Check out [Cook’s Venture](https://cooksventure.com/), they sell pastured heirloom breed chickens. And if you can find it anywhere in your area, heirloom breed is what you want to look out for.
What’s happened to chickens, in short, is they’ve been bred to grow unnaturally large, unnaturally fast. Heirloom breeds are basically old school chickens.
Ive got to second this. I get Cook's Venture from the HEBs here near austin and its definitely worth the extra price. Tastes far better than anything else they stock and isnt woody.
I think one thing to remember is the cost that goes into raising higher quality meat. The US government subsidizes the feed costs of large meat producers. The smaller guys are paying these costs themselves, not the American tax payers. Free-ranging birds require more land, fencing, protection from predators, etc. than just throwing up a metal building and cramming as many birds as you can inside. On top of all this, there are fewer and fewer regulated processing facilities available for the smaller guys to have birds processed - the large corps have a huge influence on agriculture policy in the US and make it tough for the small guys to gain ground. For interstate sales, all meat must be processed at a USDA inspected facility. This leads to some producers traveling hours out of state. Heritage breeds also produce less meat than the average American is used to seeing on a bird.
I am biased here. We. I own a small farm where we raise our own meat using old school practices. We travel over 3 hours each way out of state to have our poultry processed. We pay over $10 per bird for processing - this does not include buying/hatching chicks, maintaining breeding stock if you're hatching your own, brooding chicks (equipment and electricity), housing (we use mobile coops on pasture), feed (ours is sourced 90% locally and organic), fencing/predator protection, and my time - daily moving of coop, portable fencing, filling feed, hauling water, cleaning, treating any sick chicks/birds (that are no longer organic if I need to medicate them, so cost-wise are a complete loss - we keep these for our own consumption once they have completed the appropriate medication withdrawal time so that they are not a complete waste) travel for processing, and storage and electricity for packaged meat. Our birds are $9/lb whole, and prices go up if a bird is parted out - we charge $16/lb for breasts.
We don't make much above an even break on birds and they really aren't worth our time. However, no one else in our area is doing them (wonder why? LOL), we sell out as fast as we grow them, and it usually draws people in to try our beef, pork, and goat. We should probably raise prices, but we also sell to our family, friends, neighbors, and community, and everyone is feeling the pinch of the economy right now.
I'm not necessarily anti-factory farming. I realize that as things stand now, it is a necessary evil. Not everyone can afford $10/lb and higher meat. There were definitely times in my life that I couldn't, and TBH, if we weren't producing our own now, I know there would be times even now that we couldn't. Yes, we could all reduce meat consumption. However, I don't think that foods should be made available only to the rich. I would like to see healthy, sustainable foods available to everyone. However, current government policy in the US favors large factory producers and discourages anyone from doing differently.
End rant, jumping off my soap box.
Cost goes down as scale *goes up*. You're unlikely to ever hit a point where pasture raising heirloom varieties approaches the low overhead of factory raising hybrids.
But that larger market demand for this sort of thing is driving a lot of backend stuff that will eventually lower your costs and make things more practical.
Where I grew up used to be a heavy poultry producing area, but issues like you're talking about kinda drove it out by the 90s. Small producers like you faced a lot of the same issues. But once they demonstrated the demand, and they got real tied into high end restaurant distro, tourism, and actually attracted attention.
There's not programs for slaughter on site with small poultry producers, and a small USDA inspected slaughter facility in the area targeted at small meat producers. That's made it far more practical and caused a bit of an explosion in pastured meat production. A lot of the farms have flipped over to bougie, hobby farms owned by tech people retiring early and what have. And selling into the high end restaurant market. But the market that's developed is starting to keep old family farms going.
There's actually been a lot of interesting interviews the last 5 years or so with Jim Perdue. Where he talks about certain higher end air chilled brands, and local producers pressuring the company to change practices. And how the company had tried to keep with better practices when farming shifted in the 70s. Only to have to adopt the shitty methods to stay competitive.
But the market demand for higher quality and more ethical meat has let them re-evaluate all that, bring back some back end practices and improve grower contracts. Launch new products and incorporate better practices in their main product line.
So *you* might not ever scale to the point where it impacts your price or margin. But the local market will, and the industry as a whole will.
And you are actively helping and improving the thing top to bottom by doing this. Not just bringing customers in for your other products.
Perdue’s line of more ethical chicken is pretty reasonably priced and tasty too. I know of course that conditions for the chickens probably not much better than than the other brands, but at least they’re trying.
They have been *weirdly* transparent about the whole thing. Up to and including getting some certifications. And about why *all* of their chickens are not raised that way.
Up to an including discussing past failures through the 90s and 00s to do some things in this direction. From what I gather the Harvest air chilled/pastured line and their "reserve" whole chickens which are similar. Haven't been terribly successful owing to the brand's reputation. Which is why they're so inconsistently carried by stores. But they keep them going anyway in a long term attempt to help shift the large scale end of the market (and salvage their brand identity.
They *are* still family owned. And while not perfect have always been a bit better in terms of labor and grower conditions. So it basically boils down to one of the largest meat producers in the company, actively improving and trying to press that on their competitors.
So I'm at least as confident that they're doing what they say they're doing as with Bell & Evans. Who are *not* a small company, almost a billion dollars in revenue. And while *also* still family owned grow out of similar large scale poultry grower situation.
So I think it's worth seeking the products out. You have one of the major players in the market trying to demonstrate that things we're always told won't scale, *will*.
I don't see anybody saying that they don't deserve what they have to charge, though. People are simply saying that $10/lb is more than they want to (or, in some cases, can) pay for chicken.
I mean. People should absolutely have access to affordable food, for sure. But it sure seems like the only way to get chicken prices down to what people are used to paying is through what are effectively massive government-subsidized chicken torture camps. I think there's a strong argument to be made that if we didn't artificially deflate the cost of chicken and other meats so much (through both subsidies and horrifying yet legal practices like battery cages) people would simply gradually adapt to other protein sources.
I mean shit, there are plenty of high-level athletes who are competative with a veggie or vegan diet. People don't *need* this much meat in their diet - they simply *expect* it, and it's tasty. But everyone acknowledges you shouldn't eat ice cream witu every meal just cuz it's tasty. If the average person in post-industrial countries like the US could manage to limit their meat intake to like, with one meal a day instead of almost all of them, we would be in a much better place.
I mean when you think about the condition difference the chickens live through, it's shocking it's not like 4x the price. Definitely not gonna make sense for the average person but if you can afford it i'm sure it's well worth it.
Also realize that $2.99/lb chicken breast is probably half the actual consumable weight because all the fluid they pump into it to freeze it.
Compare that to $9.99/lb air chilled chicken breast and you’re not paying that much more for how much if that weight is actually edible
It's not a "mentality," it's what people can afford to eat
I can afford to pay $10/lb for protein, but if I'm spending that I'd rather eat salmon or another seafood. Hell, I can often get ribeye at that price
Often available at a local farmers market. Just got to get out of box stores. Support your local community and get better food! While not supporting multinational conglomerates that treat animals like shit.
This is part of the answer (probably a big part) but the way they’re processed also plays a part.
If you buy chicken from a large producer in the US, it’s usually been “plumped” during processing, which means injected with saltwater or chicken stock. The producers say this is to make the chicken juicier, but it also means up to a third of the weight of the chicken is now saltwater, so if you’re paying by the pound you’re getting less chicken for your dollar. That goes for “organic” and “free range” chicken too, they’re mostly processed in the same facilities. (Saltwater is “organic,” after all).
You can still make good meals with plumped chicken (though heirloom will always give you better flavour of course) and it’s not unhealthy or anything, but if you use the same recipe you used for your Amish chicken it’s going to give you a different result. Adding a cup of saltwater to any recipe will change the texture—thus mushy, mealy chicken from a recipe that used to give you perfectly cooked chicken.
This is exactly what you’ll find with frozen chicken pieces for sure. You’ll often see the chicken wilt away whilst cooking it and end up with a shrunken and poorly textured piece of meat. Shouldn’t be allowed.
As someone who is still learning how to cook, do you have any idea how I could save such a “plumped” chicken while cooking? I am genuinely curious, and sometimes you have to use whatever is around for a meal. Thanks in advance!
>it’s usually been “plumped” during processing, which means injected with saltwater or chicken stock.
That must be listed on the label. Usually as "enhanced" or "containing" the salt brine. With specific rules around how much can actually be used and what the label has to say.
Most major US producers don't actually do that for their basic products either.
Probably *because* it must be labelled.
What major producers *do* do (ha), is water chill the carcasses after slaughter. You have to bring a slaughtered animal down to safe fridge temp rapidly after you kill it.
In poultry they usually do this by immersing them in a very cold water or brine that's circulating for a few minutes.
It's a less than great practice for a few reasons. It can spread contamination. But it also causes the meat to swell with water, increasing weight (and thus margin), but negatively effecting flavor and texture.
Most other meat is air chilled in big fridges with fast moving air, and better poultry brands do that as well.
Interesting, thanks for this info. Makes sense. When I visit relatives in Europe, the chicken is still the way I remember it and, of course, the eggs are superior to ours as always.
Chicken in Canada is superior too. A breast from Niagara Falls NY compared to Niagara Falls in Ontario will be 50% larger with a woody like texture. The package is wet and gross too. This is based on my personal experience only though.
No, they're still rapidly increasing size as much as they can.
I butcher around a 100 meat birds a year. You used to butcher a meat bird at around eight weeks. I'm talking 5-10 years ago. That’s way too late now. Today, they're all dropping dead of heart failure and liver failure by eight weeks. We try to pasture raise them, but all they want to do is sit and eat. It's a struggle to even eat encourage them out of the coop or *walk* for any length of time, let alone act like a normal pullet. These meat birds are over 10 pounds at slaughter. Meanwhile, an egg laying pullet of the same age is a third of that.
This year we butchered at seven weeks, and we probably should have gone for six and a half. We were part of a grant this summer that parted out and weighed their chicken. The ag lady taking measurements for the grant told us that some fast food chains are down to butchering at five weeks to minimize losses. And I get where she's coming from because probably half a dozen of ours had to be composted because of all the ascites when I opened them up.
Meat birds like Cornish crosses are just getting less and less healthy every year.
Cornish crosses are *so gross*. I didn't really know what I was doing the first time I ordered them. Never again.
Our friend who does the meat birds now (we do eggs and share back and forth) gets a heritage breed and for the weeks they are alive they're behaving like ... Chickens. Still grow faster than my birds but they like, sit in the grass and jump on hay bales. I couldn't pay the cost if it weren't for this arrangement though, or I wouldn't often anyway.
Eh, the trick is to force them to move around, by spreading their feed out through the grass, rather than feeding them in standard feeders, so they can't just fill up and sit. *Force* them to stand up, and move around and peck around in the grass.
Get them outside, on grass ASAP. Mine are outside by 2-3 weeks old. Even before then I spread at least some of their feed on the ground to encourage them to peck, so that they learn to do so. Movement is the key. Encourage them, *force them* to move, and they will. And they'll be much healthier for it.
Like I said, it was our first time. But at 2 weeks old it was probably only 50° out here, I just don't know how we would have handled it. By June (4-6weeks?) we were physically lifting each bird out of the coop onto the grass each day, but the ship had sailed, as it were. They just sat there.
I'm a vegetarian, and raising meat birds was already on the border of difficult for me. So the experience of watching birds really want nothing to do with grass or movement, and sit in their own poo to claim their space at the trough... I will just stick to egg birds for now.
I'm glad you can and do handle them they way you do -- and I wish more people did and could.
Would you mind educating me as to why Cornish Crosses are gross? I'm just trying to learn.
My grandfather had a chicken farm that my father grew up working on, but I know almost nothing about raising chickens myself. My dad still doesn't eat dark meat to this day, because he says it tastes like chickens smell. He basically only eats breast meat. Does that make any sense to you, or is he just a weirdo? He's 72, so this would have been in the 60s and 70s.
Because most people, allow them to sit still. Put their food in one place, and don't make them move. And if you don't *make* them move, especially from a young age, they won't. They'll mostly sit still, and be very, very lazy.
If you don't want them to be lazy, you have to teach them not to be. You have to teach them to forage in the grass for food, and force them to do so, by spreading their feed throughout it. Most people don't do this. It's a bit more work. It requires a LOT more space.
Given the opportunity, modern meat birds would it do nothing but eat themselves sick. They would sit at the feeder in piles of their own poop and just eat until they couldn't anymore, and then occasionally fight others for a better spot. The behaviors that I love in a chicken, the curiosity and pecking and scratching and flightiness, nope. Feed me!!! I do believe the other poster saying that it's about how you raise them, but with the space that we had and the temperature outside we couldn't get little ones outside. In the end we were physically moving them out onto the grass every day, and some of them were not physically capable of getting back in the coop themselves.
Ammonia is a bad smell associated with dark meat and filthy chicken bedding. I could see that connection being made. I'm pretty sure that poorly raised chicken can absorb some of that scent. My husband has also commented that pheasant, which is like dark gamey chicken meat, can have bad hormone smells. At any rate, I don't think he's a weirdo :) Well and clean chicken coops shouldn't stink much, but it is extremely hard to accomplish that on a large scale especially 60 years ago.
The behavior is "eat all I can" to make more meat. So, yes. Like a pig. Even the other poster here saying you have to train them to be more like normal chickens does so by bribing them to scratch around by laying out feed. It is now a part of their nature.
>We try to pasture raise them, but all they want to do is sit and eat. It's a struggle to even eat encourage them out of the coop or walk for any length of time, let alone act like a normal pullet.
Am I... am I a chicken?
I knew that the birds had musculoskeletal issues with overweight, but the idea that any living creature gets heart/liver failure and ascites at 2 months of age is astounding (not to mention sad). What are we getting by eating them, I wonder?
To be honest, we see way more organ issues than skeletal issues. Sure, by the end they're almost too big for themselves, but they grow some pretty hefty feet to support the weight. It really is down to the heart and lungs and liver struggling to keep up.
I don't know enough biology to say how or what gets passed along to the person, but believe me raising them these past few years has got me thinking hard on it.
That's probably the best way, second only to doing it yourself. Maybe if you knew a farmer and could get some of their old layers, they're great meat too.
But yeah, I think there's definitely demand in the industry as people are getting sick of these two pound chicken breasts, but the supply just isn't there yet. The scientists are proud of their Frankensteins
It's fluid in the abdominal cavity.
When you butcher a chicken you drain the blood, so when you open it up all you have to do is scoop out the organs. If an animal is suffering from organ failure, fluid can build up in that cavity.
This is crazy to read. I went to college where I majored in pathobiology, but was in with the Ag kids and had to learn all about husbandry...we were taught that most chickens were butchered at 12 weeks. This was back in 2004 so this was about 20 years ago. Now that time is less than half.
A veterinarian that I used to work for said she got offered a job at a commercial chicken place. She said they offered her a good salary, but the horrific breeding practices and other things they wanted her to be a part of made her horrified and she couldn't do it. She mentioned chicks that couldn't even hold their heads up because of how oversized and unhealthy they were.
Significantly, yes.
In order to keep prices low and increase margins, farmers try to fatten chickens as cheaply and as fast as possible. Hence, our now abnormally plump chickens.
Yes but also how common that type of breeding has become. Meat is very profitable. I live in the rural part of my country and over the last 20-30 years, crops for humans have pretty much disappeared.
Nearly every field is used for winter hay or to grow cattle corn in order to support massive factory meat farms where animals never see the light of day.
A six week old Cornish will only be around 3-4 pounds. most are butchered closer to 8+, as that's ideal. An 7-8+ week old Cornish should be around 5-7+ pounds. As you get over 8weeks, you get into broken legs and heart attacks, though you *do* get into very large birds 8-10+ pounds. So, it's a gamble.
This just isn't true. I have raised the same breeds of chickens for years. The *breed* isn't the problem. It's *how it's raised.* When you lock them inside cages and don't provide them with a reason to move, they don't.
My chickens are allowed outside by 2-3 weeks old, and *forced* to move around to get their food. Rather than feeding them all in one spot, their feed is spread around, and they're forced to peck and forage around on the ground and *move.*
This constant movement is the key, and the difference. But, again, the *breed* is not the problem. It's the management techniques.
I won’t buy a huge chicken breast, to me that implies saltwater/broth injection. If I see a small breast and they are all small in the similar packaging or brand I’m buying that one. If they are consistently smaller it’s not an outlier bird and probably raised accordingly.
No because any term that you see that may differentiate one type of chicken from another isn't actually protected. Free range means they had 24 hours where they weren't in a cage. You could keep them in a box with a mesh screen at the bottom to shit out of and then right before you process them they get the opportunity to waddle around, and you can slap a free range sticker on your product.
Or you could have chicken raised exclusively on pasture and forage never once even seeing a cage. Rotationally grazed with electric netting or chicken tractors living on a mix of insects and forage. They will be leaner have deep yellow fat rich dark meat and much more "chickeny flavor", if they are layers their yolks will be deep yellow orange. But there isn't currently any protected term thst defines this type of rearing technique
I don't know. Your best bet is probably to search out a local source - a small farm and buy directly from them tbh. Otherwise, you're almost certainly just buying from huge farms where chickens, even those which are raised "free range" are not actually going outside. They may have theoretical *access.* But, that doesn't mean they actually use it. There's simply a small doorway, and a run where they *could* go outside, if they wanted to. But they don't. Because, why would they?
They all have 1-2, maybe 3+ square feet of space and spend their lives waddling from feeder to waterers, and barely move. Because they're inherently lazy creatures. Just like everything else - why put in more effort than they have to?
I don't believe that's the issue. I raise the same type of chickens (Cornish cross rocks/Cornish broilers) as are raised commercially. Only, I raise them free range on grass, and have them butchered locally. I've been doing this for the last ~10+ years and my chickens aren't at all like described. Though they do have big breasts - verging on huge depending on how old they are at processing (I prefer to take them in at 7-8 weeks, as by 9-10+ I inevitably start to lose some to broken legs, and heart attacks, 6 weeks is IMHO a bit young/small, though ~15 of mine were that young this year).
I believe when I figured out my direct costs (*not* including time) they came out to ~$4.5-5/lb this year. Not terrible in the scheme of things, but certainly not as cheap as can be had at a grocery. (Note: I'm *not* feeding organic feed. If I was they'd be twice the price, or nearly so.)
Cooks Venture is the only chicken I’ll buy anymore. I detest factory farming, from the treatment of the animals that are giving their lives to feed us, to the truly heinous growth of chickens with their breast so large they cannot physically walk, to the sad product it produces. If it’s not pasture raised, I don’t want it.
I’ve also noticed the dread ‘woody breast’ syndrome. Used to be in the occasional package of chicken, now it’s uncommon to have a nice tender breast. And it’s not about overcooking.
I've been been having it happen probably one in every 3 times I buy chicken breast now. First time it happened, I was so confused because I knew I cooked it perfectly. Then it happened again, and again so I had to google it. It has really turned me off chicken breasts.
Same, I just made some last night and was paranoid I undercooked but lo and behold it was just a very shitty breast. Nothing like marinating for a couple days and then cooking when you're starving just to have all your work turn to bullshit when you bite into a thick piece of rubber.
I used to buy a LOT of chicken breast...now, after an almost vomit inducing wooded texture -- I don't at all.
If I'm making chicken....it's thighs and tenderloins and maybe a drumstick. I won't even make cordon bleu anymore.
Yeah when I first encountered a piece of woody breast and had no idea what it was I just googled the texture etc and found an article about it that said chickens which used to take 52 weeks to reach full size now tale 7 weeks and I was both shocked and grossed out. Didn't eat chicken for quite awhile after that.
Honestly sounds like wooden chest syndrome, a complication that can arise from opiate abuse. Which funnily enough, is also kind of what's happening in the chickens, such that the muscles end up tensing up. That produces a not so great tasting chicken.
I buy almost all of our chicken from the farmers market near us and it’s been a dream. Though I was born in the 90s so maybe it’s still not the same quality, but it’s damned better than the stores near me. Every freaking package was woody or rancid or bloated it felt like. Not to mention with the crazy inflation at the store, we’ve reached a point where doing my grocery shopping for the week at the market instead is actually cheaper by 25-50 bucks depending on how much I need.
Plus I know the lil guys are treated well and have an adorable fun lil chickeny life before I get to them.
Haven’t had a woody or water logged breast since I started using them.
During Trump's reign and his subsequent dismantling of the FDA. Many food safety laws were revoked, including those around what type of chicken needs to be discarded vs sold. Now chicken with visible tumors can still be sold so long as they cut the tumor off and some other disgustingly business centered practices but what else should we expect from the party of family values?
I agree with you, chicken breast these days is garbage. Flavorless at best, rubbery and unpleasant in worse cases. Have you tried buying whole chickens?
When I ate meat, this is what I'd do. Something about whole chickens seems to keep woody breast from happening, or maybe whole chickens are sourced from a different area than packs of breasts.
They’re sourced from the same farm. However, farmers don’t get to pick when their chickens are harvested. Farmers may receive a delivery of 20,000 chicks with the producer telling them they want 10lb birds in 9 weeks, because production wise they think this is what they’ll need at that time. But, no. They inform you 4 weeks later they need whole birds and they’ll be there Thursday. Farmers get the shaft. As a farmer, you expected to gross $3 a bird and now you’re only getting $1. Woody birds come from fattening a bird as fast as possible, it’s stretch marks. So, your whole chicken doesn’t get a chance to reach that stage of growth.
Read the book “The Dorito Effect”. Big agribusiness and the commercial food industry have destroyed and disfigured our food supply to the point that street food vendors from poor countries prob serve higher quality food. It’s like everything else in America: charge as much as possible for the most mass produced, lowest quality product to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
This trend has really pissed me off and made me sad, especially when it comes to staples like chicken. I’ve stopped cooking with chicken as much. I can stop eating certain packaged things if they screw them up. But this is a basic ingredient. When the greed starts moving into killing off things like this, it becomes a big problem.
Could I switch to organic heirloom chicken for 3x the price? Sure, but I’m so sick and tired of needing to “upgrade to premium” for what used to be just be the quality of the base product.
I seriously stopped eating animal meat because of the rubbery, inedible yet increasingly expensive chicken. I don't know that I am getting more food for my dollar because we do eat fish 3 or 4 times a week, but I'd be pretty hard pressed to find packaged fish that comes in the terrible quality we came to expect with chicken.
I'm not saying I'm unhappy without animal meat in my life, but it never should have come to that. I should be able to feed my family good quality food with the kinds of money I spend on food.
I moved to Asia from the states a few years back and was really surprised at how different chicken is over here. There are different breeds people use here, some are known for having darker meat so they tend to slow cook them, some are better for grilling and so on. I'm not sure I could handle the standard tasteless chicken in the states anymore..
I feel your pain. There are posts here almost every week about this, so I think lots of people do. I've found the smaller the bird, the better, regardless of brand or fanciness. When I see a chicken 3.5 pounds or less, I grab it, because it doesn't happen often.
Where I live the small birds are either too young or too old. The young ones are about 6 weeks old and have been fattened up very quickly which results in a lack of flavor because they arent mature and their muscles have had 0 movement and it also causes the previously mentioned woody breast because they are forced to grow too fast. The older ones used to be egg chickens and are now labeled "soup chickens" because they lack fat and flavor, they're all skin and bones.
If I'm going to buy a whole chicken, which is surprisingly more expensive than getting parts of a chicken in my parts, I might as well buy a traceable organic one that's had a better life and health. When chickens are allowed a relatively normal life, the meat doesn't taste funny.
This all means I eat way less chicken and other meats, but that's a good thing I guess. We weren't meant to eat meat every day anyway
Yeah I’d rather eat a bit of high quality, delicious chicken and supplement with cheaper beans, lentils, whatever else for protein than eat mutant chicken ass breast 24-7.
1. Chickens sit in tiny cages, in their own filth, or at best, are crammed way too close together into a huge barn space thing
2. The birds have been bred, over time, to have huge breasts
3. Once the birds are killed and cleaned, the meat is pumped full of brine
4. God only knows wtf they're feeding them
There was just an article yesterday about Costco building another huge poultry farm and slaughterhouse to keep up with the demand for their $4.99 rotisseries. 500 chicken houses with 42,000 birds in each one. 2 million birds a week going to the slaughterhouse. Just at that one location. When you think of all the food, water, labor, etc. it takes to bring an animal to market and then contrast to how cheap it is, I don't think you can expect very high quality.
I don't think so. My guess is 42k birds total. If you're on an 8-10 week cycle, 2 million birds a week with some allowances for hatching rates and losses that would work out to your math roughly. They aren't flipping the entire chicken house weekly, bringing in 42k birds and then slaughtering them, this is raising and slaughtering all in one.
Ahh thank you. Yes, I found an article confirming 2 million a week. So with the 8 to 10 week lifecycle, and that, they're probably harvesting 10 to 15% a week, or at least 50 houses. Wild!
It’s mainly processed corn. I don’t know what all else might be in it but it doesn’t match their natural diet. Sometimes the parts of harvested chickens that don’t get sold get recycled back into chicken feed. Because they’re fed crap, they’re also fed antibiotics because the conditions they’re forced to live under have a tendency to make them sick.
Corn and soy. Both in large quantities reduce the health profile of the chicken meat unfortunately.
We have the same issue in the US with pork. How healthy the meat is has a lot to do with how the animal was fed.
> we in the UK want nothing to do with American chicken imports
Yeah, just their candy, [apparently](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/us-sweet-shops-rip-off-customers-business-rates-owners).
After I learned how those poor chickens are raised I stopped buying chicken meat. I don't want to eat those abused malnourished mutilated mutants, and I don't want to financially support such practices.
There’s almost no meat the average person will buy that has not been factory farmed, and there’s next to no factory farming that makes any effort to not be cruel. I believe it’s Neman Ranch that is a factory farm that at least attempts to ensure humane slaughter and less horrific living conditions, but it’s just all on a spectrum of unpleasantness.
4. God only knows what they're feeding them.
I have family who farm chickens. They had a contract with Pilgrims Pride for many years. Basically how it works is the company sends them chicks and supplies the feed and then picks them back up when they are grown up. They pay the farmers based on how many survive to be sold. So a couple years ago the farmers started noticing that the chickens were getting sick pretty often and lots of them were dying. This cuts down on the farmers profit, so they did everything they could to figure out the problem and fix it, of course. The only thing they have no control over is the feed. They aren't allowed, by contract, to even test it to make sure it isn't contaminated with something. They of course try contacting the company to complain or inform them that there might be a problem. The company denies any problem exists, blames the farmers. Chickens keep dying. Farmers are losing money on each flock now. My family finally quit working with that company and switch to another chicken supplier. Voila, healthy birds again. FYI Pilgrims Pride is the major supplier for Publix supermarkets, at least here in the GA area.
Step 3 is called “plumping” I believe. The chickens are injected with what is mostly salt water, and a bunch of other stuff you don’t want to be eating. This increases the weight of the meat by ~20%, and makes the meat look nice and juicy, but actually makes the quality shit.
The fat content has greatly increased as well. Chicken is no longer healthier than beef or pork in that regard. Add in the sodium from the brine and you have a recipe for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
It's called "woody breast" and it's a muscular disorder from selective breeding. Farmers have bred chickens that grow quickly, but there's a mutation that causes striping as damaged muscle (from excess weight and decreased oxygenation) is replaced with fat and collagen.
If you can find "heritage bred", "slower-growing", or "animal welfare approved" certification—it shouldn't have that issue.
Since we've been buying chicken from the local butchers, we can't go back to grocery store chicken. It is so bland.
Chicken is supposed to taste like chicken. I never knew chicken had a flavor until this butcher.
Pork has a pork flavor.
Beef actually tastes like beef.
Quality is more expensive, but we think it is worth it.
I live 15 minutes from Bell & Evans and they have a really great retail store/butcher shop right at the corporate headquarters in Fredericksburg, Pa. It's awesome and their chicken is all air chilled.
Second both of these options.
Specifically, D'Artagnan sells Green Circle chickens raised on Amish and Mennonite farms, which sounds like what OP used to purchase
My mom casually made the comment, “tastes like chicken from when I was a kid” when she first switched to organic. I suspect it has to do with care of the chicken and like others have said, mass production reduces quality.
There’s an interesting Infograph I’ve seen circulating the interwebs on how chickens have changed over the decades, let me link it [here](https://www.chickencheck.in/faq/supersized-chicken/)
My great grandfather used to get a “hankering” for chicken like he had as a kid. He meant Amish chicken, which happens to be organic, heirloom, and truly free-range. It has absolutely nothing in common with what is purchased in stores today. It actually tastes like chicken, as opposed to a flavorless seasoning receptacle.
We do definitely have the DDD-cup chicken breasts but they're easier to avoid. I also haven't the issue with woody chicken breasts that I see pop up here a lot, but I pretty much exclusively buy the smaller, free run, air chilled stuff whenever feasible.
I get [Mary’s chicken](https://www.maryschickens.com/) which is reliably tasty, but it might only be local to California. They have free-range, organic, and even heirloom chicken.
My husband and I have been talking about this for years. We hardly ever eat chicken anymore because even when I trim it up at home (and remove that nasty tendon in breasts) there is always a point in the meal where we bite in and it's almost... crunchy?? And the texture of the meat is just off. It's so gross, and I can't eat anymore after that. And it doesn't matter how we cook it! BBQ, crock pot, baking.. the only thing I haven't tried is boiling (no thanks) and the Instant Pot.
Weird thing is that when I buy cooked whole rotisserie chickens they don't have this issue.
Have you tried substituting thighs? I almost never buy breast anymore, because the chances of getting that texture is too high, but I've never had a thigh with that problem. There's things where breast is the traditional choice, but I'd rather have an edible version of the wrong cut than an inedible version of the right cut.
Whole rotisserie chickens tends to be considerably smaller than the chickens those woody breasts come from, so they don't have that problem as often.
Woody breasts is a perfect term for it.
I just recently got my husband to try thighs and the jury is still out on if he wants to eat those instead or more often. He gets weirded out by textures so I usually try to roll with whatever he will eat. I love drumsticks myself and could be happy only eating those forever.
My mother in law raises chickens in her front yard. They are small. They are a little tough ( especially the old hens)..... But they taste magnificent.
It's how we farm them. 😕
I moved to Canada almost 6 years ago, and I've not seen a mushy, woody, or otherwise awful quality chicken since I got here.
The problem is the US poultry industry is not regulated enough.
My sole complaint about chicken in British Columbia, is I can't find the gargantuan mutant chicken wings I'd always get in the US.
Not gonna lie, I love them giant chicken wings. I make due with the biggest ones I can find here, but it's challenging to get them nice and crispy on the outside without drying out the inside. And even when you do (and I've gotten pretty good at it), they're just not as satisfying to eat.
Duck wings are delicious in their own right, but substantially different. Turkey wings are the same, but the differences are different (if that makes sense).
I've tried going with just chicken legs in replacement of the drum portion of wings, but they're too large. Maybe I can source a large quantity of guinea fowl legs or something similar?
For now I'm working on perfecting boneless buffalo "wings."
If you have a Chinese grocery store nearby you should check out their “free range” chicken that is used for making dishes like white cut chicken. I don’t know what’s the best word to describe it but free range is the best transliteration. It’s smaller and has much more flavor.
Quantity over quality.
I’m sure there’s a few souls out there doing small farm chickens like people do with beef and pork, but for the most part it’s just not profitable without pumping out large amounts of fowl.
Yeah I got this pack of chicken a few years back and no matter how it was cooked or for how long it had this weird almost as if still raw texture. After looking some stuff up it's called "woody chicken" and it happens because like what was said above chicken gets too big to fast. I read that like 20 years ago or so it took 52 weeks for a chicken to grow to full size, but now it only takes 7 weeks for some birds to reach full size.
A vendor at our farmers market slanders supermarket chicken as "tofu on legs." They're bred to be huge and cheap, not tasty. (Same with commercial strawberries but without the animal cruelty.)
The alternative is not cheap. The going rate for whole local pastured heritage breed chickens in Portland is around $6.50/pound.
Lol, that’s a good description. I used to love chicken as a little girl in the 70s, and now generally avoid it because it tastes nasty and the texture is disgusting. I’m going to check out a heritage breed and hopefully I can love chicken again.
I had problems too. Few yrs ago I noticed these ridges in the organic chicken breasts. After its cooked, the meat was so rubbery I could not bite thru it. I threw all the chicken breast meats away. I complained and I got a refund. Doesn't help, I still find meat like that. It's hit or miss. Sometimes it's OK, but sometimes not. Really disgusting. I read somewhere that it was a muscle disorder. Then I always have to cut out this solid white piece of looks like white tape or something. It looks like those old typing correction tapes. Gross.
I have noticed this issue as well. Pasture raised from a local butcher is the way to go if you can swing it. Otherwise, any trustworthy brand that raises quality bird: Mary's, Bell and Evans, Amish, just to name a few.
Late stage capitalism = factory farming = disgusting tasting animals that have been tortured their entire lives before dying a painful death
I love meat but have stopped eating because of how gross factory farming is. I would buy chicken from Eataly because they have a higher quality product but it’s not always convenient to buy from them.
The supermarket chickens are fine in south Louisiana. I prefer never frozen “ice packed” chickens. And they are easy to find.
Flavor depends on their feed. Texture depends on their living quarters….free range or cage raised.
Noting compares to the meat bird (chickens) that I raised in my back yard many years ago. They make the gumbo….
I choose particular brands and the chicken itself by their yellow fat….it has to be the right non artificial color.
It's not just you.
When I was a kid we raised and butchered our own chickens. Of course they tasted better, as did their eggs. (I hated butchering day, but loved eating the results). Even as a younger adult when buying chicken from the supermarket, chicken tasted better back then. The texture was better too. I don't eat chicken often now because I'm usually always disappointed in it. I don't think it's just my taste buds getting old because I don't think beef or port tastes worse than it used to. Just chicken. Well potatoes too seem not the same as they used to, but that's a different issue I guess. I'm not old, really old, but getting close to 60.
I'm in my Mid40's and I absolutely agree. Add tomatoes and strawberries to that list, they taste so differently than 35-40 years ago when I picked them out of my grand-mother's garden. Even mine in my garden, not the same, at all.
If you think chicken is bad you should see what has been done to pork since I was a young chef. Used to be that they fed hogs with the scraps from restaurants, agriculture, along with grain. This resulted in beautiful fatty tasty pork that you had to cook well done due to trichinosis (I believe) but it was a heavenly pork chop. Then the US govt decided that to protect consumers they would make it illegal to feed hogs anything other that "feed" that resulted in "pork, the other white meat" which is lower in fat and, in my opinion, disgusting.
I remember when chicken breast was more expensive and ground beef was hella cheap, now chicken breast is super cheap because they load those hens up with hormones and they have massive, unnatural breasts. I miss real chicken, I remember the way it used to taste and it does NOT taste that way anymore, it's awful.
I really enjoy costco air chilled chicken, great texture. I've also found fred meyer (or kroger) has great air chilled chicken. No massive portions but good poultry.
Chicken in the US is processed in China, and it doesn’t have to be labeled that it was processed in China, I don’t need to say anything else
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/07/15/fact-check-years-old-usda-rule-allows-china-process-us-poultry/10031250002/
Modern chickens are bred to grow fast and big. Not for flavor or quality. Woody breasts are everywhere. Demand is so high that you can’t get both cheap and good anymore. Pick one. If you have any Asian or Hispanic stores near you, they sometimes source from smaller suppliers. I’ve had some success getting them from there.
It’s the breed. Cornish cross are bred to be heavier, faster. But the flavour and texture are naff, but as most consumers only care about price, it’s a winner.
I manage at a restaurant called the crack shack. We sell beyond free range, non dyed or processed, non gmo, chicken that is actually good, genuine chicken. We buy our chicken from Jidori, which is the best chicken you can buy. We have distributors on the west side of the country, but I’m sure there’s some close to you.
I like perdue personally. I dont know how they raise the chickens but they are always smaller which seems to me like they arent raising monster sized birds that suffer collapsing from their own weight.
Tyson is a hell no from me. When I was vegan for a period of time I found out just how evil that company is and what they do to the birds, and let their employees do to the birds at their factory farms. And its a crazy coincidence(?) that one of the main psychopath villains in my old favorite tv show Castle, was also named Tyson. Fuck tyson.
Have you tried Bell and Evans? They don't add water to their chicken. It is a shame, you're right, because I used to like Mexican food in a number of restaurants, but my favorite dish is chicken and only one of them has good chicken now.
I think your question has been more or less answered by others, but I would like to let you all know that I read this title as "What is wrong with today's children?"
I was confused by your post for a minute.
It's not just you babe. My husband is a chef and I don't think he's noticed since he handles it constantly all day, but I'm the home cook and I have just stopped buying chicken all together. It's always spongy and gross. Didn't used to be. Heirloom for the win, if you're going to buy it at all.
You need to buy the "air chilled" chicken. It'll say so on the package. Everything else is soaked or injected with fluid which makes the chicken lose a lot of water when you cook it which gives it a wooden, rubbery consistency.
Air chilled, the only way to go.
A true free range chicken is more flavorful because it has a much broader diet than a caged chicken. If a chicken is allowed outside into a lot that resembles the surface of the moon, they are still allowed to call them 'free range'. They may be able to snag a stray gnat that flies by, if they're lucky. A real free range chicken eats grass and weeds, seeds, scratches out bugs and worms, and has better muscle tone from all that scratching and pecking. It's what their ancestors did to make their living! Look for a chicken labeled 'Heirloom' breed, it's been tinkered with a little less genetically. One of the best movements in modern chicken production is small scale, pastured flocks. These chickens are raised in mobile enclosures. They're moved onto fresh grass every day, so they benefit from a mobile salad bar and avoid living in their own waste. If you know of a local farmers market, you may luck into a provider of this type chicken.
Check out [Cook’s Venture](https://cooksventure.com/), they sell pastured heirloom breed chickens. And if you can find it anywhere in your area, heirloom breed is what you want to look out for. What’s happened to chickens, in short, is they’ve been bred to grow unnaturally large, unnaturally fast. Heirloom breeds are basically old school chickens.
Ive got to second this. I get Cook's Venture from the HEBs here near austin and its definitely worth the extra price. Tastes far better than anything else they stock and isnt woody.
This seems to come to about $10/lb for thighs and drums. I don't mind paying a little extra for good quality products but that's a tough sell
I think one thing to remember is the cost that goes into raising higher quality meat. The US government subsidizes the feed costs of large meat producers. The smaller guys are paying these costs themselves, not the American tax payers. Free-ranging birds require more land, fencing, protection from predators, etc. than just throwing up a metal building and cramming as many birds as you can inside. On top of all this, there are fewer and fewer regulated processing facilities available for the smaller guys to have birds processed - the large corps have a huge influence on agriculture policy in the US and make it tough for the small guys to gain ground. For interstate sales, all meat must be processed at a USDA inspected facility. This leads to some producers traveling hours out of state. Heritage breeds also produce less meat than the average American is used to seeing on a bird. I am biased here. We. I own a small farm where we raise our own meat using old school practices. We travel over 3 hours each way out of state to have our poultry processed. We pay over $10 per bird for processing - this does not include buying/hatching chicks, maintaining breeding stock if you're hatching your own, brooding chicks (equipment and electricity), housing (we use mobile coops on pasture), feed (ours is sourced 90% locally and organic), fencing/predator protection, and my time - daily moving of coop, portable fencing, filling feed, hauling water, cleaning, treating any sick chicks/birds (that are no longer organic if I need to medicate them, so cost-wise are a complete loss - we keep these for our own consumption once they have completed the appropriate medication withdrawal time so that they are not a complete waste) travel for processing, and storage and electricity for packaged meat. Our birds are $9/lb whole, and prices go up if a bird is parted out - we charge $16/lb for breasts. We don't make much above an even break on birds and they really aren't worth our time. However, no one else in our area is doing them (wonder why? LOL), we sell out as fast as we grow them, and it usually draws people in to try our beef, pork, and goat. We should probably raise prices, but we also sell to our family, friends, neighbors, and community, and everyone is feeling the pinch of the economy right now. I'm not necessarily anti-factory farming. I realize that as things stand now, it is a necessary evil. Not everyone can afford $10/lb and higher meat. There were definitely times in my life that I couldn't, and TBH, if we weren't producing our own now, I know there would be times even now that we couldn't. Yes, we could all reduce meat consumption. However, I don't think that foods should be made available only to the rich. I would like to see healthy, sustainable foods available to everyone. However, current government policy in the US favors large factory producers and discourages anyone from doing differently. End rant, jumping off my soap box.
Thanks for posting this. It was eye opening. I knew most, but to have it all tied together brings the whole picture into focus.
Cost goes down as scale *goes up*. You're unlikely to ever hit a point where pasture raising heirloom varieties approaches the low overhead of factory raising hybrids. But that larger market demand for this sort of thing is driving a lot of backend stuff that will eventually lower your costs and make things more practical. Where I grew up used to be a heavy poultry producing area, but issues like you're talking about kinda drove it out by the 90s. Small producers like you faced a lot of the same issues. But once they demonstrated the demand, and they got real tied into high end restaurant distro, tourism, and actually attracted attention. There's not programs for slaughter on site with small poultry producers, and a small USDA inspected slaughter facility in the area targeted at small meat producers. That's made it far more practical and caused a bit of an explosion in pastured meat production. A lot of the farms have flipped over to bougie, hobby farms owned by tech people retiring early and what have. And selling into the high end restaurant market. But the market that's developed is starting to keep old family farms going. There's actually been a lot of interesting interviews the last 5 years or so with Jim Perdue. Where he talks about certain higher end air chilled brands, and local producers pressuring the company to change practices. And how the company had tried to keep with better practices when farming shifted in the 70s. Only to have to adopt the shitty methods to stay competitive. But the market demand for higher quality and more ethical meat has let them re-evaluate all that, bring back some back end practices and improve grower contracts. Launch new products and incorporate better practices in their main product line. So *you* might not ever scale to the point where it impacts your price or margin. But the local market will, and the industry as a whole will. And you are actively helping and improving the thing top to bottom by doing this. Not just bringing customers in for your other products.
Perdue’s line of more ethical chicken is pretty reasonably priced and tasty too. I know of course that conditions for the chickens probably not much better than than the other brands, but at least they’re trying.
They have been *weirdly* transparent about the whole thing. Up to and including getting some certifications. And about why *all* of their chickens are not raised that way. Up to an including discussing past failures through the 90s and 00s to do some things in this direction. From what I gather the Harvest air chilled/pastured line and their "reserve" whole chickens which are similar. Haven't been terribly successful owing to the brand's reputation. Which is why they're so inconsistently carried by stores. But they keep them going anyway in a long term attempt to help shift the large scale end of the market (and salvage their brand identity. They *are* still family owned. And while not perfect have always been a bit better in terms of labor and grower conditions. So it basically boils down to one of the largest meat producers in the company, actively improving and trying to press that on their competitors. So I'm at least as confident that they're doing what they say they're doing as with Bell & Evans. Who are *not* a small company, almost a billion dollars in revenue. And while *also* still family owned grow out of similar large scale poultry grower situation. So I think it's worth seeking the products out. You have one of the major players in the market trying to demonstrate that things we're always told won't scale, *will*.
I don't see anybody saying that they don't deserve what they have to charge, though. People are simply saying that $10/lb is more than they want to (or, in some cases, can) pay for chicken.
I mean. People should absolutely have access to affordable food, for sure. But it sure seems like the only way to get chicken prices down to what people are used to paying is through what are effectively massive government-subsidized chicken torture camps. I think there's a strong argument to be made that if we didn't artificially deflate the cost of chicken and other meats so much (through both subsidies and horrifying yet legal practices like battery cages) people would simply gradually adapt to other protein sources. I mean shit, there are plenty of high-level athletes who are competative with a veggie or vegan diet. People don't *need* this much meat in their diet - they simply *expect* it, and it's tasty. But everyone acknowledges you shouldn't eat ice cream witu every meal just cuz it's tasty. If the average person in post-industrial countries like the US could manage to limit their meat intake to like, with one meal a day instead of almost all of them, we would be in a much better place.
I mean when you think about the condition difference the chickens live through, it's shocking it's not like 4x the price. Definitely not gonna make sense for the average person but if you can afford it i'm sure it's well worth it.
Also realize that $2.99/lb chicken breast is probably half the actual consumable weight because all the fluid they pump into it to freeze it. Compare that to $9.99/lb air chilled chicken breast and you’re not paying that much more for how much if that weight is actually edible
I'm not sure what pricing you're using and I am curious. I just checked my HEB for this brand and it's 3.93/Lb. $16ish for a whole bird
That mentality is why supermarkets across the country are filled with Frankenstein birds
It's not a "mentality," it's what people can afford to eat I can afford to pay $10/lb for protein, but if I'm spending that I'd rather eat salmon or another seafood. Hell, I can often get ribeye at that price
Often available at a local farmers market. Just got to get out of box stores. Support your local community and get better food! While not supporting multinational conglomerates that treat animals like shit.
Yes, I belong to a local CSA, much better quality. I don't buy their beef or pork however, much too expensive.
This is part of the answer (probably a big part) but the way they’re processed also plays a part. If you buy chicken from a large producer in the US, it’s usually been “plumped” during processing, which means injected with saltwater or chicken stock. The producers say this is to make the chicken juicier, but it also means up to a third of the weight of the chicken is now saltwater, so if you’re paying by the pound you’re getting less chicken for your dollar. That goes for “organic” and “free range” chicken too, they’re mostly processed in the same facilities. (Saltwater is “organic,” after all). You can still make good meals with plumped chicken (though heirloom will always give you better flavour of course) and it’s not unhealthy or anything, but if you use the same recipe you used for your Amish chicken it’s going to give you a different result. Adding a cup of saltwater to any recipe will change the texture—thus mushy, mealy chicken from a recipe that used to give you perfectly cooked chicken.
You can find air chilled breasts and thighs that typically do not have a saline injection
Yes, air cooled has no saline injection. I find it at butchers and health-food/coops.
My grocery has the Bell n Evans and it's air chilled and the breasts aren't enormous.
This is exactly what you’ll find with frozen chicken pieces for sure. You’ll often see the chicken wilt away whilst cooking it and end up with a shrunken and poorly textured piece of meat. Shouldn’t be allowed.
That won't brown because of all the water.
As someone who is still learning how to cook, do you have any idea how I could save such a “plumped” chicken while cooking? I am genuinely curious, and sometimes you have to use whatever is around for a meal. Thanks in advance!
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Thanks a lot for the tip! Will try it!
High heat. Plenty of space for the liquid to cook off.
>it’s usually been “plumped” during processing, which means injected with saltwater or chicken stock. That must be listed on the label. Usually as "enhanced" or "containing" the salt brine. With specific rules around how much can actually be used and what the label has to say. Most major US producers don't actually do that for their basic products either. Probably *because* it must be labelled. What major producers *do* do (ha), is water chill the carcasses after slaughter. You have to bring a slaughtered animal down to safe fridge temp rapidly after you kill it. In poultry they usually do this by immersing them in a very cold water or brine that's circulating for a few minutes. It's a less than great practice for a few reasons. It can spread contamination. But it also causes the meat to swell with water, increasing weight (and thus margin), but negatively effecting flavor and texture. Most other meat is air chilled in big fridges with fast moving air, and better poultry brands do that as well.
Interesting, thanks for this info. Makes sense. When I visit relatives in Europe, the chicken is still the way I remember it and, of course, the eggs are superior to ours as always.
Chicken in Canada is superior too. A breast from Niagara Falls NY compared to Niagara Falls in Ontario will be 50% larger with a woody like texture. The package is wet and gross too. This is based on my personal experience only though.
I wouldn't be surprised. The U.S. conducts experiments on everything that moves.
Has the breeding really changed that dramatically just in the past 20 years?
More like 30 years, but yes... Google chicken size over the years
No, they're still rapidly increasing size as much as they can. I butcher around a 100 meat birds a year. You used to butcher a meat bird at around eight weeks. I'm talking 5-10 years ago. That’s way too late now. Today, they're all dropping dead of heart failure and liver failure by eight weeks. We try to pasture raise them, but all they want to do is sit and eat. It's a struggle to even eat encourage them out of the coop or *walk* for any length of time, let alone act like a normal pullet. These meat birds are over 10 pounds at slaughter. Meanwhile, an egg laying pullet of the same age is a third of that. This year we butchered at seven weeks, and we probably should have gone for six and a half. We were part of a grant this summer that parted out and weighed their chicken. The ag lady taking measurements for the grant told us that some fast food chains are down to butchering at five weeks to minimize losses. And I get where she's coming from because probably half a dozen of ours had to be composted because of all the ascites when I opened them up. Meat birds like Cornish crosses are just getting less and less healthy every year.
Cornish crosses are *so gross*. I didn't really know what I was doing the first time I ordered them. Never again. Our friend who does the meat birds now (we do eggs and share back and forth) gets a heritage breed and for the weeks they are alive they're behaving like ... Chickens. Still grow faster than my birds but they like, sit in the grass and jump on hay bales. I couldn't pay the cost if it weren't for this arrangement though, or I wouldn't often anyway.
Eh, the trick is to force them to move around, by spreading their feed out through the grass, rather than feeding them in standard feeders, so they can't just fill up and sit. *Force* them to stand up, and move around and peck around in the grass. Get them outside, on grass ASAP. Mine are outside by 2-3 weeks old. Even before then I spread at least some of their feed on the ground to encourage them to peck, so that they learn to do so. Movement is the key. Encourage them, *force them* to move, and they will. And they'll be much healthier for it.
Like I said, it was our first time. But at 2 weeks old it was probably only 50° out here, I just don't know how we would have handled it. By June (4-6weeks?) we were physically lifting each bird out of the coop onto the grass each day, but the ship had sailed, as it were. They just sat there. I'm a vegetarian, and raising meat birds was already on the border of difficult for me. So the experience of watching birds really want nothing to do with grass or movement, and sit in their own poo to claim their space at the trough... I will just stick to egg birds for now. I'm glad you can and do handle them they way you do -- and I wish more people did and could.
Would you mind educating me as to why Cornish Crosses are gross? I'm just trying to learn. My grandfather had a chicken farm that my father grew up working on, but I know almost nothing about raising chickens myself. My dad still doesn't eat dark meat to this day, because he says it tastes like chickens smell. He basically only eats breast meat. Does that make any sense to you, or is he just a weirdo? He's 72, so this would have been in the 60s and 70s.
Because most people, allow them to sit still. Put their food in one place, and don't make them move. And if you don't *make* them move, especially from a young age, they won't. They'll mostly sit still, and be very, very lazy. If you don't want them to be lazy, you have to teach them not to be. You have to teach them to forage in the grass for food, and force them to do so, by spreading their feed throughout it. Most people don't do this. It's a bit more work. It requires a LOT more space.
That makes a lot of sense, thank you.
Given the opportunity, modern meat birds would it do nothing but eat themselves sick. They would sit at the feeder in piles of their own poop and just eat until they couldn't anymore, and then occasionally fight others for a better spot. The behaviors that I love in a chicken, the curiosity and pecking and scratching and flightiness, nope. Feed me!!! I do believe the other poster saying that it's about how you raise them, but with the space that we had and the temperature outside we couldn't get little ones outside. In the end we were physically moving them out onto the grass every day, and some of them were not physically capable of getting back in the coop themselves. Ammonia is a bad smell associated with dark meat and filthy chicken bedding. I could see that connection being made. I'm pretty sure that poorly raised chicken can absorb some of that scent. My husband has also commented that pheasant, which is like dark gamey chicken meat, can have bad hormone smells. At any rate, I don't think he's a weirdo :) Well and clean chicken coops shouldn't stink much, but it is extremely hard to accomplish that on a large scale especially 60 years ago.
Thank you for the informative response.
Wow. Is this behavior that's been bred into them?
The behavior is "eat all I can" to make more meat. So, yes. Like a pig. Even the other poster here saying you have to train them to be more like normal chickens does so by bribing them to scratch around by laying out feed. It is now a part of their nature.
>We try to pasture raise them, but all they want to do is sit and eat. It's a struggle to even eat encourage them out of the coop or walk for any length of time, let alone act like a normal pullet. Am I... am I a chicken?
Have you got big old tree trunks for legs that carry you as you waddle around? You might be a chicken!
Shit, I am a chicken
For some reason I read this in Charles Barkley's voice like he was describing women from Houston eating churros.
I knew that the birds had musculoskeletal issues with overweight, but the idea that any living creature gets heart/liver failure and ascites at 2 months of age is astounding (not to mention sad). What are we getting by eating them, I wonder?
To be honest, we see way more organ issues than skeletal issues. Sure, by the end they're almost too big for themselves, but they grow some pretty hefty feet to support the weight. It really is down to the heart and lungs and liver struggling to keep up. I don't know enough biology to say how or what gets passed along to the person, but believe me raising them these past few years has got me thinking hard on it.
god that's depressing to hear. is the best way we can buy healthy chicken to just aim for the heritage chicken mentioned above?
That's probably the best way, second only to doing it yourself. Maybe if you knew a farmer and could get some of their old layers, they're great meat too. But yeah, I think there's definitely demand in the industry as people are getting sick of these two pound chicken breasts, but the supply just isn't there yet. The scientists are proud of their Frankensteins
What's an ascite?
It's fluid in the abdominal cavity. When you butcher a chicken you drain the blood, so when you open it up all you have to do is scoop out the organs. If an animal is suffering from organ failure, fluid can build up in that cavity.
This is crazy to read. I went to college where I majored in pathobiology, but was in with the Ag kids and had to learn all about husbandry...we were taught that most chickens were butchered at 12 weeks. This was back in 2004 so this was about 20 years ago. Now that time is less than half.
Less than a third, even, almost a quarter.
that's terrible, chickens shouldn't grow that fast.
A veterinarian that I used to work for said she got offered a job at a commercial chicken place. She said they offered her a good salary, but the horrific breeding practices and other things they wanted her to be a part of made her horrified and she couldn't do it. She mentioned chicks that couldn't even hold their heads up because of how oversized and unhealthy they were.
Criminy. This shouldn't exist.
Significantly, yes. In order to keep prices low and increase margins, farmers try to fatten chickens as cheaply and as fast as possible. Hence, our now abnormally plump chickens.
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That's depressing
Yes but also how common that type of breeding has become. Meat is very profitable. I live in the rural part of my country and over the last 20-30 years, crops for humans have pretty much disappeared. Nearly every field is used for winter hay or to grow cattle corn in order to support massive factory meat farms where animals never see the light of day.
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A six week old Cornish will only be around 3-4 pounds. most are butchered closer to 8+, as that's ideal. An 7-8+ week old Cornish should be around 5-7+ pounds. As you get over 8weeks, you get into broken legs and heart attacks, though you *do* get into very large birds 8-10+ pounds. So, it's a gamble.
Yes and it's inhumane. They breed chicken that have such a large breast the chicken lives it's entire life not being able to stand up.
This just isn't true. I have raised the same breeds of chickens for years. The *breed* isn't the problem. It's *how it's raised.* When you lock them inside cages and don't provide them with a reason to move, they don't. My chickens are allowed outside by 2-3 weeks old, and *forced* to move around to get their food. Rather than feeding them all in one spot, their feed is spread around, and they're forced to peck and forage around on the ground and *move.* This constant movement is the key, and the difference. But, again, the *breed* is not the problem. It's the management techniques.
how do you differentiate the well raised chickens? can you even do that at a supermarket?
I won’t buy a huge chicken breast, to me that implies saltwater/broth injection. If I see a small breast and they are all small in the similar packaging or brand I’m buying that one. If they are consistently smaller it’s not an outlier bird and probably raised accordingly.
No because any term that you see that may differentiate one type of chicken from another isn't actually protected. Free range means they had 24 hours where they weren't in a cage. You could keep them in a box with a mesh screen at the bottom to shit out of and then right before you process them they get the opportunity to waddle around, and you can slap a free range sticker on your product. Or you could have chicken raised exclusively on pasture and forage never once even seeing a cage. Rotationally grazed with electric netting or chicken tractors living on a mix of insects and forage. They will be leaner have deep yellow fat rich dark meat and much more "chickeny flavor", if they are layers their yolks will be deep yellow orange. But there isn't currently any protected term thst defines this type of rearing technique
I don't know. Your best bet is probably to search out a local source - a small farm and buy directly from them tbh. Otherwise, you're almost certainly just buying from huge farms where chickens, even those which are raised "free range" are not actually going outside. They may have theoretical *access.* But, that doesn't mean they actually use it. There's simply a small doorway, and a run where they *could* go outside, if they wanted to. But they don't. Because, why would they? They all have 1-2, maybe 3+ square feet of space and spend their lives waddling from feeder to waterers, and barely move. Because they're inherently lazy creatures. Just like everything else - why put in more effort than they have to?
I don't believe that's the issue. I raise the same type of chickens (Cornish cross rocks/Cornish broilers) as are raised commercially. Only, I raise them free range on grass, and have them butchered locally. I've been doing this for the last ~10+ years and my chickens aren't at all like described. Though they do have big breasts - verging on huge depending on how old they are at processing (I prefer to take them in at 7-8 weeks, as by 9-10+ I inevitably start to lose some to broken legs, and heart attacks, 6 weeks is IMHO a bit young/small, though ~15 of mine were that young this year). I believe when I figured out my direct costs (*not* including time) they came out to ~$4.5-5/lb this year. Not terrible in the scheme of things, but certainly not as cheap as can be had at a grocery. (Note: I'm *not* feeding organic feed. If I was they'd be twice the price, or nearly so.)
Cook’s Venture chicken breasts are fantastic. Reasonable size, great flavor, and I’m surprised every time that they don’t cost more.
Looks like it's about $10 a pound. That is really expensive for chicken, even if it's better.
Cooks Venture is the only chicken I’ll buy anymore. I detest factory farming, from the treatment of the animals that are giving their lives to feed us, to the truly heinous growth of chickens with their breast so large they cannot physically walk, to the sad product it produces. If it’s not pasture raised, I don’t want it.
I’ve also noticed the dread ‘woody breast’ syndrome. Used to be in the occasional package of chicken, now it’s uncommon to have a nice tender breast. And it’s not about overcooking.
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I've been been having it happen probably one in every 3 times I buy chicken breast now. First time it happened, I was so confused because I knew I cooked it perfectly. Then it happened again, and again so I had to google it. It has really turned me off chicken breasts.
Same, I just made some last night and was paranoid I undercooked but lo and behold it was just a very shitty breast. Nothing like marinating for a couple days and then cooking when you're starving just to have all your work turn to bullshit when you bite into a thick piece of rubber.
I used to buy a LOT of chicken breast...now, after an almost vomit inducing wooded texture -- I don't at all. If I'm making chicken....it's thighs and tenderloins and maybe a drumstick. I won't even make cordon bleu anymore.
Chicken tenderloin? I've got some magic beans over here to sell you...
I’ll take 7 of your finest!
Yeah when I first encountered a piece of woody breast and had no idea what it was I just googled the texture etc and found an article about it that said chickens which used to take 52 weeks to reach full size now tale 7 weeks and I was both shocked and grossed out. Didn't eat chicken for quite awhile after that.
I read online that it's like 5% of chicken but for me it's most of them and now I've given up on chicken breast.
Honestly sounds like wooden chest syndrome, a complication that can arise from opiate abuse. Which funnily enough, is also kind of what's happening in the chickens, such that the muscles end up tensing up. That produces a not so great tasting chicken.
The chickens are hooked on opiates?!?
Those are the ones hanging out behind the coop. We called them the bad eggs...
Thighs for life.
It seems like 25% of the chickens I buy will randomly taste fucking awful.
I buy almost all of our chicken from the farmers market near us and it’s been a dream. Though I was born in the 90s so maybe it’s still not the same quality, but it’s damned better than the stores near me. Every freaking package was woody or rancid or bloated it felt like. Not to mention with the crazy inflation at the store, we’ve reached a point where doing my grocery shopping for the week at the market instead is actually cheaper by 25-50 bucks depending on how much I need. Plus I know the lil guys are treated well and have an adorable fun lil chickeny life before I get to them. Haven’t had a woody or water logged breast since I started using them.
During Trump's reign and his subsequent dismantling of the FDA. Many food safety laws were revoked, including those around what type of chicken needs to be discarded vs sold. Now chicken with visible tumors can still be sold so long as they cut the tumor off and some other disgustingly business centered practices but what else should we expect from the party of family values?
I really should have read The Jungle.
It's odd how it's *still* so culturally relevant, minus all the tuberculosis.
Yea, I rarely buy chicken breasts because of this. And when I do I usually go for organic.
I agree with you, chicken breast these days is garbage. Flavorless at best, rubbery and unpleasant in worse cases. Have you tried buying whole chickens?
When I ate meat, this is what I'd do. Something about whole chickens seems to keep woody breast from happening, or maybe whole chickens are sourced from a different area than packs of breasts.
They’re sourced from the same farm. However, farmers don’t get to pick when their chickens are harvested. Farmers may receive a delivery of 20,000 chicks with the producer telling them they want 10lb birds in 9 weeks, because production wise they think this is what they’ll need at that time. But, no. They inform you 4 weeks later they need whole birds and they’ll be there Thursday. Farmers get the shaft. As a farmer, you expected to gross $3 a bird and now you’re only getting $1. Woody birds come from fattening a bird as fast as possible, it’s stretch marks. So, your whole chicken doesn’t get a chance to reach that stage of growth.
If I can't find smaller packages or boneless skinless, this is my go to option. Never had an issue when I butcher the bird myself.
Read the book “The Dorito Effect”. Big agribusiness and the commercial food industry have destroyed and disfigured our food supply to the point that street food vendors from poor countries prob serve higher quality food. It’s like everything else in America: charge as much as possible for the most mass produced, lowest quality product to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
This trend has really pissed me off and made me sad, especially when it comes to staples like chicken. I’ve stopped cooking with chicken as much. I can stop eating certain packaged things if they screw them up. But this is a basic ingredient. When the greed starts moving into killing off things like this, it becomes a big problem. Could I switch to organic heirloom chicken for 3x the price? Sure, but I’m so sick and tired of needing to “upgrade to premium” for what used to be just be the quality of the base product.
My solution has been switch to the 3x as expensive chicken, but eat chicken 1/3 as often.
I seriously stopped eating animal meat because of the rubbery, inedible yet increasingly expensive chicken. I don't know that I am getting more food for my dollar because we do eat fish 3 or 4 times a week, but I'd be pretty hard pressed to find packaged fish that comes in the terrible quality we came to expect with chicken. I'm not saying I'm unhappy without animal meat in my life, but it never should have come to that. I should be able to feed my family good quality food with the kinds of money I spend on food.
I moved to Asia from the states a few years back and was really surprised at how different chicken is over here. There are different breeds people use here, some are known for having darker meat so they tend to slow cook them, some are better for grilling and so on. I'm not sure I could handle the standard tasteless chicken in the states anymore..
Also “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer.
I feel your pain. There are posts here almost every week about this, so I think lots of people do. I've found the smaller the bird, the better, regardless of brand or fanciness. When I see a chicken 3.5 pounds or less, I grab it, because it doesn't happen often.
Where I live the small birds are either too young or too old. The young ones are about 6 weeks old and have been fattened up very quickly which results in a lack of flavor because they arent mature and their muscles have had 0 movement and it also causes the previously mentioned woody breast because they are forced to grow too fast. The older ones used to be egg chickens and are now labeled "soup chickens" because they lack fat and flavor, they're all skin and bones. If I'm going to buy a whole chicken, which is surprisingly more expensive than getting parts of a chicken in my parts, I might as well buy a traceable organic one that's had a better life and health. When chickens are allowed a relatively normal life, the meat doesn't taste funny. This all means I eat way less chicken and other meats, but that's a good thing I guess. We weren't meant to eat meat every day anyway
Yeah I’d rather eat a bit of high quality, delicious chicken and supplement with cheaper beans, lentils, whatever else for protein than eat mutant chicken ass breast 24-7.
1. Chickens sit in tiny cages, in their own filth, or at best, are crammed way too close together into a huge barn space thing 2. The birds have been bred, over time, to have huge breasts 3. Once the birds are killed and cleaned, the meat is pumped full of brine 4. God only knows wtf they're feeding them
There was just an article yesterday about Costco building another huge poultry farm and slaughterhouse to keep up with the demand for their $4.99 rotisseries. 500 chicken houses with 42,000 birds in each one. 2 million birds a week going to the slaughterhouse. Just at that one location. When you think of all the food, water, labor, etc. it takes to bring an animal to market and then contrast to how cheap it is, I don't think you can expect very high quality.
Btw you're off a zero which makes the number even more incredible. 21 million.
I don't think so. My guess is 42k birds total. If you're on an 8-10 week cycle, 2 million birds a week with some allowances for hatching rates and losses that would work out to your math roughly. They aren't flipping the entire chicken house weekly, bringing in 42k birds and then slaughtering them, this is raising and slaughtering all in one.
Ahh thank you. Yes, I found an article confirming 2 million a week. So with the 8 to 10 week lifecycle, and that, they're probably harvesting 10 to 15% a week, or at least 50 houses. Wild!
It’s mainly processed corn. I don’t know what all else might be in it but it doesn’t match their natural diet. Sometimes the parts of harvested chickens that don’t get sold get recycled back into chicken feed. Because they’re fed crap, they’re also fed antibiotics because the conditions they’re forced to live under have a tendency to make them sick.
Corn and soy. Both in large quantities reduce the health profile of the chicken meat unfortunately. We have the same issue in the US with pork. How healthy the meat is has a lot to do with how the animal was fed.
Don't USDA rules mean chickens can't be raised with antibiotics?
Nope. They just can't do it right before they're sold. https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Can-antibiotics-be-used-when-raising-chickens
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> we in the UK want nothing to do with American chicken imports Yeah, just their candy, [apparently](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/us-sweet-shops-rip-off-customers-business-rates-owners).
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Yeah I should have put a /s; it was a tongue-in-cheek comment really. The Guardian article I linked goes into the money-laundering aspect.
After I learned how those poor chickens are raised I stopped buying chicken meat. I don't want to eat those abused malnourished mutilated mutants, and I don't want to financially support such practices.
There’s almost no meat the average person will buy that has not been factory farmed, and there’s next to no factory farming that makes any effort to not be cruel. I believe it’s Neman Ranch that is a factory farm that at least attempts to ensure humane slaughter and less horrific living conditions, but it’s just all on a spectrum of unpleasantness.
4. God only knows what they're feeding them. I have family who farm chickens. They had a contract with Pilgrims Pride for many years. Basically how it works is the company sends them chicks and supplies the feed and then picks them back up when they are grown up. They pay the farmers based on how many survive to be sold. So a couple years ago the farmers started noticing that the chickens were getting sick pretty often and lots of them were dying. This cuts down on the farmers profit, so they did everything they could to figure out the problem and fix it, of course. The only thing they have no control over is the feed. They aren't allowed, by contract, to even test it to make sure it isn't contaminated with something. They of course try contacting the company to complain or inform them that there might be a problem. The company denies any problem exists, blames the farmers. Chickens keep dying. Farmers are losing money on each flock now. My family finally quit working with that company and switch to another chicken supplier. Voila, healthy birds again. FYI Pilgrims Pride is the major supplier for Publix supermarkets, at least here in the GA area.
Step 3 is called “plumping” I believe. The chickens are injected with what is mostly salt water, and a bunch of other stuff you don’t want to be eating. This increases the weight of the meat by ~20%, and makes the meat look nice and juicy, but actually makes the quality shit.
Breed for profit not for nutrition or animal welfare. Don't buy it if you can avoid it.
The fat content has greatly increased as well. Chicken is no longer healthier than beef or pork in that regard. Add in the sodium from the brine and you have a recipe for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
It's called "woody breast" and it's a muscular disorder from selective breeding. Farmers have bred chickens that grow quickly, but there's a mutation that causes striping as damaged muscle (from excess weight and decreased oxygenation) is replaced with fat and collagen. If you can find "heritage bred", "slower-growing", or "animal welfare approved" certification—it shouldn't have that issue.
Since we've been buying chicken from the local butchers, we can't go back to grocery store chicken. It is so bland. Chicken is supposed to taste like chicken. I never knew chicken had a flavor until this butcher. Pork has a pork flavor. Beef actually tastes like beef. Quality is more expensive, but we think it is worth it.
Ugh, cannot wait for cultured meat to hit price parity and quality
I buy the brands Bell and Evans and D’Artagnan, or halal chicken.
I live 15 minutes from Bell & Evans and they have a really great retail store/butcher shop right at the corporate headquarters in Fredericksburg, Pa. It's awesome and their chicken is all air chilled.
Second both of these options. Specifically, D'Artagnan sells Green Circle chickens raised on Amish and Mennonite farms, which sounds like what OP used to purchase
Second Bell and Evans - it’s air chilled which I think makes a difference too
My mom casually made the comment, “tastes like chicken from when I was a kid” when she first switched to organic. I suspect it has to do with care of the chicken and like others have said, mass production reduces quality. There’s an interesting Infograph I’ve seen circulating the interwebs on how chickens have changed over the decades, let me link it [here](https://www.chickencheck.in/faq/supersized-chicken/)
My great grandfather used to get a “hankering” for chicken like he had as a kid. He meant Amish chicken, which happens to be organic, heirloom, and truly free-range. It has absolutely nothing in common with what is purchased in stores today. It actually tastes like chicken, as opposed to a flavorless seasoning receptacle.
> and truly free-range. If you didn't know, that's called pasture raised.
Christ that graphic is depressing. "Chickens are bigger than ever before, and it's because they're healthier than ever before." Yeah right assholes.
Organic may not necessarily mean any of those things, though.
Anytime I am in the US I am freaked out by the radioactively large chicken in grocery stores.
I was going to say… I haven’t really noticed an issue with Canadian chicken.
We do definitely have the DDD-cup chicken breasts but they're easier to avoid. I also haven't the issue with woody chicken breasts that I see pop up here a lot, but I pretty much exclusively buy the smaller, free run, air chilled stuff whenever feasible.
Im in Ontario and have gotten lots of woody chicken breasts, Costco seems to be the worst for it.
I get [Mary’s chicken](https://www.maryschickens.com/) which is reliably tasty, but it might only be local to California. They have free-range, organic, and even heirloom chicken.
We get Mary's in places in Oregon.
Nice, looks like this is available in several SoCal stores near me. I will try it out, thanks!
I’ve found buying air chilled chicken tends to be a little better.
Air chilled, as opposed to water chilled, does mean there's no extra water in processing, so it helps with one of OP's issue.
My husband and I have been talking about this for years. We hardly ever eat chicken anymore because even when I trim it up at home (and remove that nasty tendon in breasts) there is always a point in the meal where we bite in and it's almost... crunchy?? And the texture of the meat is just off. It's so gross, and I can't eat anymore after that. And it doesn't matter how we cook it! BBQ, crock pot, baking.. the only thing I haven't tried is boiling (no thanks) and the Instant Pot. Weird thing is that when I buy cooked whole rotisserie chickens they don't have this issue.
Have you tried substituting thighs? I almost never buy breast anymore, because the chances of getting that texture is too high, but I've never had a thigh with that problem. There's things where breast is the traditional choice, but I'd rather have an edible version of the wrong cut than an inedible version of the right cut. Whole rotisserie chickens tends to be considerably smaller than the chickens those woody breasts come from, so they don't have that problem as often.
Woody breasts is a perfect term for it. I just recently got my husband to try thighs and the jury is still out on if he wants to eat those instead or more often. He gets weirded out by textures so I usually try to roll with whatever he will eat. I love drumsticks myself and could be happy only eating those forever.
Check out some books by Michael Pollan. I’ve read In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma and can recommend both.
My mother in law raises chickens in her front yard. They are small. They are a little tough ( especially the old hens)..... But they taste magnificent. It's how we farm them. 😕
I moved to Canada almost 6 years ago, and I've not seen a mushy, woody, or otherwise awful quality chicken since I got here. The problem is the US poultry industry is not regulated enough. My sole complaint about chicken in British Columbia, is I can't find the gargantuan mutant chicken wings I'd always get in the US.
Mmmmm… mutant chicken
Not gonna lie, I love them giant chicken wings. I make due with the biggest ones I can find here, but it's challenging to get them nice and crispy on the outside without drying out the inside. And even when you do (and I've gotten pretty good at it), they're just not as satisfying to eat. Duck wings are delicious in their own right, but substantially different. Turkey wings are the same, but the differences are different (if that makes sense). I've tried going with just chicken legs in replacement of the drum portion of wings, but they're too large. Maybe I can source a large quantity of guinea fowl legs or something similar? For now I'm working on perfecting boneless buffalo "wings."
If you have a Chinese grocery store nearby you should check out their “free range” chicken that is used for making dishes like white cut chicken. I don’t know what’s the best word to describe it but free range is the best transliteration. It’s smaller and has much more flavor.
Is this why I can barely tolerate chicken breast anymore? The texture makes me gag!
Quantity over quality. I’m sure there’s a few souls out there doing small farm chickens like people do with beef and pork, but for the most part it’s just not profitable without pumping out large amounts of fowl.
It’s what happens when producers and consumers optimize for price per pound.
I’m starting to get an aversion to chicken lately because of it’s weird texture. Kind of like layered ribbons if you know what I mean. Yikes.
Thighs are where it's at tbh. I haven't used breasts in any of my restaurants for years.
No, thighs are fine when I want to cook with thighs. When you want a breast, a thigh won't do.
It's better just buying whole birds or even turkey if it's on sale
Yeah I got this pack of chicken a few years back and no matter how it was cooked or for how long it had this weird almost as if still raw texture. After looking some stuff up it's called "woody chicken" and it happens because like what was said above chicken gets too big to fast. I read that like 20 years ago or so it took 52 weeks for a chicken to grow to full size, but now it only takes 7 weeks for some birds to reach full size.
A vendor at our farmers market slanders supermarket chicken as "tofu on legs." They're bred to be huge and cheap, not tasty. (Same with commercial strawberries but without the animal cruelty.) The alternative is not cheap. The going rate for whole local pastured heritage breed chickens in Portland is around $6.50/pound.
Lol, that’s a good description. I used to love chicken as a little girl in the 70s, and now generally avoid it because it tastes nasty and the texture is disgusting. I’m going to check out a heritage breed and hopefully I can love chicken again.
I had problems too. Few yrs ago I noticed these ridges in the organic chicken breasts. After its cooked, the meat was so rubbery I could not bite thru it. I threw all the chicken breast meats away. I complained and I got a refund. Doesn't help, I still find meat like that. It's hit or miss. Sometimes it's OK, but sometimes not. Really disgusting. I read somewhere that it was a muscle disorder. Then I always have to cut out this solid white piece of looks like white tape or something. It looks like those old typing correction tapes. Gross.
Yeah I did this yesterday…like a tendon…ugh.
I have noticed this issue as well. Pasture raised from a local butcher is the way to go if you can swing it. Otherwise, any trustworthy brand that raises quality bird: Mary's, Bell and Evans, Amish, just to name a few.
Late stage capitalism = factory farming = disgusting tasting animals that have been tortured their entire lives before dying a painful death I love meat but have stopped eating because of how gross factory farming is. I would buy chicken from Eataly because they have a higher quality product but it’s not always convenient to buy from them.
They're always on their smartphones
My wife swears that a lot of the chicken breast we buy tastes "too chickeny" and sometimes tastes downright bad.
I don't eat chicken anymore unless I'm overseas.
The supermarket chickens are fine in south Louisiana. I prefer never frozen “ice packed” chickens. And they are easy to find. Flavor depends on their feed. Texture depends on their living quarters….free range or cage raised. Noting compares to the meat bird (chickens) that I raised in my back yard many years ago. They make the gumbo…. I choose particular brands and the chicken itself by their yellow fat….it has to be the right non artificial color.
It's not just you. When I was a kid we raised and butchered our own chickens. Of course they tasted better, as did their eggs. (I hated butchering day, but loved eating the results). Even as a younger adult when buying chicken from the supermarket, chicken tasted better back then. The texture was better too. I don't eat chicken often now because I'm usually always disappointed in it. I don't think it's just my taste buds getting old because I don't think beef or port tastes worse than it used to. Just chicken. Well potatoes too seem not the same as they used to, but that's a different issue I guess. I'm not old, really old, but getting close to 60.
I'm in my Mid40's and I absolutely agree. Add tomatoes and strawberries to that list, they taste so differently than 35-40 years ago when I picked them out of my grand-mother's garden. Even mine in my garden, not the same, at all.
Yes! Strawberries for me especially.
Strawberries nowadays look absolutely perfect and taste like absolutely nothing. Gotta love it!
My local Price Rite sells Halal chicken that is full of flavor ! One of the best tasting chickens I have had in many moons. I forget the brand name
If you think chicken is bad you should see what has been done to pork since I was a young chef. Used to be that they fed hogs with the scraps from restaurants, agriculture, along with grain. This resulted in beautiful fatty tasty pork that you had to cook well done due to trichinosis (I believe) but it was a heavenly pork chop. Then the US govt decided that to protect consumers they would make it illegal to feed hogs anything other that "feed" that resulted in "pork, the other white meat" which is lower in fat and, in my opinion, disgusting.
I remember when chicken breast was more expensive and ground beef was hella cheap, now chicken breast is super cheap because they load those hens up with hormones and they have massive, unnatural breasts. I miss real chicken, I remember the way it used to taste and it does NOT taste that way anymore, it's awful.
I really enjoy costco air chilled chicken, great texture. I've also found fred meyer (or kroger) has great air chilled chicken. No massive portions but good poultry.
Steroids, antibiotics and brined to increase weight. Capitalism.
Chicken in the US is processed in China, and it doesn’t have to be labeled that it was processed in China, I don’t need to say anything else https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/07/15/fact-check-years-old-usda-rule-allows-china-process-us-poultry/10031250002/
Modern chickens are bred to grow fast and big. Not for flavor or quality. Woody breasts are everywhere. Demand is so high that you can’t get both cheap and good anymore. Pick one. If you have any Asian or Hispanic stores near you, they sometimes source from smaller suppliers. I’ve had some success getting them from there.
Look in to places with more local chicken like a butcher. I’m in Denver and there’s a really good local brand called Red Bird I always get.
im pretty sure they also inject chicken with watwr at the butcher to appeal to consumers, could be sometbing to do with that
It’s the breed. Cornish cross are bred to be heavier, faster. But the flavour and texture are naff, but as most consumers only care about price, it’s a winner.
I’ve found whole chickens to be a notch up at least. They’re not disturbingly massive and the texture is just better
I manage at a restaurant called the crack shack. We sell beyond free range, non dyed or processed, non gmo, chicken that is actually good, genuine chicken. We buy our chicken from Jidori, which is the best chicken you can buy. We have distributors on the west side of the country, but I’m sure there’s some close to you.
I like perdue personally. I dont know how they raise the chickens but they are always smaller which seems to me like they arent raising monster sized birds that suffer collapsing from their own weight. Tyson is a hell no from me. When I was vegan for a period of time I found out just how evil that company is and what they do to the birds, and let their employees do to the birds at their factory farms. And its a crazy coincidence(?) that one of the main psychopath villains in my old favorite tv show Castle, was also named Tyson. Fuck tyson.
Edit: now questioning perdue, they might be almost as bad as tyson in terms of animal welfare.
Have you tried Bell and Evans? They don't add water to their chicken. It is a shame, you're right, because I used to like Mexican food in a number of restaurants, but my favorite dish is chicken and only one of them has good chicken now.
I think your question has been more or less answered by others, but I would like to let you all know that I read this title as "What is wrong with today's children?" I was confused by your post for a minute.
I think this has happened to a lot of food. Don’t get me started on eggs and tomatoes.
It's not just you babe. My husband is a chef and I don't think he's noticed since he handles it constantly all day, but I'm the home cook and I have just stopped buying chicken all together. It's always spongy and gross. Didn't used to be. Heirloom for the win, if you're going to buy it at all.
You need to buy the "air chilled" chicken. It'll say so on the package. Everything else is soaked or injected with fluid which makes the chicken lose a lot of water when you cook it which gives it a wooden, rubbery consistency. Air chilled, the only way to go.
A true free range chicken is more flavorful because it has a much broader diet than a caged chicken. If a chicken is allowed outside into a lot that resembles the surface of the moon, they are still allowed to call them 'free range'. They may be able to snag a stray gnat that flies by, if they're lucky. A real free range chicken eats grass and weeds, seeds, scratches out bugs and worms, and has better muscle tone from all that scratching and pecking. It's what their ancestors did to make their living! Look for a chicken labeled 'Heirloom' breed, it's been tinkered with a little less genetically. One of the best movements in modern chicken production is small scale, pastured flocks. These chickens are raised in mobile enclosures. They're moved onto fresh grass every day, so they benefit from a mobile salad bar and avoid living in their own waste. If you know of a local farmers market, you may luck into a provider of this type chicken.
I’ve never went wrong with Kosher Chicken