KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge
bbc.co.uk40 points by penguin_booze 4 hours ago
40 points by penguin_booze 4 hours ago
Funny how across the board we have a relentless march of innovation, invention, discovery and technical prowess and yet almost everything seems constantly gets more expensive and/or worse.
I was reading today that we have managed to grow chickens with so much fat that the meat is less healthy than red meat.
I raised chickens as a teenager, mostly for eggs, but also meat. Chickens are terrible, I hate them. They're mean, cannibalistic, and I can easily see them evolving gigantism like other theropod did and becoming apex predators. I honestly think eating them isn't bad.
Nevertheless, encouraging cruelty in poultry keepers is a bad thing. Casual cruelty has a corrosive effect on people.
High streets are dying, pretty sure half the restaurants closest to me are either closed or going to close down soon. Coming back from Japan it was certainly a whiplash to find just a row of fried chicken shops and empty restaurants.
It made me rethink how great of a signal GDP growth really is on how good things are economically.
It really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good.
I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that (see also: the significant multiple more that we pay for most infrastructure compared with peer states). It would help explain why a lot of "poorer" countries reportedly don't feel poorer to live in, for a normal family, than the US.
> "It would help explain why a lot of "poorer" countries reportedly don't feel poorer to live in, for a normal family, than the US."
There are many sources for purchasing power parity (PPP) corrected GDP if you're looking for a source on this. PPP-correction does indeed reduce the disparities, but does not eliminate them. It's also tough to judge relative living standards as a tourist or during a short-term stay in a poorer country, as one is generally exposed to 'nice' subset of locales and people.
GDP is a useless metric when so much of it basically wash trading.
It's always been a dodgy metric and susceptible to gaming. But now that money is less and less connected to useful value, it's almost a sick joke.
GDP is a useful metric when we remember what it problems it was created to solve --e.g. in the Great Depression there was a concern of a decline of economic activity and a way to measure such activity and decide whether it was at a depressed level, and to what degree.
Similarly, the reason in international finance there is a focus on current value GDP is because lenders want to know whether a nation can repay foreign loans. As foreign loans are measured in dollars, lenders care about GDP in dollar terms.
But as is often the case, when people with money or institutional power create a metric for their own use case, many other groups see that and go "Aha! Free data!" and they start writing publications using this data for their own purposes, often forgetting what GDP is actually measuring and forcing it into a proxy for what they care about, for example, development economics, and often this is a poor proxy.
GDP is also useless in that it values doordashing cold fried chicken as more valuable than cooking and eating one you hand raised at home.
The arithmetic mean is one of the great tools of statistical lies. You can sweep so much sample variance under the rug with this baby!
I recently had a discussion with my wife and we check our bank records to find out how long it's been since we've been to a KFC, McDonalds or Burger King. Apparently it's been 16 months now.
It's overpriced, unhealthy and American. Enough reasons to not go.
As an American I also have not gone to any of those restaurants.
The thing is, America is the China of food[0]: we make shittons of unsafe, dangerous product and foist it onto the market by burying the market's pricing mechanism under a mountain of garbage until nobody else can compete and we dictate the price.
People will note that China makes plenty of safe, normal products too. The same applies to American agriculture, but that doesn't matter. The problem is mainly that the industry has absolutely no standards. If they can go a few cents cheaper, they will.
[0] And, prior to this century, we were also China in general - a lot of our manufacturing was stolen from Britain and ran for far cheaper.
>"If they can go a few cents cheaper, they will."
What I find most interesting about the USA is the variety; yes, there are low-cost (often unhealthy) options, but there are also a wide variety of wonderful restaurants which are not pinching pennies on their costs, even amongst national chains.
Interesting that the pledge is about fast growing vs normal growing chicken. Does the UK not have the overcrowded cage conditions we have here in the US?
The complaint is about these companies not wanting to reduce their profit margins, but how slowly do the other chickens grow? Are we doubling maturity time or increasing it by 10%? Doubling would probably impact consumer prices beyond what could be absorbed by eliminating the margin.
Most lay opinions I can find online claim the fast growing birds to have inferior meat quality. I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test.
> how slowly do the other chickens grow?
Here in Norway the two largest producers are moving[1][2] from Ross 308 to Rustic Gold[3]. They live roughly 40-50% longer. The third largest has already moved[4] to the hybrid Hubbard JA 878, with similar growth.
However it's also easier to get the slow-growing chickens larger without health issues, roughly 25% according to this[5], so it turns out you might need fewer chickens to produce the same amount of meat. And thus the economics might not be as bad as it looks at first glance.
That's for Norway though, perhaps it's different elsewhere.
[1]: https://www.nortura.no/b%C3%A6rekraft-i-nortura/omsorg-for-m...
[2]: https://kommunikasjon.ntb.no/pressemelding/18709900/coop-tra...
[3]: https://aviagen.com/eu/brands/rowan-range/products/rustic-go...
[4]: https://dyrevern.no/landbruksdyr/kraftig-velferdsloft-for-no...
[5]: https://www.norsklandbruk.no/den-vanskelige-okonomien-i-a-by...
> Most lay opinions I can find online claim the fast growing birds to have inferior meat quality. I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test.
It’s easy to distinguish.
The fast growing birds are much larger, breasts at least 2x the size of normal chickens.
The larger breasts you notice when cutting them when raw, they often have a tough texture and meat inside like strands. When cooked and chewing it’ll have a hard chewy texture, sometimes feeling raw/uncooked. This is called woody breast.
If you have a standard small chicken breast, the texture feels much more pleasant when eating, like chicken.
I always try to avoid large chicken breasts and get the smallest possible but it’s virtually impossible now unless you live near high end low volume butcher with their own independent supplier.
> I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test
I find it genuinely baffling that that would be the point.
It's a shame. Perdue managed to get wway from antibiotics but KFC went the other way.
Maybe it is not a big deal? Chicken goes through withdrawal period and level of residue is tested in end product, supposedly..
If you pump livestock (chicken, cows or pigs) full of antibiotics, surely they are going to piss/crap a lot of it into the environment, hastening antibiotic resistance.
but it will be localized farm environment only..
Its just question of risk/benefit ratio, benefit is clear: cheap meat, because producers will be less impacted by deceases. Risks are not so clear in this case.
It doesn't stay localized; runoff from farmland is a major issue. In other words, the farm animal poops out a bunch of antiobiotics, then it rains and that poop ends up washing into the river/lake/water table. That's already something that happens with situations like E. coli contamination. Things that happen on the farm don't stay on the farm.
Ok, still focus could be not on avoiding antibiotics completely, but preventing runoff, or finding types which decay faster in environment.
Do we know even if we can build sustainable large scale industry without antibiotics?
Fuck these companies, just fucking killing the planet and anyone that touches their food
You can’t have cheap fast food made from humanely raised livestock.
Nando’s however is even more despicable. Here in the US they aren’t cheap.
Well this is probably why KFC chicken has become inedible. I don't know what they are doing to those things but they are practically a different species at this point. I love fast food and eat it all the time, but KFC "chicken" is just a disgusting grey slimey pile of garbage.
has it ever not been inedible?
>has it ever not been inedible?
No restaurant ever makes it big without being good to begin with. I remember the chicken being on par with any other fast food as a kid, they just fell off hard in the 2000s. I'm really not sure who is still buying their buckets.