Mushy Chicken

This is going to be a very long post. If you aren't interested in my blathering about the poultry industry, you can skip it and come back another day. I know I have friends who know as much, or more, about this as I do (Julie, Marta, Amanda, Katherine?), so please either correct me or add your own comments. Thank you One Fly (Tom) for suggesting we share this.

If you read One Fly's blog, "Outta the Cornfield," you know that last week there was a discussion about chicken meat. This was his post on 5/7/14:

There were quite a few comments posted, mostly about the tasteless, mushy meat and how a lot of people prefer to eat NO chicken these days. Isn't that sad? If you're like me, you probably remember that fried chicken with potatoes and gravy was a favorite dinner when you were a kid. The chicken was divine.

One Fly's commenters were mostly correct, except for a lady who claimed today's chicken is full of toxins and hormones. Anyway, I had to comment. These were my replies:

One Fly reminisced about the chicken he had eaten as a kid visiting his uncle's farm. He thought the chickens there were Leghorns. I answered:

As it turns out, I was wrong, his uncle DID raise Leghorns. He would buy a bunch of straight-run chicks, keep the pullets for laying and eat the cockerels as they got big enough. At this point, we switched to an email conversation.

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Hi Jan,
Actually I was going to write you and ask some questions. I talked with my 91 year old Uncle and Rollie told me he and Dad raised White Leghorns and at times a few Wyandottes. The Leghorns were for the eggs and the roosters were butchered when they started maturing into roosters. They were fed little and foraged for a lot of what they ate. That's kinda the way I remember it. The hens were locked up at night and were fed.

As a kid I ate anything that was put in front of me and I remember these Leghorn birds tasting might good so that may not mean much.. So like my Uncle we moved to town and no longer raised chickens and bought them mostly out of the two real small grocery stores in town.

Would you even have a idea what kind bird was being sold like that in the 60's. I know what it used to be like and these grocery store birds were mighty tasty as well. Mom wanted them around 3.5lbs like most everyone else. Back then if you wanted a big bird you bought a capon.

Say for example whether is a White Leghorm or Wyandottes - if you bought these today from a hatchery will they be the identical bird as way back when?

I don't know if you saw it but I bought a 3.5lb bird today that cost 11 smacks just for the hell of it. I won't try any of this for a day or so. Have to run to Denver tomorrow.

Enough of that. How are you besides busy. It snowed again day before yesterday and it's been cold. Most of the snow is gone but it broke limbs. Now I have work to do. This is what goes on in my world. It's after 6 and it's 48° and the sun is out and it maybe this time it will stay warm for good.
Thanks Jan,
Tom

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Tom,
The Leghorns that are used commercially today are not the same as the ones even 30 years ago. One thing about poultry is that it's very easy to breed for certain traits. Unlike a cow, for example, that only has 1 baby a year, a single chicken can lay a lot of eggs. So you could get at least 200 babies from one cross. Also, you can breed two generations a year because chickens mature fairly quickly. There's no need to manipulate genes with chickens, it's easy to get what you want with traditional breeding methods.

The old Leghorns were a more substantial bird, and if you kept the cockerels long enough eventually you'd have enough meat on them to eat. The ones today have been bred to be smaller. They lay the same size egg, but they don't eat as much and you can keep a bunch of them in a tiny pen. They stand more upright, too, instead of horizontal to the ground, so they take up less space. Commercial Leghorns are not only physically quite different, they're also mentally different. They don't mind being in close quarters. I raised a bunch of Hyline pullets one year that came from UCD as 3 day old chicks. I thought I'd be doing them a favor to give them a decent life. Nope. They were weird, they had plenty of room in their pen, but they would clump together in one corner and move as a unit. They were depressing birds to have around.

If you bought a Leghorn from a hatchery [Like Murray McMurray] today, it would not be from a commercial strain. Those are only bred and distributed to the big companies [For example, to Foster Farms or Nulaid].  You would get a more old fashioned Leghorn. I have one out in my laying pen, and she's a pretty big bird.

The same thing has happened with breeding meat birds. Originally they were a cross of Cornish (a very heavy English breed) and White Rocks. The Rocks were a dual purpose breed. Cornish are hard to breed, Rocks are prolific. Today's meat birds have those bloodlines, but they've been selectively bred to eat constantly and grow very fast. Actually, they were even worse about 8 years ago than they are today. They had gone overboard and produced birds that would die of heart attacks or their legs would collapse before they were 6 weeks old, so they had to back off a bit. Same with turkeys. With turkeys, the hatcheries keep two strains. One is better at laying, they are lighter and more sturdy. The other line is the behemoths. They are usually the males. They can't breed naturally, they use artificial insemination to cross them with the lighter females.

The big companies do NOT use hormones, nor do they overuse antibiotics. Their chick feed has an anticoccidiostat. That's fed for the first couple of weeks and the only thing it does it get the chick or poult through the stage where it can build immunity to coccidia. There is no hormone that would benefit meat or egg birds, at least none that I know of. Turkeys are more difficult than chickens and they're around longer (18 weeks). Any birds that die are tested, to avoid a catastrophe if disease were to go through the flock. With chickens, if they suspected a serious disease (that wasn't transmittable to humans) at 5 weeks, for example, they'd send them to the processor early, rather than medicate them and have to keep them long enough for the residues to be gone. That would be at least 2 weeks, probably more, and by that time the birds would be too big to process as broilers. The turkey man I know said they hardly ever medicate turkeys, either, because it's too expensive and the medication isn't that reliable anyway. They are prepared to have a certain percentage of die off rather than use medication.

Oh, Wyandottes would be the same today as they were years ago. The same holds true for most of the common backyard breeds. There is a Standard of Perfection that's mostly used for show birds, but even hatcheries try to keep the breeds consistent. The only problem they have is the size of their birds creeps beyond the Standard usually. That's just because they're mass producing them, and the bigger eggs hatch bigger, healthier chicks, so eventually all their breeding stock is a little too big, or maybe their comb is not quite right. When you raise chickens to show, it can be really frustrating trying to breed to a Standard that was written in 1873, when most chickens ran around and ate what they could find.

You know, the Asians and the Mexicans don't have any trouble raising chickens that taste good. They do it in their suburban back yards where it's supposed to be illegal, but usually no one else cares. The New Age thing to do is eat grass fed beef and pork and free range chicken. The Asians and the Mexicans have been doing that for years. The rest of us are so afraid of having Mr. Government knock on our door and tell us we're bad, we don't dare just do what we want. Another group that flies under detection is people from India. You can't make curry dishes with supermarket chicken, it falls apart and disintegrates. Curry dishes are supposed to simmer for a long time. 

It really gripes me that half our white bread population will have a cow if someone tries to tell them they can't own an AK47, but if you tell them they can't own a couple of chickens they just say, "Oh, okay." They think they're going to survive in an emergency by hunting...hunting what? Here in California you have to look long and hard to find wild game, it would all be gone in a week of intense hunting. 

The whole food thing is very interesting. I think we just have too many people on this planet to feed all of them well. Most people in our country are content to live on crap, they can't tolerate real food. The food companies don't care if it's unhealthy, just so you live long enough to buy as much of their crap as you can before you die from eating it.

OK, I gotta go check the incubator before I head to bed. I'm so sorry you guys have had winter weather dragging on and on. We had some coolness last week, this week it's pretty hot. The asparagus season is almost over, but there are lots of other veggies being picked. 

And more........because when I start blathering it's hard to stop.

Tom,

I thought of some more stuff last night.

First, some of the hatcheries are selling meat bird chicks now that are not the industry Cornish Rock cross. They have a strain that takes 4 weeks longer to grow and does not have so many leg problems. And they also have red or black hybrids that are something besides Rocks. White Plymouth Rocks have been as bastardized as anything else, they are gigantic birds, even at shows where they're supposed to be a smaller standard weight. I'm not sure what they use in place of Rocks for the cross, maybe New Hampshires and Australorps. Some hatcheries have named them Red Rangers. They take at least 6 weeks longer to fill out, which is still a lot quicker than your typical backyard chicken. But that meat will still not be stringy and substantial as a Leghorn rooster that's been running around for 6 months. One problem with the newer hybrids is an older bird, even by 4 weeks, will be harder to pluck. And a red or black bird will have dark pinfeathers. 

Another thing I've noticed is that with more people keeping a few hens for eggs, we're starting to see problems pop up. The main one is longevity. I have mutt birds and Anconas that live to be quite old and still produce. Anconas are one of those laying breeds that were popular before Leghorns because the industry standard. Anyway, a lot of backyard people who take extremely good care of their birds are losing hens at about 2 years because of tumors. There is a lot of cancer. We know that because these are people who send their birds to a lab when they die. Longevity is not a necessary trait in hatcheries or a commercial environment, where they cycle the layers through at 18 months. OR, is it something in the feed that catches up with the birds at about that age? I know people who go all out to feed organic and non-GMO feed, and still end up with hens with tumors. One person had 3 in the same year. People are starting to wonder if there's some standard feed additive that maybe comes from China, a mineral supplement or something. 

In Colorado, I know there are at least a couple of people who are raising Dominiques, trying to restore this heritage breed. Like Wyandottes, they are a rosecombed bird and seem to withstand your cold weather very well. They claim their cull roosters are excellent eating.

The poultry world is interesting right now. On one hand, there are lots of people who are getting interested in raising their own. Some feed stores have jumped on the bandwagon and are providing a better selection of feeds and products for people with just a few chickens. Most people like colored eggs, so the breeds that lay them are the most popular. There are new, smaller hatcheries that deal in these breeds. There are also new businesses that make and sell backyard chicken coops. It would all be fine except on the other hand you have the large commercial growers scared to death that all these outside chickens are going to bring in a plague that will wipe everything out, and you have the Peta people who don't believe anyone should eat chickens OR eggs. And they're both working to kill the backyard chicken movement. The problem with chicken diseases is commercial birds have no immunity to anything because they're an isolated population. Something that might kill a bird or two in a backyard flock will go through and wipe out thousands at Foster Farms. In fact, if they even suspect a problem they'll eliminate a whole farm's worth of birds immediately. This may be economically the best solution, but in the long run it means our source of cheap meat (even if it IS substandard) could be easily wiped out. 

Historically, backyard birds and show birds (another thing those two groups want to eliminate is poultry shows) are not the ones that spread disease. 

There are some basic guidelines for poultry breeders that are provided by the US Government, and the states add their own laws. This means the enforcement is spotty. There is a National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP) whose goal is to inspect and test flocks for Pullorum. This is only one of the bad diseases. Some states have never, in a hundred years, had a case of it, but they still require that flocks are tested. Your flock has to be tested once a year to keep your certification current. It requires blood tests of all your adult birds. In some states this is a free service. In others the testing has a fee, and the certification costs a bunch of money. In Louisiana right now they are trying to pass a law that says each single bird needs to be tested by a veterinarian and issued a certificate. That could be impressively expensive. They want to require that any birds going into Louisiana for a show must have RECENT certification. That will pretty much prevent poultry shows in Louisiana. There are a couple of problems with this program, first, most veterinarians do not have experience with poultry. They wouldn't know a sick bird if they saw it. There are tales of vets who will hand out certificates for a set price without even seeing the birds. And those are the ones who will even allow you to take your chickens to their office at all. It's another case of bureaucracy at its worst.

Texas totally closed their borders to outside birds a few years ago. This seems silly, because their entire southern side borders Mexico. The shows in Texas do not accept outside birds. I think the Texans like this, though, there's no competition from outsiders. And exhibitors from Texas can cross back and forth across the border to show their birds, I've heard they aren't even stopped when they come back into the state. So one has to wonder what the point is.

I guess I think the problem of bad tasting chicken isn't going to go away easily. You know how American companies think. Make a product as cheap as you can, then use some of the profit to convince the stupid public that they should buy it. And now there are at least two generations of people who have never tasted real chicken. Soon, it won't be a problem, there will be no one left who knows what chicken is supposed to taste like. Meanwhile the Southeast Asians, the Mexicans and the Indians will be the only ones who know the difference, and they'll continue to raise their chickens in their suburban backyards despite any laws that are passed. One of my Mexican friends raised a pig...a PIG!...in his backyard for his daughter's quincinera (sp?) party. They butchered it in their garage and cooked it in a hole in the backyard. And they live in a nice housing development. 

So, you don't need to go to South America to get real food, just have lots of friends who are recent immigrants.

Jan