I'll have my Chickens raised Vegan and my Burgers Sans Pink Slime (Thank you very much!)

I have a great amount of pride in my Agricultural education and background. I think I can speak fairly intelligently on a wide variety of topics in agriculture subjects that include animal husbandry and food production.

It is for that reason that I was recently surprised by a couple of things I've just learned.

I'll admit, I've made light of my friends' fascination with organic and natural foods and their willingness to pay2–4 times the price for food, which, in my opinion, is no better than conventionally raised food and has been extraordinarily over-hyped in order to make (a lot of) money from people who seem to me to be out of touch with how their food is produced.

Growing up, the community of farm people I associated with worked hard and took pride in production agriculture while they embraced new ideas and technology with enthusiasm. They associated the organic movement with long haired hippies who smoked pot and ate fruit with worm holes in it and didn't take baths quite as often as they should. In other words, they viewed it as “Left Coast Radical”, I would even say.

Photo credit: The Culinary Geek on Flickr

This common sense approach to life and growing food made me think that the wild things my friends had been saying about some things of late were just too fantastic to be true. I started seeing cartons of eggs and packaged chicken that would have statements on them like, “Fed a natural vegetarian diet” and “100% natural vegetarian diet”. When I first started seeing that I thought,”Idiots! Chickens are all fed grain, of course that's vegetarian.” 

Wrong. I find that chicken parts, that's right, parts of chickens from processing, are made in to chicken feed and fed back to……chickens. They say all day long that this is OK, but it just seems wrong to me, I don't want that……take me back to the chicken houses of my youth!  I want my chickens fed……grain. Yes. Vegetarian chickens. Vegetarian eggs. So OK. Now I look for that on the cartons. It's true.

Image Credit: Nick Wheeler Oz on Flickr.

Image Credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr

Then, the other day, there was a press release. The statement was that McDonald's and some other high profile restaurants were going to stop using a “filler ingredient” in their burgers consisting of “trim from the extremities of the beef” which is more apt to contain unacceptably high bacteria populations, so they use ammonium chloride gas on it to kill that and then put it in and feed it to……people. This is done at the chain restaurants. Shaves a few cents a pound off the meat for them, amounting to millions of dollars per year. The material is referred to by some as “Pink Slime”. What?? I honestly did not know that. The burger in my freezer is grown right here on my farm and…..it's 100%…….beef -burger-meat. No filler. Or more accurately, NO PINK SLIME. Good grief. How does anybody think that's OK?

I guess I need to make sure that corporate America is following those wholesome food ethics I grew up with. Which will involve, among other things, feeding chickens a vegetarian diet and, refraining from using fillers in hamburgers. Wow, guys. You make a bad name for a good profession. Whatever else you are doing that deviates from common sense, safe, good wholesome food like I grew up with and I still produce, stop it right now! ~JB was here.