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KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

bbc.co.uk

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Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#31

Post by magicalhippo »

mrguyorama wrote: post #5

Interesting that the pledge is about fast growing vs normal growing chicken. Does the UK not have the overcrowded cage conditions we have here in the US? The complaint is about these companies not wanting to reduce their profit margins, but how slowly do the other chickens grow? Are we doubling maturity time or increasing it by 10%? Doubling would probably impact consumer prices beyond what could be absorbed by elimi…

> how slowly do the other chickens grow?

Here in Norway the two largest producers are moving[1][2] from Ross 308 to Rustic Gold[3]. They live roughly 40-50% longer. The third largest has already moved[4] to the hybrid Hubbard JA 878, with similar growth.

However it's also easier to get the slow-growing chickens larger without health issues, roughly 25% according to this[5], so it turns out you might need fewer chickens to produce the same amount of meat. And thus the economics might not be as bad as it looks at first glance.

That's for Norway though, perhaps it's different elsewhere.

[1]: https://www.nortura.no/b%C3%A6rekraft-i-nortura/omsorg-for-m...

[2]: https://kommunikasjon.ntb.no/pressemelding/18709900/coop-tra...

[3]: https://aviagen.com/eu/brands/rowan-range/products/rustic-go...

[4]: https://dyrevern.no/landbruksdyr/kraftig-velferdsloft-for-no...

[5]: https://www.norsklandbruk.no/den-vanskelige-okonomien-i-a-by...

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#32

Post by carefree-bob »

georgefrowny wrote: post #20
bubblewand wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good . I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that (see also: the significant multiple mor…

GDP is a useless metric when so much of it basically wash trading. It's always been a dodgy metric and susceptible to gaming. But now that money is less and less connected to useful value, it's almost a sick joke.

GDP is a useful metric when we remember what it problems it was created to solve --e.g. in the Great Depression there was a concern of a decline of economic activity and a way to measure such activity and decide whether it was at a depressed level, and to what degree.

Similarly, the reason in international finance there is a focus on current value GDP is because lenders want to know whether a nation can repay foreign loans. As foreign loans are measured in dollars, lenders care about GDP in dollar terms.

But as is often the case, when people with money or institutional power create a metric for their own use case, many other groups see that and go "Aha! Free data!" and they start writing publications using this data for their own purposes, often forgetting what GDP is actually measuring and forcing it into a proxy for what they care about, for example, development economics, and often this is a poor proxy.

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#33

Post by tonyedgecombe »

advisedwang wrote: post #25
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #4

I was reading today that we have managed to grow chickens with so much fat that the meat is less healthy than red meat.

Can you share a link to what you were reading?

https://nutritionfacts.org/book/how-not-to-diet/

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#34

Post by riku_iki »

armoredkitten wrote: post #18
riku_iki wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it will be localized farm environment only.. Its just question of risk/benefit ratio, benefit is clear: cheap meat, because producers will be less impacted by deceases. Risks are not so clear in this case.

It doesn't stay localized; runoff from farmland is a major issue. In other words, the farm animal poops out a bunch of antiobiotics, then it rains and that poop ends up washing into the river/lake/water table. That's already something that happens with situations like E. coli contamination. Things that happen on the farm don't stay on the farm.

Ok, still focus could be not on avoiding antibiotics completely, but preventing runoff, or finding types which decay faster in environment.

Do we know even if we can build sustainable large scale industry without antibiotics?

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#35

Post by acheron »

bediger4000 wrote: post #26

I raised chickens as a teenager, mostly for eggs, but also meat. Chickens are terrible, I hate them. They're mean, cannibalistic, and I can easily see them evolving gigantism like other theropod did and becoming apex predators. I honestly think eating them isn't bad. Nevertheless, encouraging cruelty in poultry keepers is a bad thing. Casual cruelty has a corrosive effect on people.

I wouldn’t say our chickens are mean. They are incredibly stupid though. Some kinds of birds can be smart, but chickens aren’t one of them.

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#36

Post by merry_flame »

acheron wrote: post #35
bediger4000 wrote: post #26

I raised chickens as a teenager, mostly for eggs, but also meat. Chickens are terrible, I hate them. They're mean, cannibalistic, and I can easily see them evolving gigantism like other theropod did and becoming apex predators. I honestly think eating them isn't bad. Nevertheless, encouraging cruelty in poultry keepers is a bad thing. Casual cruelty has a corrosive effect on people.

I wouldn’t say our chickens are mean. They are incredibly stupid though. Some kinds of birds can be smart, but chickens aren’t one of them.

Nonsense. I've even had hens that paired together to open doors – one flying repeatedly on the handle, another one pushing the door. And those were reform hens that seemed particularly blunt relative to their peers.

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#37

Post by erhserhdfd »

bombcar wrote: post #28
georgefrowny wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP is a useless metric when so much of it basically wash trading. It's always been a dodgy metric and susceptible to gaming. But now that money is less and less connected to useful value, it's almost a sick joke.

GDP is also useless in that it values doordashing cold fried chicken as more valuable than cooking and eating one you hand raised at home.

GDP records market transactions. So in your scenario, purchasing the chicken, the chicken feed, the chicken coop, etc would all be measured. The time spent raising the chicken (assuming you did not pay someone to do it), would not be captured.

However, I think part of your criticism is a moralistic and health based argument that raising a chicken is intrinsically better and healthier that Doordashing fast food. When a consumer chooses a $60 delivered meal over a $45 home-cooked alternative, that reveals a preference for whatever they value, such as convenience, time saved, taste, service quality, etc. GDP doesn’t evaluate whether that preference is “good”; it only records the transaction value that arises from it.

So I agree GDP is not a perfect measure, but it's far from useless.

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#38

Post by cucumber3732842 »

bubblewand wrote: post #15
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote: post #9

High streets are dying, pretty sure half the restaurants closest to me are either closed or going to close down soon. Coming back from Japan it was certainly a whiplash to find just a row of fried chicken shops and empty restaurants. It made me rethink how great of a signal GDP growth really is on how good things are economically.

It really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good . I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that (see also: the significant multiple mor…

>It really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good.

     -every medical licensing racket organization
>I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that

Way more than anyone wants to admit.

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#39

Post by cucumber3732842 »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #22
mrguyorama wrote: post #5

Interesting that the pledge is about fast growing vs normal growing chicken. Does the UK not have the overcrowded cage conditions we have here in the US? The complaint is about these companies not wanting to reduce their profit margins, but how slowly do the other chickens grow? Are we doubling maturity time or increasing it by 10%? Doubling would probably impact consumer prices beyond what could be absorbed by elimi…

> Most lay opinions I can find online claim the fast growing birds to have inferior meat quality. I wonder if I could distinguish in a blind taste test. It’s easy to distinguish. The fast growing birds are much larger, breasts at least 2x the size of normal chickens. The larger breasts you notice when cutting them when raw, they often have a tough texture and meat inside like strands. When cooked and chewing it’ll ha…

You see the same fibrous crap in tenders. It's like eating a wet (chicken flavored) rope.

Re: KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge

#40

Post by cucumber3732842 »

ramesh31 wrote: post #21
whalesalad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

has it ever not been inedible?

>has it ever not been inedible? No restaurant ever makes it big without being good to begin with. I remember the chicken being on par with any other fast food as a kid, they just fell off hard in the 2000s. I'm really not sure who is still buying their buckets.

To be fair, KFC "made it big" 3/4 of a century ago.
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