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What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

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Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#31

Post by SerLava »

pavlov wrote: post #27
ncr100 wrote: post #15

Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. I wonder if it was painful for the bird having this tough dead tissue at the core of its breasts.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in how animals are treated. Industrial meat production practically runs its margins on increasing the suffering of animals in a manner that narrowly avoids this kind of visible anomalies in the product. As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before puttin…

>Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free."

It's kind of like that... except that slaves were people - not chickens. Which certainly flavors the metaphor a bit.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#32

Post by makerofthings »

nsebban wrote: post #19
milesrout wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they haven't. Red meat is not dangerous. Cooking red meat the way Americans tend to (disgustingly fried everything) is, but disgustingly frying anything is bad for you.

People fry red meat ?! I have spent much time in the US, but I think I have never seen that...in restaurants at least. And I'm kinda glad I didn't.

Slightly OT, but Is this a language thing? In the UK frying in this context means in a flat frying pan with a very small coating of oil. This is perfectly normal for a steak. Deep fat frying, where the meat would be submerged in hot oil would be out of the ordinary.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#33

Post by batiudrami »

ncr100 wrote: post #15

Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. I wonder if it was painful for the bird having this tough dead tissue at the core of its breasts.

In the meantime you might find vegetarianism surprisingly easy - I know I did. It is initially a bit of extra effort because you need to learn brand new recipes and depending on where you live you might have limited restaurant selections but I mostly gave up meat 18 months ago and was surprised at how easy it was.

Plus it's way cheaper and you get to massively reduce your carbon footprint too. It's not for everyone but maybe worth thinking about? :)

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#34

Post by ikurei »

qubyte wrote: post #29
pavlov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in how animals are treated. Industrial meat production practically runs its margins on increasing the suffering of animals in a manner that narrowly avoids this kind of visible anomalies in the product. As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before puttin…

Not if we're talking about advances in textured vegetable protein. When I read "fake meat" I take it to mean that it's not animal derived. Otherwise it'd just be meat.

Still, we can do something about it right now. We may need meat, but we don't need meat in every meal; if we reduced the consumption of meat, we could conceivably switch to more expensive, less efficient, more humane ways to grow animals.

If you can afford it, you can also only buy meat from non-intensive farming. Or stop eating meat all together.

I just don't think it's morally right to wait for a solution that may not ever come, or not for a long time. I eat veggie fake-meat often, and sometimes it's great, but it's not close to real meat and I don't know that it'll ever be accepted by most of the population.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#35

Post by DonHopkins »

ncr100 wrote: post #15

Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. I wonder if it was painful for the bird having this tough dead tissue at the core of its breasts.

Like "Chicken Little" from "The Space Merchants" (1952) by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth [1]:

He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped.

It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.

Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. (Ch. 9)

Also [2]:

Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.

On January 17, 1912, Nobel prize-winning physician Dr. Alexis Carrel placed a part of a chicken's embryo heart in a nutrient medium in a glass flask of his own design. Every forty-eight hours the tissue doubled in size and was transferred to a new flask. Twenty years later, it was still growing.

In his 1941 story Methuselah's Children, Robert Heinlein paid homage to his work by referring to the famous chicken as a research tool for the long-lived Howard Families:

Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as "Mrs. 'Awkins." Mrs. 'Awkins was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O'Shaug techniques and still Mrs. 'Awkins flourished.

[1] http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.nl/2012/08/this-is-her...

[2] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#36

Post by curiousDog »

batiudrami wrote: post #33
ncr100 wrote: post #15

Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. I wonder if it was painful for the bird having this tough dead tissue at the core of its breasts.

In the meantime you might find vegetarianism surprisingly easy - I know I did. It is initially a bit of extra effort because you need to learn brand new recipes and depending on where you live you might have limited restaurant selections but I mostly gave up meat 18 months ago and was surprised at how easy it was. Plus it's way cheaper and you get to massively reduce your carbon footprint too. It's not for everyone b…

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Particularly going Vegan. What sorts of protein do you usually eat?

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#37

Post by DanBC »

sturmeh wrote: post #7
bambax wrote: post #3

Brown meat is much much more delicious; why would anyone prefer white meat is beyond me. And the irony is that, in buying "heavy breasted chicken", customers pay for something they can't consume (assuming chicken is priced by the pound in the US).

Maybe because studies in the past two years suggest that red meat is actually quite dangerous with frequent consumption.

The WHO said that red meat is probably a carcinogen, and that processed red meat is definitely a carcinogen.

But the amount of cancer they cause is quite small.

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/10October/Pages/Processed-meat-c...

> A key statistic provided by the infographic is that if everyone stopped smoking, there would be 64,500 fewer cases of cancer a year in the UK, compared with 8,800 fewer cases if everyone stopped eating processed or red meat.

This is for a country with a population of 60m to 70m people.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#38

Post by DanBC »

milesrout wrote: post #18
sturmeh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because studies in the past two years suggest that red meat is actually quite dangerous with frequent consumption.

No they haven't. Red meat is not dangerous. Cooking red meat the way Americans tend to (disgustingly fried everything) is, but disgustingly frying anything is bad for you.

Red meat is, according to WHO, a probable carcinogen, although the increased risk is quite small.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#39

Post by pavlov »

SerLava wrote: post #31
pavlov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in how animals are treated. Industrial meat production practically runs its margins on increasing the suffering of animals in a manner that narrowly avoids this kind of visible anomalies in the product. As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before puttin…

>Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free." It's kind of like that... except that slaves were people - not chickens. Which certainly flavors the metaphor a bit.

Absolutely. That's the crux of the issue: do chickens' lives and feelings have any value? If so, how should society impose that value system on an enormous industry that optimizes to extract value from chickens' suffering?

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#40

Post by milesrout »

nsebban wrote: post #19
milesrout wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they haven't. Red meat is not dangerous. Cooking red meat the way Americans tend to (disgustingly fried everything) is, but disgustingly frying anything is bad for you.

People fry red meat ?! I have spent much time in the US, but I think I have never seen that...in restaurants at least. And I'm kinda glad I didn't.

Have you ever had a hamburger...?
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