Big Chicken: A Fowl Conspiracy

Chicken! It's one of the world's most popular food stuffs, and nowadays it's a global, multibillion dollar industry. But a dark side comes with all that success -- including problems that, one day, may threaten civilization as we know it. Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they explore the Stuff They Don't Want You To Know about Big Chicken.

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Andrew the try Force Howard. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Friends and neighbors, fellow
conspiracy realists, we know you know, we know the score.
A lot of us are snacking on something, having a

(00:49):
little nash as we as we tune into these episodes
or to our strange news or listener mail. Just want
to give you a heads up. If you're eating, this
might not be the jam for you. It might not
be the jelly. It might not be the chicken salad
that you were seeking.

Speaker 4 (01:07):
I'll have chicken, guys, but I still have yet to
come around on chicken salad.

Speaker 5 (01:11):
It weirds me out. Just saying it out loud kind.

Speaker 4 (01:14):
Of weirds me out a little bit, even though I
like everything that it contains, But something about it being
this like gulash of like pasty, kind of mayonnaisy.

Speaker 5 (01:23):
Chicken just wears me out.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
But I know there are chicken salad people who are like, no,
you just have to have the right one, and please
let us know your recipe. What's a good chicken salad
recipe that'll turn a denier like myself?

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Crepes, add grape, okay, and then put it on raisin bread.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
You could add all sorts of stuff. Yeah, I love
this question because chicken salad is such an umbrella term,
and salad can be confusing because I believe a lot
of us in the US associated purely with vegetable or
produce salads. But the edemal like salad in culinary terms,
is just a mixture of stuff put to get owns.

Speaker 4 (02:02):
Yeah, I think part of it also, it might be
that expression you can't make chicken shit into chicken salad.

Speaker 5 (02:09):
I just think that sticks.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
With me for an expression.

Speaker 5 (02:12):
It really is.

Speaker 4 (02:13):
It's a thing because it's like it's like putting what
do they say, a sow's year into a silk purse
from a sow's year.

Speaker 5 (02:21):
It's kind of the same idea that one.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
Well, it makes sense that chicken would be a go
to in so many figures of speech were idioms because
it's one of the world's most popular meats. Like, as
we record tonight, billions of human beings are eating billions
of chickens in one form or another. Every year. More
than sixty billion chickens are killed at some point in

(02:47):
the production process because they're part of the planets or
one of the planet's largest industrialized livestock programs in all
of human history. I mean even gosh, not too long ago,
we were talking about how an argument over boneless wings
recently went to the courts in Ohio. Remember that one.

Speaker 4 (03:09):
Oh yeah, it was a very controversial debate there, very contentious.

Speaker 5 (03:16):
A lot of people really had a bone pick.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
I'm sorry, there it is not there, it is no apologies.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Well, some important stuff. What does boneless actually mean?

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Sure? What does organic mean? What is antibiotic free?

Speaker 5 (03:29):
Was there once a bone that was removed? Is that
the key?

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Just because we say it's boneless doesn't mean there's no bones.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
Or is there a translation era? Is it bone comma less?
You know, like fewer bones. That seems to be what
the court's going with.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
I just think it's funny that there's also like the
flip side of that that is considered a feature, which
is bone in like a ribbi, you know, a fancy
steak that have bone in before it.

Speaker 5 (03:55):
Like, that's what you want.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Chick and thigh.

Speaker 5 (03:59):
We left zachy just hick you.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Guys, chicken die with bone end man. That's the way
to go for our home cooks, as long as you're
not vegetarian or vegan. And speaking of a mixture of things.
In a previous conversation, uh we in we had a
series wherein we investigated the dark side of the livestock
industry overall. This time we're back with a new cluck

(04:23):
to step two. We're scoping in on one creature in particular,
one entity in particular, a thing that spans the globe
the same way the Dutch East India Company spanned the
globe in days of old. We're talking about Big Chicken,
and not the uh, not the weird statue a little

(04:45):
north of the Atlanta metro.

Speaker 5 (04:46):
Area with that googly eye watching you.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
Yeah, yeah, KFC's Big Chicken. Uh It's I'm not gonna
I don't want to be a hater. I'm not going
to say it's worth visiting. If you have one day
in the Atlanta area before your next flight. But if
you find yourself here for let's say four days or

(05:12):
a week, and you've got a car, you got wheels,
then why not drive by it? It's you know, it's
a spectacle.

Speaker 4 (05:18):
It makes some lists, you know, of roadside oddities. I
think it's worth, you know, checking off of your particular list.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
If that's your thing, Drive by the Big Chicken and
then enjoy a Chick fil a sand.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Exactly right, Even though Big Chicken is from KFC, exactly
what it used to be a sign for a KFC,
and I don't think it's there anymo.

Speaker 5 (05:38):
Yeah, the chicken remains.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
Oh wow, So it looks like we got to get
up there too, get some fieldwork in. Big Chicken is huge.
There are dozens of conspiracy surrounding this. There are thousands
of controversies, and there's some dark stuff on the horizon.
But how did we get here? To answer that, we're
going to have to learn a little bit about chickens.

Speaker 6 (06:03):
Yeah, here are the facts, all right.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
We did some episodes. We and our colleagues did some
episodes on domestication as a concept over the almost two
decades now. And if you want to learn more about domestication.
Highly recommend stuff you should know by our pals Josh
and Chuck. If you want to learn about the domestication

(06:36):
of dogs, check out our series on ridiculous History. If
you want to learn about the domestication of chickens, you're
gonna have to break past some assumptions. Assumptions I thought
we all had, you know, I always assumed that the
domestication of the bird we call the chicken was ancient.

(06:58):
It was like pre recorded history.

Speaker 4 (07:02):
Yeah, it was thought for a long time, like sheeper goats,
that they were domesticated around eleven thousand years ago.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
Yeah, it looks like chickens are actually, in comparison, quite
new to the domestication game, just about three to four
thousand years ago. And it is. This is a cool,
weird fact. The domestication occurs in step with the cultivation
of rice in Southeast Asia.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Makes sense. Chicken and rice, they go together, nice.

Speaker 5 (07:36):
Very good dish.

Speaker 4 (07:38):
And I believe the original birds that were domesticated were
called wild red jungle fowl from Southeast Asia.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, it's inn't that funny. Humans have been terrified of
chickens for a long time, just so afraid of them.
Didn't want them around the houses. Just keep those chickens away.
A little dinosaurs and can get behind that. Get out
of here.

Speaker 5 (08:00):
They were frecky little guys. Man. I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
They will eat each other. They are. Yeah, they're very
different personalities, but personalities they do possess. It wasn't until
twenty twenty we'll go to Science magazine here that a
study of a deep study of chicken genes like DNA
of modern chickens confirmed a humble jungle foul. The Gallus

(08:26):
Gallus spedicus subspecies was the ancestor of living chickens, sort
of the avi and eve in this situation, and chickens
share more of their DNA with that specific subspecies than
any other subspecies, and this helped the scientists do some forensics.

(08:47):
They narrowed down the side of domestication to Southeast Asia,
and then they did a couple of other studies, all
to research the original assumption that everybody grew up with,
which was that chickens were domesticated back when the sheep
and the goat was domesticated. There's a cool team up

(09:09):
between a paleo anatomis and a bio archaeologist specialized in domestication,
which I didn't know was a job you could have.
So shout out to Joris Peters and Gregor Larsen. They
went around the world, you guys, in two separate studies
looking into sites of antiquity that happened to have chicken bones,

(09:31):
whether in a campfire pot or whether buried with a
human as you would bury a beloved pet.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
Man. If they ever have to reassess bioarchaeologically the nature
of chickens, Atlanta will be the perfect site for chicken bones.

Speaker 5 (09:47):
It's there got a more lousy with them. They're everywhere.

Speaker 4 (09:50):
The joke online is very much based on the reality
of living in the city.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
They find their way into that red clay and then
they'll be there for the future. It is interesting, just
this concept of having chickens as pets. I was being
silly there talking about scary little you know dinosaurs and but.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
No, it's true.

Speaker 5 (10:13):
It's true.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
No, if you've spent any time around chickens, whether it's
just you know, a couple, maybe it's just six to
twelve or something like that, that are being raised for
their egg production or something like that. Uh, these animals
are can be at least extremely affectionate and curious and
like interested in humans in some way I could say,

(10:35):
down to hang around you, and it's it's actually I
can imagine it. I can imagine a chicken making a
really cool pet, maybe more dog.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
Well, they form bonds for sure, like they're Another stereotype
we have to bust is the myth of being bird brained,
because chickens can have complex emotional lives. They recognize humans.
They you know, they experience pain and joy and grief
and curiosity and you know, all the hits, all the

(11:04):
slow jazz, which means that there are also and I'm
only saying this because I met a few, there also
are some evil chickens. There are some like villainous like
dommer level chickens. It's weird, but it does indicate, you know,
that point about their emotional complexity. The oldest what we

(11:27):
will call chicken bones discovered so far. They come from
a place in Thailand, in central Thailand named bond Non Watt,
and they show up around the time ancient farmers started
growing and cultivating rice. So our best guess is this
rice cultivation led to rice seeds being scattered around, right,

(11:50):
and this was amazing for the wild jungle fowl that
you mentioned earlier and old, because that thing was basically
just play in the lottery every time at peck in
the dirt, hoping it came up with something it could eat.
And now all of a sudden, yes, yeah there's literal
pay dirt. That was really nice. Yeah, there's literal pay dirt.
And the birds begin nesting at the edges of these

(12:13):
cultivated rice fields, which means over time they slowly acclimate
to humans and can currently humans acclimate to them. Fast
forward thousands of years. Yeah, chickens got the raw end
of the deal.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Yeah, yeah, I've played Minecraft. If you have seeds around,
those chickens will hang around you, and if you give
them some seeds, they get little hearts over their heads
and they procreate.

Speaker 4 (12:37):
Oh that's sort of like given the dog a treat
and legend of Zelda or in Breath of the Wild,
and give the dog an apple and it starts to
like emote these hearts and then it'll follow you around.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
Oh, just for a rule of three, if you cast
speak to animals and boulders gate three, then you can
also befriend dogs and owl bear. I don't want to
spoil it too much a strange ox Okay, a strange
I don't want to spoil like it's a whole fricking storyline.

Speaker 5 (13:08):
Man, I've got it. I'm gonna you know what I'm gonna.

Speaker 4 (13:10):
I'm gonna start digging back into it after I start
civilization whatever the new one is, and after I hunt
a few more monsters and monster hunter wilds, which is
a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
Yeah, all right. We also know in the in the
large sense, there's there's an evolutionary dilemma. So being domesticated
by humans on this planet means that your species will
become one of the most prolific species on the planet. Right,
Like cows are everywhere, you know, chickens are everywhere, But

(13:42):
as an individual instance of that species, your life is
probably gonna suck, unless you're like maybe a dog or
we could bracket cats. They sort of domesticated themselves. But
the weird fact going into this industry of consuming chickens
is that chicken and rice was probably always a thing.

(14:03):
Logically it may have been. It probably was the world's
first chicken dish, and even then we see a pattern
from these studies. It takes a while for humans to
think of these jungle foul, even after they're domesticated as
a food source. First, what we see is that for

(14:24):
a long time people looked at them as sort of
a real life Pokemon flex. I got a living alarm clock.
Look at these feathers, dog, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (14:35):
Well, yeah, and the eggs, the eggs I guarantee were
cultivated before the actual chicken meat. Who figured the eggs
are useful in so many different ways?

Speaker 3 (14:43):
It's a returning investment too.

Speaker 4 (14:45):
But who figured that out these weird orbs, that these
little guys poop out, that we could do something with them.
I mean, I know trial and error and all that,
but I always wonder who first cracked an egg and try.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Eating it raw?

Speaker 4 (14:57):
And I was like, Okay, that's kind of gross. What
if I had he it up over a fire? And
now it's this lovely, you know, pillowy delicacy. It's the
mushroom question It is, really is what's our rate of attrition?
How many bad eggs did people encounter?

Speaker 3 (15:10):
First?

Speaker 4 (15:11):
Well, and also, you know you're not supposed to eat
raw eggs, But isn't that more a product of modern farming?
Like do you think back then it would have been
totally fine to eat raw eggs, or were they still
prone to having some sort of food borne illness.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
That's an interesting question.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
I just I don't know.

Speaker 5 (15:28):
It's maybe the wrong one for right now, but it's
just I don't know.

Speaker 4 (15:30):
It's the whole trajectory of how we got to eating eggs.

Speaker 5 (15:33):
It's fascinating.

Speaker 3 (15:35):
Well, I just.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Imagine if you have greens around, like lots of greens
that are being produced, no matter what type it is, right,
even if it's rice, and you've got an egg product
like or just an egg, and you combine that in
just as an experiment and realize, oh, this is a
really good binder behind.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Because yeah, the harsh reality is that most people were starving.
You know, food security was a huge concern. Also, it
makes me think, while we're just while we're gaming this out,
there may have been some pivotal moment where the rat
would have replaced the chicken grains edges of fields tolerance

(16:16):
for humans, the egg was probably the deciding factor. Honestly,
the egg and the slightly at that point larger size.

Speaker 5 (16:24):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
Well, yeah, other little rodent like creatures like the guinea
pig became a major source of food in other places
right that hang out where the grains hang.

Speaker 5 (16:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
Yeah, So we see a pattern and we can't answer
why nature or why this version of reality swung to
one pivot point or the next, but we can tell
you over really give you fast forward through thousands of years.
Can we get a fast forward queue thousands of years?

(16:57):
There is a domesticated chicken industry. Big Chicken is real.
It's global. The domesticated chicken spread far and wide. We're
talking about multi like a multi, multi billion dollar initiative.
It's across the world anywhere you go. Right, Chicken is
for people who eat meat. Chicken is one of the

(17:18):
most accessible versions of protein.

Speaker 5 (17:22):
Right.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
It's one of the few that is not explicitly banned
in other meat eating religions, like you can't eat pork everywhere,
you can't eat beef everywhere, you can't eat certain shellfish everywhere.
But unless your religion for bids animal products at all,
chicken's fine.

Speaker 5 (17:42):
Chickens good to go, baby, exactly.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
We just need, you know, millions and millions and millions
of them, because there's some hungry people in this planet.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
Right, billions. Yeah, which brings us to the chicken industry today.
Maybe kick some stats.

Speaker 5 (18:01):
Let's do do that.

Speaker 4 (18:02):
But I really quickly just think it's appropriate to bring
up this little reference right before the section.

Speaker 5 (18:08):
You guys know the rapper Rick Ross, Yes, which one? Oh?

Speaker 3 (18:12):
No, the the not the namesake.

Speaker 5 (18:16):
I think that's right.

Speaker 4 (18:17):
Rick Ross is an Atlanta rapper and entrepreneur, and he
owns a massive two hundred and thirty five acre estate
in Fayetteville, Georgia that he calls the Promised Land, and
he's into all kinds of farming, including bison. And I
think he's either considering getting into chickens or he already has.
But there's this excellent interview with them on Vince Staples

(18:39):
podcast where he's describing being surrounded by chicken cages and
chickens roaming around.

Speaker 5 (18:44):
He goes, it's there everywhere, going, you know, quack quack
quack quack quack quack.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
No, Yeah, that makes sense. He's he is the same
guy who invited people to just d m him if
they want parachute into his estate in I want to
say Florida, but it may have been Faettville as well. Well.

Speaker 4 (19:08):
I take to tell you, Rick Ross, but chickens don't
say quack, they say buck.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Do you think he's okay. He's either never seen or
been in the chicken areas of his estate, or he's
in fact raising ducks.

Speaker 5 (19:24):
Unclear. Unclear.

Speaker 4 (19:26):
Well, so, as of twenty twenty four, the United States,
with Rick Ross contributing to this, potentially had an inventory
of over five hundred and twenty million chickens and two
hundred and eighteen million turkeys. The market leader for poultry
production in the United States is, of course Tyson. Maybe not,
of course. I just think they've got a big presence

(19:47):
here in this part of the country, for sure, These
chicken plants with over forty three billion US dollars in sales.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
WHOA, don't forget per due farms, guys, don't forget all
the other.

Speaker 4 (20:01):
To be confused with produce far mart that's pretty far right.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
And yeah, there are a couple other players in the game.
Tyson is the big one, but there is a pantheon
in the United States at least. And now we have
to look at the difference between how these how these
chickens exist. They're laying chickens which make eggs until they're slaughtered,
and then there are broiler chickens, which are grown for
a short time to an enormous size and then slaughtered.

(20:30):
Broiler chickens are the majority source of US chicken meat.
There's sixty seven percent of all poultry sector sales, that's
per the USDA. And there is an explosive trend here.
In less than sixty years, the number of broiler chickens

(20:50):
has skyrocketed. There were five hundred and eighty million annually
in the nineteen fifties. They're like nine billion now in
more recent years. So that's a that's a percentage raise
of about fourteen broiler chickens.

Speaker 5 (21:05):
Think your cost co Rotisseri guys.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Right, well, no, any chicken that is raised for meat,
that's what the broilers are. And all chicken well, ninety
five percent of the chickens raised for meat in this
country are represented by the National Chicken Council, you guys.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
Right, Yes, we were talking about this off air. I'm
I've been reading a lot of their works, the National
Chicken good writing.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
They've got a great YouTube channel, y'all. It's and this
is this is real. The National Chicken Council aka Big Chicken.
They have a YouTube channel with the It is at
Chicken Roost Roost two four four six, that is their
YouTube channel.

Speaker 4 (21:54):
And this isn't which you may be consider in and
of itself a lobby but they employ lobbyists, right, isn't
that the edge?

Speaker 7 (22:01):
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's it would call itself
a trade organization or a trade group, but it is
extremely active in you.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
Know, in located streets. Yeah, very much so.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
Their their corporate offices are five blocks from the White
House lawn and uh, they're right over there in the
same place with stuff like the NAACP in Washington, DC,
like the same block of places, the American Chemical Society
and the Natural Resources Defense Council, a bunch of these,
like I guess, trade groups lobbyists that hang out and

(22:38):
are able to literally walk over to the White House
or to Congress and just have a little shit chat
about that bill or whatever.

Speaker 3 (22:47):
And we've spent time in that neighborhood.

Speaker 8 (22:48):
You know.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
It's kind of like if you're in the US, you
might run into this in your own town. It's kind
of like how multiple car dealerships will be on the
same street because like attracts like you could argue, but
for them, proximity is always key in lobbying. And this
is just the US we're not even talking about China,

(23:09):
which is the largest producer of chicken and poultry products
in the world. Together, the US and China represent about
a third of all the global poultry production, which is
a terrifying stat when you think about it. It is
not even really counting the eggs. That's a whole other
bag of badgers. What we see here already is an

(23:30):
economic leviathan, and it comes with some advantages. It comes
with some consequences if we're beaten fair. First, the first
pro or advantage is that chicken is affordable, so for
countless people throughout history, throughout recent history, and throughout the
world today. This means you can have a source of

(23:52):
protein for your family that you may not have been
otherwise able to afford. That's the biggest win for humans,
make no mistake about it, food security. The chicken industry
represents a tremendous leap forward in that regard. Yet I
would argue a dangerously imperfect leap forward.

Speaker 5 (24:13):
Oh for sure.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
For sure, guys, let's talk about units of meat per meal,
like when we're thinking about an animal, just thinking about
the number. We were talking about the number of chickens
that get slaughtered, right number that are raised and then
gets slaughtered and then consumed. One broiler chicken theoretically is

(24:35):
enough food to feed a family of four, maybe five
even maybe you know you.

Speaker 3 (24:41):
Got a little tyson sitting there in the high chair.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Sure, well, I'm thinking the big old, big old broiler.
Oh yeah, okay, little Tyson.

Speaker 5 (24:48):
Tyson's the boy's name human.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
Okay, a little Tyson broiler.

Speaker 4 (24:55):
But he gives his own little Tyson broiler for a
little Tyson.

Speaker 8 (25:00):
A great idea, but just theoretically, that one chicken is
like a meal, right, so one of theoretically three that
are going to be had throughout a day.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
You know how standard household or whatever you want to
you know, allocate those averages for in the United States.
But if you slaughter a single pig, let's say, I
mean that's food for a weeks.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Yeah, depending on your preservation methods too.

Speaker 5 (25:28):
Are we are we talking?

Speaker 4 (25:29):
Does this stuff line up with the idea of servings
or are these kind of unrelated?

Speaker 2 (25:34):
This is thought, This is just thinking off. I mean, yeah,
maybe number of servings are the the number of animals
that need to die in.

Speaker 5 (25:41):
Order for meals to be had?

Speaker 3 (25:43):
Right?

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Okay, so like just when we think about the number
of chickens that have to be raised and killed to
meet the same number of meals basically that you would
get if you were instead just slaughtering.

Speaker 3 (25:54):
Cows or meet the number of meals.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah, I'm serious.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
Quote, yeah, that's true, right right, and also what's the
environmental footprint? Do check out our episode on the livestock
industry where we talked a little bit more about beef
and pork. We we have to tell you that pro
that advantage at the very beginning, so we know why
the Humble Chicken became sort of a hellen of food

(26:22):
security Troy, you know, and launched a thousand dinner tables,
as they would say. We also need to admit that
this comes with a panoply of consequences, a rogues gallery really,
of problems that are ethical, that are practical. Some of
them are immediate, some of them are long standing, and
some are on the horizon in a way that can

(26:44):
be scary to think about, and others still verge into
downright conspiracies. So we're gonna pause for word from our
sponsors and we come back. We're gonna ask as honestly
and as fairly as we can what are some of
the cons a Big Chicken.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
HPAI, Hewlett Packard artificial intelligence.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, First things first, obviously,
we're talking about the dark side of Big Chicken. Whether
you're a huge Chick fil A fan, whether you have
your favorite chicken wing spot, or whether you're an avowed vegan,
there's no denying that because of this industry, life absolutely sucks.

(27:39):
For chicken. Life is just terrible. You know, it's genocide.

Speaker 4 (27:46):
Even though, like you know, best of circumstances, the cage
free eggs that you pay extra for or whatever, the
free range chicken. That's all just like the path to death,
like no matter how you slice it.

Speaker 5 (27:59):
Okay, pun may be a little intended.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yes, yes, a but and this is a yes but section.
Sorry guys. Yes, but there are things changing a little
bit right for chickens. We'll get into that. For all
the animals, there are some things that theorety theoretically could
make their lives better before they get slaggered.

Speaker 5 (28:22):
Maybe.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah, And to learn why those changes exist, let's look
at the current and past state.

Speaker 5 (28:31):
Right.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
Why the changes Matts alluding to are even on the
proverbial dinner table, right, So factory farming incorporates and institutionalizes
a collection of horrific methods conditions imposed on chickens. They
kind of have a disposition matrix toward what creates the
largest amount of profit and everything that's happening, everything that

(28:55):
you're about to hear, which may make some of us,
some of us in the crowd on comfortable, It is
all in the name of not malevolence, but in the
name of squeezing a bit more profit out of that
bottom line out of every single bird. And it starts
with culling. So it is currently common for producers to

(29:16):
get a big, a big new generation of chickens, to
identify all the newly hatched male chicks and to immediately
kill them to in older days, to just grind them up.
The logic being these guys don't lay eggs and they
used to grow too slowly, so a lot of them

(29:37):
would be ground up and then fed back to the chickens.

Speaker 5 (29:42):
That seems safe.

Speaker 4 (29:44):
I don't know, it just seems like potentially the way
that you would get like super pathogens or something.

Speaker 3 (29:51):
Yes, nice foreshadowy there, I mean, this doesn't be life
is great for the survivors of that first cull egg
laying chickens. Let's say you become a laying chicken. You
are still in these brutal, very cramped conditions pretty often
because cage free, by the way, doesn't mean what a
lot of people assume it means, and an egg laying

(30:12):
chicken will often get debeat to eliminate inter chicken violence,
which is otherwise a hilarious phrase, but it's very real.

Speaker 4 (30:23):
Burned off if I'm not mistaken, right, isn't it like
a process clipped off?

Speaker 5 (30:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (30:28):
Okay, for some reason, I've seen a process involving some
sort of very like hot brand of some kind or
like I don't know, maybe.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
I could see Yeah, I mean it differs. It's always
going to be what's the cheapest thing for that producer, right,
And once those once those beaks are clipped or burned,
otherwise maimed or removed, you'll see a lower level of
aggression and cannibalism, which would in other circumstances be widespread,

(30:57):
whereas our pal Frank would say wide rife in this
very contaminated, cramped environment. The reason that works is because
it puts the chicken in a state of chronic pain
for the rest of its short life. So if it attacks,
if it like it hurts to eat. Imagine your main
way of aggression, right, or sustenance was your mouth. And imagine,

(31:23):
you know, shortly after you were born, somebody messed with
your jaw and your mouth and your nose such that
it hurts to breathe, it hurts to eat. You're an
intense pain if you try to bite. That's why it works.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Now, these growers we're talking, we're talking about this is
happening for chickens that lay eggs, like lay yeah, okay,
so but those are not the broiler chickens, right, those
are different. Yeah, those aren't the ones that humans are
going to eat. Generally, those are for a whole separate purpose.

Speaker 3 (31:59):
Those will tend to have a longer life span, still
brutally short, but they'll tend to have a longer lifespan.
We're right. Their eggs, Yeah, they get killed kind of
in the pecond wave, and all of these creatures live
a much shorter life than they would live naturally or

(32:20):
in you know, your backyard.

Speaker 4 (32:23):
I did google chicken beak removal hot, and there is
a thing for sale online. It is called a chicken
beak breaker hot. Beak machine automatic beak breaker, and it
basically has a blade that is heated up to red
hot and then the the beak is put in there
and it's it's clipped off using it because it cauterizes it,

(32:45):
you know, after it clips these that can't be very
pleasant at all.

Speaker 3 (32:50):
No, again, it gives them chronic pain for the rest
of their lives when they clip that beak. This doesn't
even Oh, we got to talk about the size right
earlier mentioned units of food right end user. So we
mentioned earlier that modern chickens, now, if you look at them,
they're going to be way bigger than those jungle foul

(33:11):
of ancient Southeast Asia. Part of that is due to
injection of growth hormones juice in the birds. That's illegal
in the US and Australia currently. But another part of
the general size disparity comes from something it's even a
little crazier. It's eugenics. Intense breeding regimens.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
So couple with these extremely cramped conditions you can barely
call a life. This can also result in chickens that
are so overweight and burdened by their own heaths that
they are essentially you know, in invalid I guess, for
lack of a better term, they are not able to

(33:56):
move around and operate like a normal creature would. The
level to which they are plumped up, I guess you
could say essentially is like completely burdening them at all times.

Speaker 5 (34:08):
They can't even support their own weight.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Yeah, and that's not their choice. Also, it's a short life.
It's filled with terror. And we were talking about this earlier.
It bears emphasis. Anyone who has raised chickens on a
small scale, A lot of our friends or family, or
even coworkers outside of that, can confirm chickens do have personalities,

(34:34):
can experience emotions, which means they know when stuff sucks
right just like you, they have a problem with it.
Even the more humane operations out there will use slaughtering
alternatives like decompression or gas chambers or something called the
kill cone. The kill cone is where you take a chicken,

(34:58):
you stuff it headfirst down a funnel, and then you
pop the head through the opening at the bottom of
the funnel, and then you slash their neck and then
bleed out. Those are examples of the more humane alternatives
to the usual factory slaughters. So the more you learn
about this industrial level poultry production the worst. It becomes

(35:22):
a point we were talking about a little bit off air.
In a lot of animal rights literature, the people who
would be the polar opposites of the trade lobbies or
the thing with the autonomy big chicken. A lot of
those groups vilify the human poultry producers as some kind

(35:43):
of callous, unfeeling monster. But that could not be further
from the truth that people are doing the work, by
which we mean not the lobbyists, not the executives and
the c suite and whatever. The people on the ground
are often forced to resort to these barbaric practices just
a stay of float in a market that continually pushes

(36:03):
for the bottom line. What we're saying is, in short
life often sucks for the poultry producers as well. And
I think that's something a lot of our you know,
with the best of intentions, a lot of animal rights
activists forget.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, for sure, we do have to remember that there
are I don't even know how to say this, because
everything we're talking about here is a reality, like especially
when we're getting into the industrial size, like huge chicken
production situations. I watched a video that was put out

(36:39):
there in twenty fourteen by the National Chicken Council that
is going through the slaughter process and the line when
chickens are being processed into meat, which is just horrifying
to think about. But they, I mean, they use the
term that's an industry term, the evisceration line. And if
you know what that word means, it's like to have

(37:01):
basically the insides removed, your internal organs taken out of
a body. That is what they go through. And you
they show you, like, this is how it works. All
these chickens that are hanging by their feet after they
have been you know, killed systematically on this line and
this giant line of chickens been killed then through their backsides,

(37:25):
all of it. It just is a claw that goes
in and evisceraates them and then they get vacuumed out
and cleansed off with this stuff. Oh what is it called.
It's a it's a chemical chlorine wash. It's parasitic acid,
is what it's called. It's hydrogen peroxide and acetic acid

(37:48):
combined together. It's certain concentrations. According to them, the hydrogen
peroxide becomes water and the acetic acid is the same
thing that's in vinegar. So theoretically it's a wash that's
safe and it kills off all the microbes and now
you're good to go with your chickens. It's just a
horrifying thing to watch the kill process, right, But there
are other things in place thanks to things like the USDA,

(38:12):
like the Certified Organic label that we're going to talk
about a little bit, but something like that that gets
slapped on a meat product, lets you know as a
consumer that theoretically somebody from a government organization went to
that farm and certified that those chickens are able to
roam around freely. It's not some cage system you know

(38:33):
that's like free range, but still inside a little cage.
It certifies that, no, those chickens actually go out onto
this farm and graze and then come back in, and
that's what you're eating. It's not the chicken in these
horrifying conditions that we're talking about in these larger industrial versions,
which is again a step forward towards good potentially, but

(38:55):
in the end, everybody's getting viscerated no matter how you lived.

Speaker 4 (38:58):
As you said before, a Matt, did you see that
John Oliver piece from last week tonight on this Yeah,
Ben pointed it out in the outline here. I actually
didn't catch it originally, but saw this clip the Bens,
referring to John Oliver and his writers really look deeply
into the notion of contract farming. He describes it, I

(39:20):
think very aptly as basically a chicken daycare company where
baby chicks are brought into an independent farm, then they're.

Speaker 5 (39:28):
Picked up a month later for processing.

Speaker 4 (39:31):
Ninety seven percent of chickens, they point out, and the
piece are raised this way in the United States, and
the big companies actually also own the feed as well
as the feed bins, so there's this really interesting feedback
loop or kind of monopoly kind of situation going on.
The independent farmers, though, are responsible for literally everything else,

(39:51):
the property, the equipment of the labor, all of that.
But then you know they're under the thumb of this
big chicken because of the proprietary nature of the process
that they have on lock.

Speaker 5 (40:00):
Is that about right, Ben, Yeah, it's like a.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Share crapping, but with chickens, well not quite, because they
do own the property, they're they're on the hook. These
contract farmers, who often get vilified or contract producers, they're
liable for the majority of the cost involved, right, and if,
for instance, there is some kind of regulatory violation that

(40:25):
occurs or that they get popped for, they're on the
they're they're on the kill cone for that as well.
We see a ton of producers who are teetering on
the edge of financial ruin, underwater on loans or debts,
usually transactions that they depended on to get up and
running in the first place, or that they relied upon

(40:47):
as the market cyclically waxed and waned. Right, Because farming
and livestock production, it's always been a matter of margins,
you know, and you're dependent upon a lot of factors
that are simply beyond your control. So it doesn't stop there.
Worker safety and worker rights in general often fall to

(41:10):
the wayside in these contract farming arrangements. This system the
Big Chicken has ox fan thank you, thank you. Ox.
Fam America found that a lot of slaughterhouse workers, in
some exhaustive studies, despite having you know, regulatory bodies show

(41:31):
up and certify stuff, a lot of these slaughterhouse workers
were not getting brakes to the point where they had
to wear diapers. They were getting paid below minimum wage,
and some entities were purposely targeting underage folks, undocumented people,
people who can't fight back as potential employees so that

(41:53):
they could keep those expenses low and push to keep
those profits high.

Speaker 4 (42:01):
All right, why don't we take a little breather here
this heavy stuff, have a word from our sponsor, and
then we'll be back to find out more about some
of the pitfalls of this massive industry.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
And we've returned. Another harsh reality of why life can
be terrible for poultry producers and employees is this. Accidents
and serious injuries We're talking like amputations are widespread in
this endeavor. Folks working in this industry on the ground

(42:45):
are three times more likely to suffer serious harm in
comparison to the average employee in the United States. There
was an OSHA study in twenty fifteen that found on
average employees of Tyson Foods, at least one is injured
such that they have to amputate a finger or limb

(43:07):
per month. Per month, there's at least one person who
you know officially gets the street game.

Speaker 4 (43:14):
Nine fingers, I mean, just pretty horrific. Back to that,
you know, automatic beak removed room machine. If if I'm
remember incorrectly, and I've seen this process you know from
film clips, there are workers that kind of have to
hold the chicken up to this device to have their
beaks removed. You know, you can just depend on the
chicken to do it themselves, and I can imagine that
could be really, really dangerous. I mean, you're holding a chicken,

(43:37):
you know, up close to this machine that's like chomping
off their beak. I mean, that's just one of the
many dangerous pieces of equipment these folks are interfacing with
on a regular basis.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, when you're in the actual slaughterhouse, when all of
that stuff's going down there, I mean is large, dangerous,
sharp implements that are a part of the factory, right
and people have got to service those things, and it's
just continually moving. There are workers that have large knives

(44:09):
just at hand at all times when they're there. Even
the USDA inspectors when they're on the line, they've got
you know, large knives to to check out and inspect things.
And then there are people that are constantly just cutting
away at the chickens to remove a broken wing or
you know, if there's a chicken that's got uh, it
was weird to think about. There's a chicken that's all

(44:30):
bruised up. They'll take it off the line so that
you don't have to see that, but they can still
use the meat product in something else, you know.

Speaker 5 (44:38):
Sure, it's just.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
There's there's danger all across the factory system.

Speaker 3 (44:43):
Yeah. Yeah. For comparison here, just to give people a
sense of the numbers, some of the some of the
machines are measured by the high amounts of chickens, chicks
or whatever they can process per minute. So we're talking
wood chippers situations where the machine does not turn off.

Speaker 4 (45:02):
And I would imagine math that any of those bruised
chickens that aren't you know, fit for sale as a
as a broiler, you know, for pieces like that, would
maybe be ground up to being a ground meat product.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
Well yeah, that's color can because.

Speaker 4 (45:16):
That's all you know, like kind of uniformly use what
is it the pink slime, I believe is what's called.

Speaker 3 (45:22):
Oh yeah yeah, or mechanically separated is another key phrase.
You will see it and canned chicken. And look, a
lot of this is that these people, again, people who
are working in this industry are not bad people. They're
not malevolent. They're trying to keep their jobs. And the
companies that are involved in the meat business at a

(45:42):
high level, at least in the United States, they are
some incredibly powerful lobbying organizations. They take a lot of
that profit they're squeezing out of the chicken or whatever livestock,
and they push it toward influencing politicians and touching policy
in a way that is increasingly advantageous, creating a feedback loop.

(46:04):
We're talking about the American Meat Institute, the National Meat Association,
National Chicken Council. We didn't say it earlier, but you
may recognize their previous work as the National Broiler Council.
They changed the name because it was a little, well,
too little, too close too much. I like that.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah, And they specifically represent those broiler chickens, the meat chickens,
not the egg layers.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
And there these are powerful groups. They have such a
strong voice in decision making in Washington, and one of
the in they're fairly consistent in their work. They're pushing
back against proposed safety standards. They're pushing back against what
they see as over regulation. And one of their arguments
goes returns to the thing we said at the top

(46:55):
of this evening's episode to food security. Right, We're we're
self regulating. The argument goes, we accept a certain amount
of government intervention, but our overall goal is to keep
meat safe and very affordable. We want it to be
cheap for the average consumer. So help us, help you, America,

(47:18):
is their argument at base. This is why chicken is
cheaper than peanuts. Often.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah, and it is weird. If you go to the
National Chicken Council's websites and stuff they do, they advocate
for that. It's generally advocating for safety, you know, at
least outwardly. When you look at the press releases and
stuff that gets put out, it's all about, Hey, the
antibiotics that everybody is so worried about, You don't got
to worry about that. They explain to you how the

(47:46):
antibiotics that go into chickens are never in the meat products,
and they're tested for that. The USDA protects you as
a consumer against having antibiotics, and the meat products you
receive they do go into the chickens, but there is
the there are these periods where they're no longer allowed
to have antibiotics, so it'll never get into your body.
It's fine, which I mean is maybe true. And maybe fine,

(48:09):
but it doesn't change It doesn't change the actual issues
with doing something like using antibiotics in chicken products.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Right, yeah, we're definitely we have to dive into that
because that will bring us to you know, the horizon,
what rough consequence slouches toward Bethlehem in big chicken industry.
When we stay just a moment on the realities of
people in the poultry industry on the ground, it means

(48:36):
that these big groups, these organizations, these corporations, these who
fund the trade groups and the lobbies, they have so
much leverage over employees. If you make too much trouble,
you raise too much of a ruckus, you ruffle too
many feathers, you can be blackballed. You're not only cut
out of the chain. You're not only cut out of

(48:58):
the chain, but you are still on the financial hook
for all those loans you took out at the beginning. Right,
the bank that gave you money is not going to say, ah,
you had a conscience, you know what I mean, So
we're going to forgive this loan. They're going to say, hey,
you're late this month, and that will be the extent

(49:20):
of their empathy or observation. Also you know, there are
harmful impacts on the local community. I was interested to
learn and we found this in previous research on livestock overall.
But you guys might remember back in two thousand and
nine a criminologist studied locations of poultry processing outfits and

(49:46):
crimes rate of crime. Similar studies have been conducted with
the location of military bases and crime. And what this criminologist,
Damie Fitzgerald, found was that slaughterhouse employment, regardless of the
animal involved or being processed, slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates,

(50:09):
violent crime, arrest arrest for sexual assault and other sex
offenses in comparison to other indists.

Speaker 4 (50:16):
And this is what like pointing to just the potential
for this being such a traumatic situation to work in
that you would maybe I don't know, be damaged psychologically
by that, or that certain types of people that might
be violent offenders are more attracted to this kind of work.

Speaker 5 (50:34):
I'm curious. It's a very interesting step.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
Those are great questions in Fitzgerald's work. What we see
is not a not a ton of conclusions past the correlation,
but some of the possibilities that were just mentioned there.
The idea that maybe folks who wouldn't pass a background
check for another job are getting hired. Maybe that's one. Maybe,

(50:59):
you know, there have also been some interesting studies that
we have in cited here regarding the psychological effects. You mentioned.
It's very that's a very real thing as well. But
what we're bringing this up for is to show that
there does appear to be a discernible impact on the
social environment in which these operations exist. And I think

(51:22):
that's a nice segue to the larger environmental impact the
overall what happens to the land, the air, the sea,
the you know, how much arsenic are you getting, guys,
are you getting enough arsenalup?

Speaker 2 (51:35):
So? Oh man, And really quickly before we hit on that,
I just want to talk about the reason why there
were there are so many poultry farmers out there in
the world, especially in the United States. And before we
jump in, let's just talk about why there are so
many poultry farmers out there, why there's so much chicken,
specifically chicken for meat being produced in the United States. Specifically,

(51:59):
it is because it takes eighteen to twenty four months
to raise a cow for meat. It takes six to
twelve weeks to raise an entire flock of chickens, like
a chicken house filled with chickens six to twelve weeks.
And the reason why farmers are going towards chickens is
because with some of these contracts that they signed that

(52:21):
we talked about in the beginning, like with the big
with the big producers that then get contracts to raise chickens,
as well as independent chicken raisers who kind of do
their own thing and then sell their own chicken via
small farm. Is because you can get paid, let's say
every twelve weeks if you raise flocks of chicken in
that way, if you've got four chicken houses that you're

(52:42):
raising at the same time or maybe in tandem, right,
you're getting paid pretty consistently. If you're raising a whole
bunch of cows, it takes you twenty four months potentially
to get paid, right, But because then you're selling your
product at the end period. It's the reason why farmers
are moving towards poultry on huge rates because you're actually

(53:06):
gonna have money coming into the farm consistently, rather than
hoping that you're gonna have enough money to pay off
all those loans and then pay for your life and
your family and all that other stuff.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
Predictable profit on a shorter time window or a shorter
distance between intervals.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
Yeah, I think that makes sense to all of us.
But it also means that there are so many chickens
being produced for these purposes and in these ways. It
is having this environmental impact and this societal impact that
we just maybe as a species, didn't expect to be
as large for sure.

Speaker 4 (53:42):
So let's go into some more environmental consequences.

Speaker 5 (53:47):
You mentioned arsenic earlier.

Speaker 4 (53:48):
Ben Arsnic in case you need a refresher, is a
metallic mineral that's released into soil and water when fertilizers
and pesticides are used. Organic farms are less toxic than
the inorganic stuff, but still they are not non toxic
after a certain threshold.

Speaker 5 (54:06):
None of this stuff is particularly good for you.

Speaker 3 (54:09):
Yeah. Arsenic was originally put into large scale chicken feed
in the nineteen forties for three reasons. It was supposed
to help fight disease, it was supposed to improve muscle growth,
and it was also this is a weird one to me,
it was supposed to make the meat pinker, So it
was an esthetic agent.

Speaker 4 (54:31):
And guys, we are talking about the same arsenic like
the King of Poison, Right, it is the same. It's
just about the concentration. So no matter how you shake it,
this stuff is a historically effective poison, you know, from
like Agatha Christie novels.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
Yeah, Dory, our friends at the National Chicken Council have
a statement where they see there's no need to worry.
You know, there's no direct correlation between long term detrimental
health effects like cancer head to arsenic. But it is
also true that for a long time, consumption of chicken

(55:10):
was the primary source of arsenic exposure in US children across.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
That's crazy. It's almost like they eat a bunch of
chicken products.

Speaker 4 (55:19):
Chicken, the fingers nuggets, you know, part of school lunch programs.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
I think it was smart to call them tenders too.
That was great marketing.

Speaker 5 (55:28):
Yeah, they don't like people don't say.

Speaker 4 (55:29):
Fingers is much more specialized the term these days. It
seems like it's not used as broadly because it is
kind of odd.

Speaker 5 (55:37):
Because you know, chicken don't really have fingers.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
It's like lady fingers. Yeah, chicken fingers is calm. Yeah.
So along with arsenic and specific there are other concerns
about substances excreted by the industry or related we mentioned.
We'll mentioned some of the issues that chickens themselves face.
There's a thing called ammonia burn because when there are

(56:02):
large accumulations of feces, there is this creation of ammonia.
Right it's concentrated, it has to go somewhere. As a result,
a lot of chickens get respiratory diseases. They get this
thing called ammonia burn, and it's not exclusive to chickens.
Twenty sixteen, MPR went to North Carolina, one of the

(56:24):
country's largest poultry producing states. At What they found was
people who are locals. As this industry continues to explode
the area, they're starting to at least they're starting to
think they are experiencing ammonia burn because of a weird,
unwanted combo of dead birds, leftover feed and feed waste

(56:48):
and then manure. It all mixes, right, and sometimes they're
just mass graves that have a stink cloud coming off them,
like the wavy lines in a cartoon or evil fingers
you around.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Yeah, it's really bad. There was a Tyson plant right
near where I grew up, and the smell just from
the plant, the processing plant so this isn't even the
growing chickens part that we're talking about with mostly like
feces runoff and all the nastiness that's been discussed, the
smell from a plant of blood yep, and this just death,

(57:22):
oh god. And it's the innards. Remember we're talking about
the evisceration part where all that stuff goes. You might
save the livers and the gizzards and a couple other
little things for specialty food products, but most of it
is just trash. And when it becomes that waste thing,
where it goes afterwards and how it stored can affect
everybody in And.

Speaker 4 (57:43):
There's a big Tyson plant near Athens, Georgia, where I
lived for quite a while, and you know when you
got in that vicinity of that place, it was pretty rough.

Speaker 3 (57:54):
Yeah, yeah. And you can smell some of these from
the highway, yeah, the road as you're driving through. There
are a couple of I think we've all in the
Southeast in particular, had those experiences. There are a couple
of times I was able to time my drive to
a few places by when the spell kicked in.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
You like to get away from it, to.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
Get away, or when it arrives like switch when is
it time to switch off the outside vents?

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (58:26):
Right, yeah, and you can feel it coming, you can
hear it.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
But I remember hearing about this specifically when we were
when we covered Dark Waters. I think we mentioned not
that long ago in the show that we just published
it as a classic where there were issues with water
runoff and chemical plants. The other issue that came up
was water runoff with chicken feces specifically.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
Yeah, exactly, it's one hundred percent true. I mean, the
critics will argue that, let's step back. So proponents, a
lot of people higher up in the industry will argue, look,
we comply with regulations as they stand, and we're helping
a lot of people because we are an enormous economic

(59:13):
powerhouse whenever we cluck through town. But the critics on
the other side will say, yeah, you're quote unquote complying
with regulations that you physically hampered. Right, you change the
rules of the road to your advantage at the consequence
of the public, and of course these cursed birds.

Speaker 4 (59:35):
And now it seems like, I mean, even under the
best circumstances, these regulations are fallible and not nearly robust. Enough,
and it does seem like, given the nature of the
governmental situation that we find ourselves in the United States,
we may see further erosion of these types of regulations
for the benefit of the yield, you know, for the

(59:55):
benefit of the companies producing the stuff and profiting from
this stuff, rather than then for the safety of the
end user.

Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
I'm glad that was said, because that's happening now. That
is true. The relatively defanged regulations that already exist on
federal and state by state levels are being further debaked,
you could say, because they are already standing exemptions from
state odor ordinances, especially in big poultry towns or excuse me,

(01:00:25):
poultry states. And then there are also exemptions from federal
air emissions monitoring. So the rules are already put at
like the video game difficulty setting is at easy right now,
it's at laughably easy for compliance, and that means that

(01:00:46):
this stuff gets into the air, into the soil, leaches
into the water. And the argument from the industry, again,
to be fair, has always been something along the lines
of in our broiler chicken friends say this too. It's
something like, if you overregulate this industry, you're going to

(01:01:07):
damage it. You're going to have very dangerous economic impacts,
but you're also not going to produce much in the
way of favorable results. You will have a lot of
sound and fury signifying nothing. That's an argument critics reject,
but it is the one the Feds and big companies
do seem to embrace. Not putting a not putting a

(01:01:30):
chicken in the kill cone of this one. We're just
letting you know the two different sides of the spectrum here,
and I don't know. The other thing to get more conspiratorial,
we're duty bound to say this is that other stuff
added in the production line may hold even more dire
consequences down the road. Diarer the dire risks die.

Speaker 5 (01:01:54):
Die die.

Speaker 4 (01:01:55):
The operative word here are we talking about antibiotics and
that feed loop sure feedback loom created by feeding the
chickens their ground up cohorts.

Speaker 5 (01:02:06):
Right? Not great?

Speaker 4 (01:02:09):
Oh, in terms of the kinds of superbugs that this
can create.

Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
Yeah, Now, the antibiotics have to be included in some
level for some of these large scale operations, you know,
facilitation of rapid weight gait, cutting down on the diseases
that would otherwise run rampant in those conditions. This widespread
use of antibiotics mentioned the word superbug there and all.

(01:02:38):
This widespread use of antibiotics is essentially fast tracking the
evolution of superbugs of drug resistant things. It's reducing the
overall effectiveness in antibiotics in humans. And this is an
across the board effect. This is across the board catastrophic potential.

(01:03:00):
If you are vegan, if you are vegetarian, a super
bug generated by this overtreatment of antibiotics can still affect you.
It doesn't matter what you eat.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
It does matter if the antibiotics actually get into you, right,
And the National Chicken Council says no, they will never
do that.

Speaker 4 (01:03:22):
But you know, and y'all, I know, I keep harping
on this idea of like feeding the chickens ground up chicken,
and I guess the issue there can be their self
contaminating and then the antibiotics, I don't know, like they
can become less effective or there is something that I've
definitely seen reported on in terms of that feedback loop

(01:03:44):
of the whole system, the close system of it all.

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
Yeah, So these bugs that we're describing, these infections, their
generational time window is much shorter than that of a
larger organism. So when you can continually expose them to antibiotics,
that would have, you know, would have been an existential
threat over time. With a lot of antibiotics hitting these

(01:04:12):
things again and again, we are, as I said earlier,
we're fast tracking the revolution. This is not a theoretical matter.
This will lead to the creation of superbugs unless there
are discoveries of new, increasingly powerful antibiotics. There is an
arms race against infection.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
And that is specifically talking about the types of bacteria
and things like salmonella, things that you hear about with
an outbreak with like a chicken crop or an egg
crop or something like that that is not tied to
or to at least not directly tied to avian flu
and things like that that we're going to get into.
That's a whole other bag of badgers on top of this.

(01:04:51):
One has to do with the potential biological contamination.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
Yeah, and this realization or growing awareness in the public
ed to a series of without the three of us
sounding dish, it led to a series of feel good
statements by a lot of end user chicken companies and
chicken joints. Tyson KFC, our own Chick fil A. A
lot of these outfits said, all right, no antibiotics ever.

(01:05:18):
We're not going to do it. We've heard you the people.
We'd love to sell you a combo number three, and
we want you to feel safe buying it. They later
backtracked their promises and they modified to these more nuanced stances,
the same way that Google no longer says, don't be evil.
Tyson used to have no antibiotics ever on the label.

(01:05:41):
That's removed. If you see that, now you're buying expired chicken.
Just so you know, pro tip from the boys.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Yeah, and we talked about this on I think Strange News.
Maybe one of the big problems was these major chicken users,
the companies that actually give you an end product of chicken,
like your KFC's and Chick fil A's, they realized, at
least the ones in the UK, they realized they could
not source enough chicken to meet demand that could meet

(01:06:10):
those standards that they were theoretically striving for, right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
And the producers themselves could not afford to make to
create chickens at that level that the restaurants were looking for.
So it was it was a weird discrepancy, weird misstep
Chick fil A also switched the game to something I've
referenced a couple times here. They switched the game to
no antibiotics important to human medicine.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, that's interesting. But so does that
just mean they're not using antibiotics that you might get
prescribed if you go to the doctor.

Speaker 4 (01:06:48):
Because that would be a bad thing if those particular
ones were weakened or our immune systems no longer responded
to them.

Speaker 5 (01:06:56):
Is that the idea of what they're claiming.

Speaker 2 (01:06:57):
Well, it's a bug. It would be better the buzz
knew about the medicine you were going to take.

Speaker 3 (01:07:07):
Also too, it's there's there's a lot of room for
cognitive parkour in the phrase important to absolute human medic a. Yeah,
how does truet Kathy feel today? He feels very dead.
But yeah, it's a shame, but he is. He has passed. Uh.
This so that is its own uh. As said earlier,

(01:07:30):
Bag of Badgers Avian flew. Other diseases are different and
are perhaps even larger threats, depending upon whom you ask.
So chickens and turkeys, when they get killed, they're usually
not able to walk that well, they're sick, they're in pain.
They're often infected with things like E. Coli or as

(01:07:52):
earlier mentioned, salmonella, other bacteria that can make human being sick.
And since poultry products are, oh, by the way, the
main source of food borne illness in people, I was
not aware of that these chickens have to get soaked
with these toxic chemicals mentioned earlier that some remnant of

(01:08:14):
those chemicals is consumed along with the flesh. This all like,
this is all hitting very weak immune systems in the
individual bird, and that means we're creating fertile soil for
a possible zoonotic version of av and influenza. It's a
global concern. As we're recording, South Africa is currently anticipating

(01:08:38):
another outbreak. They're not saying it might happen. They're saying,
you know, it's kind of like what is it tornado
watch versus tornado warning. They're not saying the conditions are favorable.
They're saying strap in folks.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
Yeah, and that's avian flu that has made.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
The jump right to become zoonotic.

Speaker 5 (01:08:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
Right now in the United States, at least specifically, all
of these producers are worried about avian flu in the
chickens and in the flocks themselves. That hasn't jumped to
humans yet, but good golly, it seems like it might
happen in any day now the way it is happening
in South Africa, because we've got a specialized version called

(01:09:17):
highly pathogenic avian influenza, and it is taken out flocks,
especially egg laying flocks, left and right and right now.
There's a billion dollars that's getting pumped in through the
USDA to fix all these things. And guys, I want
to talk about this because it feels really similar to
is what happened with SARS Cove two with the USDA

(01:09:41):
is attempting to get what they're injecting one hundred million
dollars into government grants to create a new vaccine for
the chickens, like specifically to vaccinate all the chickens. Guys
like that, that is crazy. I mean, I mean, it
makes sense, I guess, but I don't know. Something about

(01:10:03):
it weirds me out, and I, yeah, I don't know.
What do you think?

Speaker 3 (01:10:06):
Look at I think our next step is to agreed
it is a worrisome thing. Our next step is to
look at Congress members overall and see what they're investing in.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
Hmm, that's interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
Yeah, a lot of people made money off antibacterial wipes
and toilet paper and co vaccine companies.

Speaker 2 (01:10:29):
Yeah yeah, yeah. Look into the Secretary of Agriculture Brook Rawlins,
because this was a big announcement that came at the
end of February this year, and it is all about
trying to fix egg prices. It's like a five pronged
approach to fix egg prices in America. But all of it,
all of it goes back to avian influenza if you

(01:10:49):
really look at it, and the billion dollars, most of
it goes to helping out farmers who are basically, you know,
had their livelihoods cut in half or more because of
this single virus.

Speaker 3 (01:11:02):
The United Nations clocked this possibility too. In their official
statement a while back. They said governments, local authorities and
international agencies need to take a greatly increased role in
combating the role of factory farming a little redundant. But
they have, you know, other stuff to do. They said,
commerce and live poultry and wildlife markets, which provide ideal

(01:11:24):
conditions for the virus to spread and mutate into a
more dangerous form. I mean not for nothing did Stephen
King pick influenzas as the big bad of the stand.
Its mutation is unpredictable. Its mutation is continual, and it
moves at a pretty quick pace.

Speaker 2 (01:11:44):
And there's plenty of chickens for it to move through, right,
It's got.

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
A lot of practice, it's got a lot of different
fields to play a game.

Speaker 2 (01:11:52):
On and have a little tiny jump in its evolution,
and then we got something wholly different. Worries me a
little bit in this legislation that came through. One of
the things that the USDA is talking about doing in
this five promonged approach is to remove unnecessary regulatory burdens
on the chicken and egg industry to further innovation and

(01:12:15):
reduce consumer prices.

Speaker 5 (01:12:17):
Exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:12:18):
Yeah, the consumer prices are definitely what they're concerned about.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
But like theoretically, just thinking on that a bit, when
we think about when people go to the grocery store, now,
you buy what you can afford, right, and if you
can afford a little more, you are likely going to
choose one of those labels like the USDA Certified Organic.
That means, you know, the chicken has bypassed a lot

(01:12:44):
of the horrific stuff, not all of it, but a
lot of the horrific stuff that we described in this episode.
So you use your money to purchase a chicken that
actually is roaming around somewhere, isn't it.

Speaker 4 (01:12:55):
Kind of also not a thing as much in other countries,
like you don't need to pay extra for the safer food.
Like I feel like that's definitely the case where it's
just chicken, his chicken, and you don't have to like
pay a premium to get the one that probably won't
kill you or make it right.

Speaker 3 (01:13:15):
You're also looking at higher food safety standards, but then
you're also looking at local producers, right, So that is
part of it, the idea of returning to a less
centralized supply chain. The issue is what this legislation ignores,
which I mentioned before there is it ignores the fact

(01:13:37):
that there is such tremendous financial pressure being put upon
the further erosion of existing regulations, and the idea that
the market itself will suddenly prioritize health and safety, which
is simply it's never been the case and at least

(01:13:58):
not the US. Nepton Sinclair was a percent right, there's
a reason that we mentioned them. So often yep, yep.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Just something I never learned till we did this episode. Guys,
it costs an individual farmer somewhere around two thousand, three
thousand dollars to get your even if it's a small farm,
to get everything certified organic. And it's because you have
to pay one of the roughly eighty certifiers, like literally
individual eighty human beings that can certify your farm kickbacks organic. Well,

(01:14:31):
you have to. You have to pay for them to
fly from wherever they are, say for a couple.

Speaker 3 (01:14:35):
Of days, gaining per diem.

Speaker 2 (01:14:38):
Yeah, I mean you have to do that as a farmer, right.
That's not the USDA doing it or some other It's.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
Not Tyson doing it for you.

Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
Yeah, exactly, crooking.

Speaker 3 (01:14:47):
It's a program you can enter in as a contract farmer.
This is so what will this all lead to? Time
will tell? The clock is ticking? Is the cock crow
of disaster on the way? You know, I said the
line earlier. I just love it. What rough Avian flu
slouches toward Bethlehem to be bored. What's the end results.

(01:15:10):
I think we've been very fair in this episode, or
we've endeavored to be fair, giving chicken fans and foes alike,
just an understanding of the issues involved.

Speaker 5 (01:15:19):
I mean, I love chicken. I eat plenty of chicken.

Speaker 4 (01:15:23):
I really enjoy making, you know, slicing it up and
grilling it, putting it on salad, whatever. I know all
this stuff, and have known all this stuff before even
doing this deeper dive here, and I'm still so removed
from all of that that it doesn't affect my purchasing
and consuming habits that much. And I know that's the
case for a lot of folks. And I want to

(01:15:45):
do better, you know. I mean, it's every time we
get into this kind of stuff, it makes me want
to change the way I act as a consumer. But
it's so easy to just kind of like turn a
blind eye to a lot of this stuff, where at
least like willfully deceive yourself about what's going on.

Speaker 3 (01:16:00):
It's also easy to feel that one is attempting to
empty the ocean with a bucket, you know, Like, what
difference can an individual make? We'd love to hear from
people in the industry in particular, you know, what does
the public need to know if you're directly connected to this,
what are are the potential dangers? In your opinion, overstated.

(01:16:21):
Are they perhaps underestimated? It'd be great to hear from anyone.
Do we have anything we want to add before we
close tonight's episode. I've got one.

Speaker 5 (01:16:28):
Thing Mary talked about, Rick Ross.

Speaker 2 (01:16:32):
What are the lives of the chickens you raise?

Speaker 3 (01:16:36):
Like?

Speaker 5 (01:16:36):
For real?

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):
Because we have often heard the horror stories of the
factory farming. What are your chickens lives like?

Speaker 3 (01:16:46):
Yeah? And have you met a villainous chicken? I really
want to hear about this because I only ran into
two over a long career of meeting various animals and.

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
Were or like hens heads.

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):
Wow, Okay, it was crazy man anyway, So you can
always always email us for that. The very last note
here is that if you find yourself in our fair
metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia, the best chicken wings in town
are at the local, tell them we sent you, and
all the way tell us your thoughts with all these

(01:17:21):
questions we've asked, We try to be easy to find
via email, via telephonic device, and via the lines. You know,
check your chicken scratch to us on the internet.

Speaker 4 (01:17:32):
And pepper wet y'all try it at the local rules
check us out. Sun very good also good excellent choice, Matt.
You can find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff, where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group, where you
too can share your preferred recipe for chicken salad and
your preferred way of eating a wing in our Facebook group.
Here's where it gets crazy. You can also find this

(01:17:53):
at the handle conspiracy Stuff on x FKA, Twitter and
on youtubee. We have tons of videos for YouTube check
out on Instagram and TikTok. However, we are Conspiracy Stuff
Show and there are other ways.

Speaker 2 (01:18:06):
Yes, you can call us. Our number is one eight
three three STDWYTK. When you call in, give yourself a
cool nickname and let us know in the message if
we can use your name and message on the air.
Call in and tell us what your order is from
the chicken Salad Chick. We're not sponsored by them. I
just do happen to enjoy their food. Do leg your

(01:18:27):
chicken salad.

Speaker 5 (01:18:27):
You have chicken salad back, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:18:29):
I really am used to do it at the old
offices in Buckhead all at least once a week. Okay.
You've got three minutes in that message, by the way,
so keep it a little short if you can't. When
you're ready, to send us something longer. When you've got
a lot to say, why not instead send us a
good old fashioned email.

Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
We are the entity is that read every piece of
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rules of the email. Let us know what your thoughts are,
short or law. Give us the pictures, give us the links,
Take us to the edge of the rabbit hole. Will
do the rest? Be well aware, yet out afraid. Sometimes

(01:19:06):
the void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:19:29):
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