There are very few things more disgusting than pink slime, the beef trimmings that are treated with ammonia and may be finding their way to our schools and are in 70% of our supermarket ground beef. Some of the latest gross food is coming out of crazy fast food restaurant creations (like Pizza Hut's hot dog stuffed crust pizza and Burger King's bacon sundae). But the latest in disgusting food news is chicken.
That's right, chicken. Healthy, previously thought to be safe-to-eat chicken bought at your local grocery store has just been found to contain some of the most disgusting things you can imagine: feces, painkillers and banned antibiotics, to name a few. So the question I'm asking is: WHAT is going on in factory farms?!
Read more ¿Qué más? "Pink slime" may be hiding in your ground beef .
Well, whatever is going on in there, we know that it isn't anything good. John Hopkins University found that "healthy chicken" sold in local supermarkets has likely been raised on a diet of the most unhealthy things on the planet. After doing testing on chicken feathers (which reveal what chickens ate during their typically 8-week lifespan, researchers found antidepressants, painkillers, allergy medicine, caffeine and banned antibiotics .
Meanwhile, laboratory testing conducted by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine found that nearly half of the chicken products marketed by national brands and sold in supermarkets are contaminated with feces.
Let me repeat that again: half of your chicken contains feces.
According to their press release, this is what they found:
Testing revealed that 48 percent of the chicken samples tested positive for fecal contamination, indicated by the presence of coliform bacteria commonly found in chicken dung. The bacterial species E. coli is a type of coliform bacteria and a specific indicator used by slaughter and processing plants to check for fecal contamination of food products and water.
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I don't know about you, but I am sufficiently grossed out. Now that I have to watch the meat I eat, it's hard to realize that I also have to be weary of the chicken I buy. This is pretty disturbing news about the chicken that's coming out of factory farms. So what are we supposed to do? Personally, in the meantime, I'm going to try to eat vegetarian a lot more.
What do you think of the latest news that chicken may be contaminated with feces, antidepressants, etc?
Image via Sandy Austin/flickr
