Gallus Gallus Domesticus
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Occam’s Razor
Occam’s Razor, a concept I occasionally reference in my writing, is a favorite principle. If you run your dishwasher and return upon completion and there is some water in front of the dishwasher, the best explanation is the dishwasher might be leaking. Sure there are other possible explanations but focusing on the most likely is usually a good plan. Today’s post is sourced from past reading, industry experience, and some education via one of my favorite sources of health information.1
The Dash Diet
The Dash Diet is the default recommendation from my health provider. When I read the basic outline, it seems pretty sensible. It is the default because average Americans are candidates for obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes. Most of the tendencies are due to diet and inactivity. Those tendencies, coupled with Type-2 diabetes made me a likely adopter of the Dash diet. The problem for me was I largely ignored the signs and just hoped for the best. By happenstance, when reality stared back at me in the mirror, I explored a different option. The Dash Diet prescribes lean protein and that is largely chicken and fish. I like seafood of all kinds so eating more of it was not going to be a sacrifice for me. The chicken challenged my mind a bit more.
Passing the Eye Test
I think, generally, if you ask people, they assume that “red meat” is not as good as other choices. However, it seems to me, that is mostly the perception of eating leaner cuts of meat. My work experience adjacent to the food business has been illuminating and it finally brings us to Occam’s Razor. Part of my career, I spent at Ecolab. Our business was keeping things clean and safe in all sorts of ways. My concentration was on our Dispenser System Engineering business which designed automated cleaning systems of all sorts. A lot of our work was concentrated in our Food & Beverage Division. So what the heck does that mean?
Let’s imagine you are a soup company and you make your soup in REALLY large pots. All of us hope after making cream of mushroom, the company will clean the kettle before swapping to chicken with noodles. So why the soup talk? The manufacture of food can be separated by what it is you are trying to make. In our case, we separated our food into markets, namely (1) beverages, (2) food, (3) meat, (4) poultry, and (5) dairy. I doubt it is surprising to many that (1) beverage making is a pretty good business to be in. People pay $2 for a bottle of water so we have that to inform us of where the money is at. Breweries and other beverages are a pretty good business and it is mostly about sanitizing the equipment as needed. Food is a pretty generic term but whether soup, baking, or whatever, the profit is pretty strong.
Is 1900s Meat Worth Comparing?
One of the consistent themes of this Newsletter is things improve. However, that does NOT mean they are sustainable. The practices of early 20th-century meat production and today are likely quite different. Some of the changes are progressing while others are market-based necessities and adjustments to competition.
Things get a little dicey when we enter the meat markets. The path from “farm to table” is a quaint term that allows us to retain an idyllic image of pastoral animals, engaged with their 4-H sponsors. The reality is profoundly different. I remember learning about processes in place and how costs must be managed ruthlessly to make the economics work. Having spent a portion of my career in the nuclear power business, I was familiar with radiation. I was not prepared to know that to keep meats like beef and pork “safe”, it was largely an industry standard to radiate the beef to kill the prevalent pathogens common to the animals. Why are there so many pathogens? That, of course, is another “problem” that scale and process may have created! As absurd as that may seem, I also realized that the same could not apply to birds because it was too costly if the 20-for $5 Nugget pricing must be sustained. The solution was to suspend the birds and dip them in acid for long enough to kill pathogens and not so long to break down the meat. While some poultry is irradiated, because of its lower final cost per pound, options to kill pathogens without irradiation are actively sought.
So what is my point here? Is irradiation of beef “good or bad”? It is probably simply a necessity based on the volume, our current voracious appetite for meat in the First World, and the variability of the sources. Careful slaughter by a butcher for the subtle occurrence of contamination is simply too costly rather than radiating the carcass in the first place. What I know for sure is individual butchering does not seem to need to do this. My research points to a measurable difference between cattle raised on grass and not finally finished in a feedlot. I put a lot of faith in the observation that corn finishing strips the animal of all of the healthful benefits of the omega fatty acids that come to reside in the flesh of the animal that eats grass. For those reasons, even though there is a taste difference discernable to many, grass-fed beef is a worthwhile substitute of the past for the current mass-market feedlot approach. The finishing on the feedlot creates a much larger and unstable animal and the time allotted for the final finish is CAREFULLY MONITORED to avoid the emergence of an animal too large for its legs and even the fractions of downer cattle.
Recent Meat History
If meat consumption were a religion, chicken would be the fastest-growing religion of them all! Around 1940 Americans became hooked on chicken and began consuming it in ever greater numbers. In those days it was far behind pork in consumption and beef was king! Meat consumption has always been significant in the United States. While overall meat consumption briefly dipped around 2004, the decline was short-lived. Never underestimate the ability to rationalize. Meat consumption began to decline with awareness of its impacts on health and the environment. The paleo diet and keto movement came to the rescue and consumption of meat quickly recovered and began rising again. The foolishness of accepting bacon as a reasonable thing to be eating all the time is readily accepted in a no-pain mentality.
Since the end of World War II meat consumption in the United States has risen from about 170 pounds to about 280 pounds per year per person! Some preferences haven’t changed very much. Americans, since the turn of the century in 1900 have largely eaten about 70 pounds of pork per year. Americans have not lost their taste for pork. It just has not grown. Beef consumption has risen from about 70 pounds to a bit over 100 pounds per person over the last century. Recently it has been declining slowly from a peak in the mid-1970s of about 125 pounds per year. It is now about 80 pounds per year.
Chicken consumption was quite low around 1900, perhaps 10 pounds a year. It has been steadily rising without pause for over a century and now has reached about 110 pounds per year! While many of us overdo it on Thanksgiving, turkey and lamb round out the sources of meat we eat but neither is significant compared to the big three. Is chicken “better” than beef, pork, lamb, or seafood? I doubt it. I am more likely to assume that the gray matter on top of our spinal cord is simply craving more fat and the development of chicken with Dolly Parton-like breasts satisfies our desire for fat at the lowest cost. The most intriguing part of this journey is to understand which meats carry the largest payload of fat. While today is not a lecture, frequent readers might remember that the lowly seed called quinoa is a COMPLETE PROTEIN just like chicken is, and without the extra payload of fat, cholesterol, etcetera.
Goldilocks — Too Much, Too Little, Or Just Right!
Meat in moderation is likely a fine solution for many reasons. Moderation will always be the challenge. Supersize me and the 24 oz Tomahawk steak will continue to be offered.
I try to be straightforward when I evaluate this kind of information. I am not interested in talking about the merits of meat tonight. Meat and dairy provide all of the essential amino acids WE NEED to thrive. Alternate sources are not straightforward and are likely something that can only be a ready substitution in affluent societies. Today I am most interested in the premise that chicken is a reasonable and “better” substitute for other meats. What are the downsides, if any, to poultry and chicken in particular? I think this is a worthwhile discussion because poultry in large quantities is a VERY RECENT switch for Americans. It seems people are prone to preach that chicken is lean and “better” than red meat. I think it is likely that NEITHER of those statements is true.
It has only been since about 2005 that chicken became the most prevalent meat choice for Americans. With only 20 years of data for folks that might nominally live 80 years, that is not a long time by any stretch!
The Rise of the Chicken
Against this backdrop, we (Ecolab) sold automated equipment and procedural controls to make sure that surfaces and machinery were kept clean and sanitary. The chemistry of keeping food clean is pretty simple. Despite what a former President might have surmised about bleach inside our bodies to kill COVID, anything chlorinated irreversibly kills living tissue and is a strong no-no. Furthermore, all of the chemistry is water-based (no organics need to apply) as they are toxic poisons for living things. So our place in the business was to develop hundreds of very specific cleaners that could be used separately or in combination to keep things clean. Often it was bleach to clean the surfaces and then a sufficient rinse to remove its remnants as the remnant chlorine KILLS tissue.
So this longish discussion arrives at a simple, yet primary set of truths. The chemistry of keeping things clean and safe to eat is well understood. The resulting economics and viability of how we raise poultry are not reasonable. The price to sell in the poultry business is MUCH LOWER than it is in the Beverage, Food, or even Meat industries. Every corner that can be cut, has been cut. The pricing of products to the poultry business is about as low as they can go. It is natural (and sensible) to assume that the producers take great care to only use as much cleaning product as ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. This is simple economics and Occam’s Razor at work.
I believe the change in the mix of what we consume for meat has mostly to do with the changes in practice over the last century. I remember my Mom and Dad commenting that chicken didn’t quite taste the same as it did in their youth. This is by design and the changes are worth considering. Here are some facts about chicken (and poultry) in general
Eating chickens is the most common source of Salmonella poisoning. A 2014 issue of Consumer Reports published that 97 percent of chicken breasts found in retail stores were contaminated with bacteria that could make people sick, and 38 percent of the Salmonella found was resistant to multiple antibiotics.
WTH with the antibiotics??? We are CONSTANTLY LECTURED when given antibiotics to take the whole prescription even after we FEEL BETTER. All creatures, including bacteria and viruses, have EVOLVED and ADAPTED to fight invaders like antibiotics. Whereas we have trained a generation of doctors not to over-prescribe antibiotics, farmers have not gotten the memo.
Worldwide it is estimated that 66% of all antibiotics are used in farm animals, not people! The next time your doctor lectures you to take the whole course of an antibiotic ask them if the antibiotic they prescribed for you is used en masse on animals. Much of this use is routine and enables farm animals, most often pigs and poultry but sometimes also cattle, to be kept in poor conditions where disease spreads easily.
It is not unreasonable to wonder whether bulk dosing antibiotics to chickens and then offering them to us when we have a bacterial infection. It seems likely that after you unwrap your chicken, the flesh of the bird might very well have some latent antibiotics IN IT!
How good are the antibiotics and the dipping in acid doing? According to a national retail-meat survey by the Food and Drug Administration, about 90 percent of retail chicken showed evidence of contamination with fecal matter.
Bacteria (like salmonella) are one thing, but what about viruses? Viruses may also potentially pose a risk. Might chicken cancer viruses be transmitted to people through the handling of fresh or frozen chicken? A study of 30,000 poultry workers found that those who slaughter chickens have about nine times the odds of pancreatic and liver cancers. For context, the most carefully studied pancreatic cancer risk factor is cigarette smoking, but smoking for 50 years “only” doubles our odds of getting pancreatic cancer.
What about people who eat chicken? The European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study followed 477,000 people for about a decade and found a 72 percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer for every 50 grams ( < 2 oz) of chicken consumed daily, which is about a quarter of a breast. When a similar result was found for lymphomas and leukemias, the EPIC team acknowledged that while the growth-promoting drugs fed to chickens and turkeys could be playing a role, it might also be cancer viruses found in poultry.
Similar studies around colon and prostate cancer lead to surprising conclusions of risk isolated to poultry consumption.
Why Are We Choosing Chicken?
I completely agree that we might always be able to find studies that agree with our bias, so let us set aside the observations above. Why are we eating so much chicken in the first place? It is certainly CHEAPER than other meats. A can of beans can be had for 50 cents on sale so it can’t just be the price. My take returns to Occam’s Razor. We just can’t resist fat as it satisfies us in so many ways. It turns out that chickens are far and away the MOST EXTENSIVELY genetically modified of our everyday foods. Chickens can now be raised from chick to wrapped and ready to go in as few as five weeks! These are animals teetering on their legs barely able to support their now preferentially large breasts. It is a careful dance to raise them and slaughter them before their large breast stature overwhelms their leg’s ability to support them!
Some of what I just shared might sound like an animal cruelty issue to some of you but I doubt that holds much sway with many of us. The secondary effect of the genetic selection, food source, and focus on fast fattening is that poultry is likely now the most fattening meat of all on offer. I think we must of course exclude pate aka fattened goose liver. Those eating even one ounce of chicken a day (think two chicken nuggets) had a significantly greater gain in body mass index over 14 years than those who consumed no chicken at all!!! Chickens have been genetically manipulated through selective breeding to now contain two to three times more calories from fat than from protein, and even skinless chicken may have more fat, and more artery-clogging saturated fat, than a dozen different cuts of steak. I consider this the most damning fact of all!!! So while you might rationalize that you eat chicken because we NEED PROTEIN, it is what comes along for the ride that might be worth worrying about more.
Occam’s Razor Again
In the principle of the simpler the better, my conclusion is if you want to know the most suspect of things to eat, look where the ruthless cost-cutting practices have brought us to. By the way, the cleaning products I spoke of are now also part of the dairy farm business. Pricing there is razor-thin margins similar to poultry. Americans drink less milk every year for decades now. Managing costs is the only way to survive on a dairy farm. If it were not for absurd national subsidies, the dairy industry would have shrunk even more. When it comes to milk, did you know that the amount of money a farmer gets as a SUBSIDY is based largely on their distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin? In the earliest days of subsidies, it was farmers on the East Coast and the “need for New York Cheddar” that drove the absurd subsidy based on distance from Wisconsin. It is no accident that wistful advertisements guide us to the merits of Vermont or New York cheese. They are merely far away from Wisconsin as far as I can tell :)
When Californians with an IDEAL climate figured out how to import water from the Colorado River to the desert perpetually, the dairy industry blossomed and rapidly surpassed even “America’s Dairyland”. Whether dairy or tree nuts, these are two of the heaviest users of precious water in the Golden State. I happen to enjoy almond milk. The understanding that it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond makes it clear to me that California and the Western States have clear policies they might pursue to address their “water crisis”. Many years ago I worked with a gentleman who was a hobby farmer. He grew cotton in California. It doesn’t get any more ridiculous than that!
An interesting aside on how tree nuts became so popular. California has extremely DISTORTED “water rights”. California farmland that has water rights is a use-or-lose proposition. This means WASTE IT IF NECESSARY. This led to asinine use of water and has now reached its stupid destination as farmers grow almonds, pistachios, and cotton. Until the obvious distortion is dealt with, it seems silly to listen to the pleading for “we need more water”. Pistachios were raised traditionally in Iran. The CIA toppled the Iranian regime after WW II and installed the child Shah of Iran. He was an SOB but he was our SOB. He abused his people on an unprecedented level and was toppled in the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s. The US response was to sanction and disallow the import of Iranian pistachios. The rational response was to start growing them in the Golden State. Unintended consequences…
If you are looking for an offbeat and ultimately heartwarming story about the human spirit and adaptability that showcases the almond, the likely culprit in the decline of the dairy industry, here is a fun old post you may enjoy. Perhaps one of the features of my early writing was its economy. I was writing every day so the reference only requests four minutes of your time (if you skip the links).
Trust But Verify
While I try to research my writing, bias seeps into the writing of everyone. I believe it is the human condition. The best things to write about are things we feel strongly about. The discipline of the method is to recognize and limit your bias whenever possible. As a treat that I enjoy, few meat experiences match well-prepared lamb for me.
I fear the experiment with chicken is being repeated in America and the impact will be felt by those of us who enjoy the taste of lamb. Because Americans have been conditioned for now almost 40 years to the highly marbled and largely corn diet for pasture animals, the results are best seen and tasted in lamb. Lamb is not particularly popular in the United States although immigration from some regions of the world is increasing in demand.
Americans are big believers and advocates for the use of antibiotics to allow indoor dense feeding of animals and judicious use of hormones because bigger is always better. I found this balanced review of lamb from a culinary perspective and it matches my experience. Open the link and merely look at the chart that shows the weight of a lamb raised one way versus the other. If the goal is a larger animal, the American approach is hard to argue with. Eating lamb from Australia or New Zealand yields a very different experience than eating native-raised lamb. The size of American lamb chops brings to mind the NFL lineman relative to a “normal” human being. The taste profile is similar to the difference between grass-fed cattle and the more common final finished corn-fed steer. While I DO NOT KNOW, I would imagine the impact on the organs of the animal finally finished with corn is similar to the effect on cattle. A cow has multiple stomachs and is referred to as a ruminant. Anywhere from 1 of 8 to as many as 1 of 3 cattle on feedlots suffer liver abscesses as the organ is simply driven to failure. This is why the broad availability of liver nowadays is much less. It has been compromised by the final finishing process.
I encourage the lovers of lamb (if any of you qualify) to sample the difference between a more modest New Zealand lamb chop (devoid of antibiotics, hormones, and corn) and the Americanized version available. If you are a supersize advocate, the American version is for you. One of the former highlights of the Minnesota State Fair for me is smallish lamb chops on a stick prepared with Middle Eastern seasoning. Yummy.
The Poll & Music
If you decide to do the poll please share your reasoning in the comments. I do not expect Something Else tonight but my readers are always capable of a surprise.
The music often chooses itself. Tonight is no exception. The last two times I was a steady carpooler, my alternate driver was hooked on this band. I enjoy them to this day. Those who listen will even note a reference to one of my favorite meats :)
What’s Next
Next time we return with “Extra Crispy”. It has nothing to do with food.
https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/chicken/
I've been feeling squeamish about chicken for a while, and it's much harder to find locally raised ones than it is to find grass-finished beef where I live. You might have pushed me over the chicken edge!
I think "The Rise of the Chicken" could be a short story. Maybe even a novel.