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Bruce Friedrich

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Outraged by Pink Slime? Actually, Chicken Could Be a Much Bigger Risk

Posted: 11/19/2012 4:24 pm

The product is "so covered in bacteria that researchers at the University of Arizona found more fecal bacteria in the kitchen -- on sponges and dish towels, and in the sink drain -- than they found swabbing the toilet." Thank God, one of nation's top producers of "lean, finely textured beef" (a.k.a. Pink Slime!) went bankrupt.

Actually, that first line wasn't talking about pink slime, which some say is actually safer than untreated ground beef according to food safety advocates. That line was talking about a much bigger safety threat: White Slime (a.k.a. chicken).

Mark Bittman, reflecting on chicken in the New York Times noted: "Bill Marler, a leading food safety lawyer, told me he assumes that 'almost all chicken and turkey produced in the U.S. is tainted with a bacteria that can kill you.'" That's a fair assumption: According to Consumer Reports, "two-thirds [of store-bought chickens] harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter, the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease." As Men's Health magazine colorfully notes: "It's a wonder broilers don't come with barf bags."

Public health expert Dr. Michael Greger offers this more graphic description, which I tagged in my opening line:

Chicken carcasses are so covered in bacteria that researchers at the University of Arizona found more fecal bacteria in the kitchen -- on sponges and dish towels, and in the sink drain -- than they found swabbing the toilet. In a meat-eater's house it may be safer to lick the rim of the toilet seat than the kitchen countertop, because people aren't preparing chickens in their toilets. Chicken 'juice' is essentially raw fecal soup.


You might want to read that last paragraph again: Basically, researchers found more poop in people's kitchens than the found in their toilets. "Chicken 'juice' is essentially raw fecal soup."

Remarkably, chicken is about to become even more disgusting: The USDA has removed government inspectors from more than 20 plants and wants to fire another 800 safety inspectors -- putting the poultry industry in charge of monitoring itself (yes, seriously). According to Food & Water Watch, the plants the are currently self-inspecting have ratcheted up line speeds to almost 200 birds per minute (so more than three birds per second), and evidence is that if the system goes national, we'll see "more defective and unsanitary poultry contaminated with feathers, bile and feces."

The entire FWW report is worth reading, but I'll just tell you that the "inspection category that had the highest error rate [involved] feathers, lungs, oil glands, trachea and bile still on the carcass. The average error rate for this category in the chicken slaughter facilities was 64 percent... In one turkey slaughter facility, nearly 100 percent of samples found this category of defect." Yum.

There's a real dispute about the safety of pink slime -- not so of chicken. According to Dr. Greger, campylobacter "can trigger arthritis, heart and blood infections, and a condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome that can leave people permanently disabled and paralyzed... With the virtual elimination of polio, the most common cause of neuromuscular paralysis in the United States now comes from eating chicken."

And salmonella?
Within 12 to 72 hours of infection the fever, diarrhea, and abdominal cramps start. If the victim is lucky it's over within a week. If not, the bacteria can burrow through the intestinal wall and infect the bloodstream, seeding its way to other organs, including the heart, bones, and brain... Salmonella kills more Americans than any other food borne illness.


Furthermore, "one exposure can now trigger persistent irritable bowel syndrome and what's called reactive arthritis, which can become a debilitating lifelong condition of swollen painful joints."

If we as a nation became alarmed in proper proportion to things that are concerning, white slime would be a much bigger concern than pink slime, and it would be Tyson Foods that was filing for bankruptcy, in addition to the makers of "pink slime."

 
 
 

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01:23 PM on 12/04/2012
Another great one that I send to friends and family, hoping they're take it in and change their diets! Thanks for always telling it like it is and fighting for doing the right thing.
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Jenny Brown
09:53 PM on 11/29/2012
Another great article, Bruce. xo
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Bruce Friedrich
Sr. Dir. for Strategic Initiatives, Farm Sanctuary
03:08 PM on 12/03/2012
Thank you very much, Jenny!
10:34 AM on 11/28/2012
You are what you eat....

The bottom line people is, it is the margin in the ledger, profits profits profits. It has nothing to do with your health. Cruelty to animals, eating animal flesh (animal flesh is not meat, historically changed) shows how barbaric and cruel we are as a society. The status quo to keep the money mongering evil continuing, filling your heads with poisoned flesh of animals to skew your thinking without common sense and rational.

If you were raised to eat people, you'd feel the same way as we do with eating the flesh of animals. Culture, how we are raised, instills what our belief systems are. China, it is ok to eat cats and dogs, to boil them alive, skin them alive; to cause them as much pain as possible before death because of their belief systems. The difference in America is, we do it mostly behind closed doors,... Asia, they do it out in the open.

Go vegan people, avoid the risk of your health becoming impaired. The cruelty stops, the illness stops, the clarity begins, all, with what you put on your plate. Changing what you put on your plate to eat, changes the health of yourself, animals and the planet... for the better.
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carolrhartsell
HP Senior Comedy Editor
12:36 PM on 11/27/2012
I'm curious what the percentages look like for local, hands-on farmers, who slaughter animals themselves on a small-scale and know what they're doing. When I went back to eating locally-sourced meat, I made a point to go to a farm and watch my Christmas turkey slaughtered... the thinking being if I were going to eat it, I needed to be honest about what took place. But one thing that stuck in my mind in particular was when the farmer -- a 70-year-old woman who had done this her whole life -- carefully removed the bowels and intestines from the bird, explaining, "If you tear them, you essentially get fecal matter all over your bird." I'm going to guess that improper slaughtering is one of the main causes of these high percentages of fecal matter on mass-produced poultry.

Of course, if you object to eating meat and slaughtering animals all together, that doesn't matter, but for someone more on the fence, like me, it's worth making the distinction.
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Bruce Friedrich
Sr. Dir. for Strategic Initiatives, Farm Sanctuary
03:10 PM on 12/03/2012
I'm sure you're right about less and more fecal contamination, but things are not pretty at the small-scale level either. Check out this video, "Free Range: A Short Documentary," by a former Univ. of Tex. film student--it shows bird slaughter at its "best," and it's still pretty bad...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMF5ZW2QvYg
05:16 PM on 11/20/2012
I periodically visit the site http://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls/default.htm because there are about 10 food recalls a week, mostly involving salmonella, listeria, and E. coli, and undeclared allergens. Big and small food manufacturers alike are affected. Everything from E. coli in fresh spinach to salmonella in tahini, to undeclared soy in tuna fish. The key to avoiding food poisoning seems to be, don't buy processed foods, and wash thoroughly whatever you do buy.
02:25 PM on 11/20/2012
Our food complex is sick and broken. Eating sick animals makes you sick - is that really a surprise? The catch is now that you know this, what are you going to do about it? If you continue to buy cheap food you are then complicit and industrialized food production will continue with big pharm expanding their coffers with all the drugs sold to offset the result of consuming bad food. It's a commitment and will cost more, but start sourcing your food from local farms; buy fresh and local and you will reap the reward of better health.
08:23 PM on 11/19/2012
yes this a common trick in 8th grade science class
show the kids that there is less bacteria in the bathroom than most other places to scare them into washing their hands
08:03 PM on 11/19/2012
oh and yuk
08:03 PM on 11/19/2012
carasses lol
06:00 PM on 11/19/2012
Holy crap. This is extremely unsettling because my family eats a lot of chicken and chicken products.
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Bruce Friedrich
Sr. Dir. for Strategic Initiatives, Farm Sanctuary
03:12 PM on 12/03/2012
Watch this video, from the 3 minute mark to 5:30:

www.WhatCameBefore.com
I-US
Beware the monsters lurking in word swamps.
05:59 PM on 11/19/2012
That's disgusting!
05:01 PM on 11/19/2012
Thank you for your informative post! I will be sure to share with my omnivorous friends....I had read last year that the producers would be doing their own inspections, which makes very little sense from a health standpoint. May make sense from a money savings standpoint, but without third party inspection the fact that the meat is as dirty and infested as it is, is hardly surprising....Always love your blogs. Keep them coming....
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migdawn
07:36 AM on 11/20/2012
absolutley!! amd a good reminder for us to sanitze our kitchens more often(yes goes without saying but why not say anyway!!)
08:31 AM on 11/20/2012
Or better yet, not ingest nor subsidize the filth and cruelty associated with chicken (and meat) farming in general!
11:56 AM on 11/20/2012
I believe that the problem is in the "processing" of chicken - when the intestines are ripped out, they spill out e coli and all other kinds of nasty bacteria that don't belong outside of an animal's intestinal tract. "If you play, you pay"
12:24 PM on 11/20/2012
Could be...That and the horrendously, inhumane and filthy conditions in which they are raised, where they are often stacked upon each other, defecating on each other constantly...surely not something to subsidize with one's consumer dollars or to ingest this filth and suffering....