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Horrible treatment of chicks

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Axordil
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Posted: Tue 25 Sep , 2007 3:01 am
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Organic vegetables and fruits really aren't all that much more expensive than conventional
Tell that to the $5.00 tomato I bought once at Whole Paycheck. :D

OK, it was a heritage varietal too. And it was really good. But not THAT good.

Some organics are not much more expensive, some are, and sometimes it depends on where you are. If you have to go through Whole Foods, the price difference is greater. If you can buy from local suppliers, it's not bad.

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vison
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Posted: Tue 25 Sep , 2007 4:49 am
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Why would anyone buy a $5 tomato? Jeez.

Ya need tomatoes in the off season? Buy canned tomatoes.

At our house we try to live by the 100 Mile Rule: we try to eat mostly food grown within 100 miles of home. Sure, if we want coffee and oranges we can't do that. But for meat, milk, butter, cheese, eggs, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, broccoli, corn, strawberries, raspberries, apples . . . . etc., etc., in season: grown here. I refuse outright to buy imported strawberries out of season, preferring to buy locally frozen ones. Likewise with nearly everything else. Right now we are eating corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes and green beans from my garden. Lamb from our own pasture, chicken and eggs grown by a neighbour.

I know that many people don't have gardens and pastures full of lambs. But there are outlets in all big cities and most towns for local produce. Look for it.

Admittedly I do not try to economize on food. But as axordil points out, most North Americans spend less than 10% of their income on food.

I don't agree that organic food necessarily tastes better. It is not the method of growing the food that gives it its taste, but the fact that organic farmers often grow better tasting, older varieties.

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TheMary
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Posted: Tue 25 Sep , 2007 8:20 am
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Pippin4242 wrote:
TheMary wrote:
I find the treatment of human beings in other countries far more horrifying.
But it doesn't mean that this isn't important. I mean, it's possible to care about both.

*~Pips~*
It was just my opinion.

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yovargas
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Posted: Tue 25 Sep , 2007 12:59 pm
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That video pretty well summarizes my view on this sort of thing: I find watching that sad and unpleasant, but I have no moral objection to what they are doing.


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MariaHobbit
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Posted: Tue 25 Sep , 2007 1:44 pm
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If they'd just take one second more per chick, and set them down gently rather than throw them down the chute, I'd be less outraged by the process.

These chicks could very well be sold to organic farmers and raised in humane conditions for the rest of their short lives. Or they could be sold to factory farms and have unpleasant, short lives. Either way, I still think it's a scary, unnecessarily harsh way to start out.

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Axordil
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Posted: Tue 25 Sep , 2007 1:46 pm
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Time for a story some of you have heard.

I used to have a job at a diabetes-centered research lab that involved doing extremely nasty and fatal (if quick) things to rats and rabbits (and for a while, guinea pigs, but you can't MAKE a guinea pig diabetic, even if its pancreas is gone). I wasn't entirely sure the research was all that useful, then or now, but it felt like a step up from being an usher in a porn theater, which is what I was doing before.

At any rate, apart from the small animal dismemberment, there was one aspect of the job that stays with me. We did experiments where we perfused rabbit hearts with a mix of blood and tracer-enhanced albumin to track, ah, something or other. Now, rabbit blood actually didn't work very well, because we couldn't recirculate it, and a rabbit doesn't have enough blood to work with for 90 minute durations we were working with. So we used sheep and cow blood, which someone had to go pick up from a nearby kosher slaughterhouse. Since kosher killing involves slitting the throat as opposed to bonking or shooting, it was a good match for what we needed, and they didn't have any use for the blood, so it was more or less free.

You can guess who that someone usually was. Wearing scrubs and with 5-gallon carboy and Big Funnel in hand, I drove over to the place once a week or so when they had the right animals coming in. I won't go into the details, but I learned quite a bit about the gnarly bits of food production there.

It didn't turn me into a vegetarian. It turned me into a thoughtful omnivore. There really isn't a polite way of separating an animal from its life, but are ways that are more respectful and less...and ultimately, while the animal doesn't care, and any effect it might have on them is erased with its passing, the same can't be said for the people doing the dirty work.

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Holbytla
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Posted: Tue 25 Sep , 2007 5:43 pm
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This stuff reminds me of a quote;
Quote:
Mona Lisa Vito: Imagine you're a deer. You're prancing along. You get thirsty. You spot a little brook. You put your little deer lips down to the cool, clear water - BAM. A fuckin' bullet rips off part of your head. Your brains are lying on the ground in little bloody pieces. Now I ask ya, would you give a fuck what kind of pants the son-of-a-bitch who shot you was wearing?

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MariaHobbit
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Posted: Tue 25 Sep , 2007 5:55 pm
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A head shot on a deer with it's head down drinking is a stupid shot to take. :P

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Wilma
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Posted: Thu 27 Sep , 2007 5:30 am
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I just saw the chick video. I mea they re just born, with no mother!! Just flung around all over the place! Those poor little things. Now I know farming chickens can be pretty nasty but at the very least can they get a nice start to life? Just seeing them thrown down chutes and the shell seporator thing was pretty... sad.

Unfortunately, my idiot local grocery store does not sell organic. The store that does is at least half an hour walking and on some days the bus isn't that reliable. But now I think I am going to try and incorporate more organic stuff even if it means I have to walk far. Also I need to talk with the butcher since I don't know much about free range and grain fed animals and I don't know if they sell those type of meats (lots of organic fruit and veggies though).

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Griffon64
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Posted: Tue 02 Oct , 2007 1:04 am
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Q - what kind of regulations are imposed on the "organic" label? I'll buy, I'll pay. I am looking at food labels now where I used not to, to check for locally grown and/or organic. But I want to know exactly what that "organic" means.

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Lily Rose
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Posted: Tue 02 Oct , 2007 1:30 am
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Griff, it is my understanding that organic means that no pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics or any other artificial ingredients are used and the products must be at least 95% free of all of these. Even better is to buy something labeled as free range or cage-free. Cage free doesn't necessarily mean organic. Then there are products that are a certain percentage organic or have just certain ingredients that are organic. It can be pretty confusing to start with.

Some good organic brands that are often found in regular supermarkets are Muir Glen (tomato sauces and canned products), Cascadian Farms (vegetables, cereal, granola bars and a variety of other products), Stonyfield (dairy and soy yogurt), Silk (soy milk), Newman's Own (coffee, snack's, lemonade), Kashi (cereal products) Not everything that these companies make is organic, but the majority seems to be.
Some grocery stores, like Giant, have their own line of organic products, as do some mainstream companies.

On a similar note, I like to look for products that are fair-trade certified, because that insures that the farmers are paid fairly for their crops. Generally, this label is only found on organic products.

The label "all-natural" means absolutely nothing. The FDA has allowed a lot of sketchy looking chemicals to be labeled as natural. It is just a ploy that a lot of companies use to make something look better or healthier than it actually is.

I buy cage-free eggs, which are considerably more expensive than ordinary eggs. However, it is worth the price to me to not be supporting factory farms.

Since I read the article that Holby posted about Smithfield pork, I have been going out of my way to boycott anything made by that company. I knew that factory farms were bad, but I had no idea that they were that bad.

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MariaHobbit
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Posted: Tue 02 Oct , 2007 1:33 pm
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"Natural" doesn't necessarily mean *bad*. The eggs I sell, I can only classify as natural, because I don't buy organic feed for my chickens. There just isn't a local source for me, and it's not worth my time to drive 300 miles up to Iowa just to buy chicken feed.

They still run free and tear up my lawn and flower beds and get killed by hawks, foxes, coyotes and weasels. So, they are definitely cage free, until we get sick of the destruction... If they wouldn't dig holes in the lawn to take dust baths in, I wouldn't get upset, but they are getting worse than moles! And I can't keep a flower bed looking nice. As soon as I pull the weeds out of one, along come the chickens and scratch all the mulch all over the place and kill the flowers. :( We are seriously discussing building a large pen for them.

But, there are no antibiotics used on the birds, and no pesticides or herbicides used on my land. More than half their diet in the summer is bugs and stuff, so it's very close to organic. But, I can't call the eggs organic, because my supplemental feed isn't organically grown.

But they are "natural". :shrug:

And a heck of a lot better than store eggs.

edit: I agree that the natural label IS vague, though, and unless you can ask the producer exactly what they mean by that, it isn't worth much. I saw some "all-natural" chicken for sale the other day, and reading the fine print it said, "NO HORMONES". :roll: Nobody uses hormones on fowl. It's antibiotic use that's important. The label did NOT say antibiotic free, so the all natural label was meaningless.

Last edited by MariaHobbit on Tue 02 Oct , 2007 1:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Jude
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Posted: Tue 02 Oct , 2007 1:35 pm
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Maria - do you do mail-order? :D

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MariaHobbit
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Posted: Tue 02 Oct , 2007 1:39 pm
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Errrrr, I don't even know if it's legal to ship something like that to Canada without some sort of inspection. :scratch: And the shipping cost would be prohibitive, I think.

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Lily Rose
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Posted: Tue 02 Oct , 2007 4:11 pm
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Maria, I was referring more to packaged products, like juice drinks and snacks and stuff. I should have clarified.
I often but eggs that are labeled as natural. My biggest concern is that they are cage-free.

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MariaHobbit
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Posted: Tue 02 Oct , 2007 6:11 pm
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I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of free range chickens when I come across a bit of styrofoam that we left out by accident, and the chickens have pecked it to pieces. Idiot birds. WHY eat styrofoam? What kind of horrid chemicals does that put in the eggs that we are eating? What ELSE do the idiot birds eat that we don't know about, when they go through the kitty door into the garage/shop and hang out in there?

Chickens are very, very stupid. We know now to keep styrofoam out of their reach, but just this weekend, a trash bag outside split and they got at another piece. :roll: What can I do? Kill all the birds and start a new flock, on the off chance that something in th styrofoam will hurt us? Or just hope it clears out of their system quickly?

Free range means they can get into all sorts of stuff they probably shouldn't get into. Not that there is lots of hazardous stuff on our place, but what would a beak full of axle grease do to the bird or her eggs? A drop could have fallen when my husband was fixing the tractor, I don't know.

The safest meat we raise are the fryers we raise in a large cage that rolls over the ground to new grass every day. We can control what they eat that way, and keep them safe from predators. And away from styrofoam and other such weird hazards. Our egg layers have no such protection. :(

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Dave_LF
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Posted: Tue 02 Oct , 2007 9:42 pm
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MariaHobbit wrote:
Chickens are very, very stupid.
Which is one reason the article about pork bothers me far more than the chick video. I think I am going to try to avoid mammal meat from now on. Hunted or free range is ok on special occasions when I can get it and don't mind paying.


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