Chicken

I've been trying to cut down on chicken for a while. But it's hard to stop doing something that makes my life easier or stop eating something as delicious and easy to get as chicken -- just because it feels like I have to(?)

A few months back, this guy -- a food expert, Michael Pollan -- was on Oprah during which they asked if we knew where our food really came from.

Jumping straight to the chicken part, below are excerpts from Oprah's website:

"Michael says [chicken] has been re-engineered through breeding and diet to produce the breast meat consumers want. Compared to 50 years ago, chickens are now raised and slaughtered in half the time and grow twice as big.

In one way, Michael says this is a great achievement.... 'Now it's the cheap meat.'

'But you have to understand there's a price to that, and the price is you can only do it with lots of antibiotics,' Michael says. 'You give all those antibiotics to your animals, they're not gonna work for you when you need them.'" ~ full article here.

That managed to make me, like, 25% scared. It is below that really got me:

Michael further revealed that most poultry farming practices out there cause chickens to grow faster and bigger, they can't even stand on their feet because they are not able to support their own weight.

Ok, that is scary.

So now I don't feel forced to cut it. Just haunted.

And I almost... asked my mother to rebuild our old chicken coop, so we could get a supply of 'healthier' chickens every month -- together with a promise that I'd clean it etc whenever I'm back home. Almost.