• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Yep, you eat rat poop.

        And probably feathers and beak, too.

        But the baby chick macerator drops the fluffy goo into a different bucket. It’s not even necessarily the same processing plant as where the adult chickens are slaughtered for meat. Freshly hatched chicks are sexed so the boys can be immediately culled. Other meat doesn’t go into that macerator, so you’d have to go out of your way to add it to the nugget mix, and the benfit of a few extra lbs of mostly feathers and bone are not going to be worth the effort.

        • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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          8 months ago

          It’s not even necessarily the same processing plant as where the adult chickens are slaughtered for meat.

          While this may be true: I have worked at 4 different chicken processing places (though 3 of them were owned by Foster Farms) and they all handled every part of production from farm to package. Both chicks and adults.

          And it sucks being on any part of the line that is dealing with the live animals. It’s one of the reasons I don’t eat a lot of chicken any more. One of my first jobs ever as a teen was cutting the toes off the birds so they wouldn’t be able to scratch each other up if they started fighting.

          • roguetrick@kbin.social
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            8 months ago

            That has to do with the fact that the entire American chicken industry is exploitative to the people raising the chickens as well as the chickens. Since the factory is both the hatchery and the processing plant, the farmers never even own the chickens. They’re more like babysitting them by taking out a loan from the bank. They get squeezed, default, and somebody else comes along to keep it up. Reasonably this sort of business practice should be outlawed as anti-competitive.

      • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        And you think there’s no acceptable amounts of rat poop in any other food you eat? Funny.

        Chickens aren’t grown in sterile level 4 labs. There’s all kinds of contaminants in every food you eat. Many many more so if you buy “organic” because those fertilisers and weed killers are far less pure.

        There are exceptions, of course. But you’ll still find miniscule trace amounts of quicksilver in baby food every once in a while, sure. So little that the check machines won’t even register there’s any at all but a lab could still find some. But by and large, there are acceptable levels for everything and we check for all of that, too. There’s a reason it’s an industry, not grabbing a random chicken from the street and biting it’s head off.