by some predator, or instead of being provided with antibiotics as hatchlings perhaps worms will eat most of their siblings alive before they leave the nest.
Romanticizing factory farming is ridiculous, but so is romanticizing the lives of wild animals.
From a species interaction perspective the farming of animals could be described as mutualism, but humans tend to break all the rules in traditional species interaction models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_interaction#Mutuali...
We're not unique though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism
[+] [-] Luc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] UK-AL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Buldak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _hardwaregeek|6 years ago|reply
I wonder how these differences extend to nutritional value?
[+] [-] ska|6 years ago|reply
I don't think you can be as simplistic as "US chicken bad" though. The US has a very well established industrial food chain that reaches everywhere, but it's not the only thing going on. The US industry has some economies of scale that work for it too.
Quick-cheap-and-nasty chicken in the UK is just as flavorless as in the US. And you can find better stuff in the US, albeit at higher cost. But the same can be said of flavorless but cheap Holstein milk & butter, or basically anything that has been subjected to aggressive optimizing for cost per unit/volume whatever. Applies to factory bred chickens, but also tomatoes designed to ship well.
The end result is usually pretty cheap, and pretty bland at best.
[+] [-] 13of40|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deschutes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hhjjkkll|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawarner|6 years ago|reply
1/12 m^2 vs. 1/17 m^2
Consumer cost, difference between free range vs. intensively reared:
4 euros/lb vs. 2 euros/lb.
Does the difference in production costs explain the drastic consumer cost difference between these two methods? Why can't free-range farming be automated like it is in the intensive rearing model?
[+] [-] Someone|6 years ago|reply
Some of the large factors that affect production costs are feeding the chicken and e.g. capital costs of the stable, but optimizing production per dollar more or less boils down to getting the “feed conversion ratio” down.
It is about 1,6 for intensively reared chicken in the USA, meaning they have to eat 1,6 kg of food to gain a kilogram of weight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Poultry)
For comparison, you need two kg of feed to get a kg of eggs, so eggs are about 20% more expensive per kg than chicken meat.
You can’t keep chicken that grow that fast to an age of 80 days, as they would break their legs from excessive weight.
Free range chicken are different breeds that have a higher FCR.
[+] [-] iambateman|6 years ago|reply
My guess is that free range chicken should be about 50% more expensive, but the market can handle some aspirational pricing.
[+] [-] newman8r|6 years ago|reply
Sounds like a good business to be in if it can be scaled up.
[+] [-] thinkingemote|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostjohnny|6 years ago|reply
you don't need automation to make it cheap
My family used to breed any sort of livestock, from chickens to lambs, from cows to pigs, from rabbits to pigeons
High quality meat, just for the family
chickens are by far the cheapest and easiest
(rabbits get sick easily, pigs eat a lot, cows need a lot of work to keep them clean etc. etc.)
[+] [-] toasterlovin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wortelefant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arendtio|6 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/NxvQPzrg2Wg?t=163
[+] [-] feld|6 years ago|reply
Chicken is insanely cheap.
[+] [-] hollerith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miguelrochefort|6 years ago|reply
I don't remember ever seeing prices like these in Canada.
[+] [-] froindt|6 years ago|reply
From my understanding, that was below the price of production. 2017 was a very tough year for chicken farmers, with a huge oversupply. The chicken rendering (killing) operations were backlogged by many months. Farmers often had no choice but to raise the chickens they already bought, knowing full well they're going to be sold unprofitably.
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toasterlovin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdf21|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbuwivbiu|6 years ago|reply
All those cheap chickens may as well have stickers on saying "1/3 the enjoyment"
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
Our distant relationship with where meat comes from is one of the most bizarre things about humans. Especially next to our psychopathic relationship with our own pets.
I've seen people freak out with disgust because there's a tiny feather or some dirt in their carton of eggs. Or disgusted by the hanging, swinging corpses behind the butcher when they go to order something that's sliced off the corpse.
[+] [-] lostjohnny|6 years ago|reply
you wouldn't
You already could right now but you're not doing it
[+] [-] jsilence|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] semi-extrinsic|6 years ago|reply
If you don't like this type of thing, the other option is to change the entire system, pay ordinary people enough for their ordinary jobs that they can afford to care about animal welfare and the environment and all the other things that get de-prioritized when the option is not putting food on the table for your family.
[+] [-] jolmg|6 years ago|reply