Anyone For A Dead Chicken 2006?
Posted on 30 August 2010 by LynThomas in Health
While China consumes 4.7 billion chickens per annum, most of them are raised in battery conditions. Bosses of small-scale factories however, are often happy to buy any chickens that die prematurely and feed them into the food chain.
These undercover photos were captured, early one morning in China, in 2006. Be warned that some of these images are very disturbing.
Five riders were sent out on their motor cycles to ask around the chicken farms, if they had any dead chickens.
A dead chicken cost around 1RMB and the farmers were only too glad to get rid of them. The chickens were taken to a small processing shed where they would be sold at 9 RMB after processing.
collecting dead chickens
Four employees started to de-feather the dead chickens, after soaking them in boiling water from a rusty wok. A discarded bath tub was used to soak the bare skinned chickens.
Wearing slippers the workers walked among the chickens as they lay on the floor of the shed. After the colouring process the chickens were quite tender.
Soaked and Coloured
The end result were delicious finger-licking looking Charcoal Roasted Crispy Chicken that can be seen on many supermarket shelves.
The Final Result
Before you get too upset about processed chickens from China, take another look.
McDonalds chicken nuggets contain only 44% chicken. The rest is mostly corn, salt, preservatives, dextrose, chicken broth and a few other interesting items, such as tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum. This is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in, to “help preserve freshness.”
According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid). The FDA allows processors to use it sparingly in food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.”
Do some research yourself. Check out Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest chicken growing and processing operations, on Wikipedia. From illegal dumping of untreated wastewater and polluting local drinking water, to smuggling and hiring undocumented immigrants, inhumane killing of birds, undisclosed use of antibiotics, colour discrimination, to a hidden cache of untaxed money, processing chickens is all about making money.
We need to listen all the activists who loudly declare that consuming huge amounts of processed foods is hazardous to the health.
