After having my chickens now for almost a year I'm feeling very torn in how I should eat meat.
here's my dilemma:
I now know how healthy and happy chickens should be kept and this is how I keep my 6 sex link chickens. I also know that the cheap chicken that we by in supermarkets are grown in extremely unhealthy living conditions. Yet I only want to buy meat when it is on sale. I will only buy chicken breast when it is $1.99 or less. So I am partly to blame for why poultry farmers have to save money by producing more chickens in less space or growing only hybrid chickens with unusually large breasts. Unfortunately I think I was happier being ignorant and just buying meet because it looked nice in the wrapper.
So my options are:
1. Ignore everything I've learned about healthy sustainable agriculture and continue buying chicken breasts in pretty packaging when it's on sale.
2. Become a vegetarian and continue to keep chickens just for their eggs and gardening skills.
3. Practice what I preach and only support healthy humane and sustainable agriculture.
I know that I should choose either option 2 or option 3. Option 2 would be the easiest because it eliminates meat altogether. But if I want to continue to eat meat and stop living a lie then I have to choose option 3. But option 3 seems incredibly difficult because I'll have to change more than just my supermarket.
As an American consumer I have been brainwashed into believing that supermarkets are the best part of a "civilized" world. We are able to find all types of food prepared perfectly in clean aisles far away from the farmers. Butchers prepared meats so all that we had to do was take it out of the package and it would be ready to be added to any recipe. Supermarkets have become so successful that many of us shoppers never think about where our food came from. We never asked what part of the cow is used to make beef patties or hot dogs. Try asking a supermarket butcher where the meat came from. More than likely he'll say that he doesn't know. But this is what we want. This is progress. We no longer have to deal with a carcass and butcher our food ourselves. All of the hard work is done for us so all we have to do is enjoy our modern living. But have we gone too far?
I can buy a chicken breast at my supermarket for $1.99 /Lbs and barbecue it on my deck while watching my chickens playing in the yard and never once thinking that the two are related. The chicken breast is not a chicken it's a chicken breast that came from the supermarket. I could never think of my chickens as walking chicken breasts just as I could never think that this chicken breast came from an actual chicken. But now I realize how ignorant that sounds and I need to change. So tell me what you do. Do you buy cheap chicken breast when it's on sale like I do?
