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While I agree with you on every point....(and remember Taz didn't want to know what goes into commercial chicken feed
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My chickens free range all day long and STILL love chicken. I don't go out of my way to provide it for them, but if it's in the leftovers that I save for them, they get it.
Better than watching those documentaries mentioned (and I have) read
The Omnivores Dilemma. Forget the commercial chicken and eggs, you'll look twice at your feed lot beef.
The salmonilla issue goes away when the meat is handled and cooked well. Salmonilla is everywhere. In the soil in feces.... Yes even in a non farm perfectly groomed back yard... The only time it becomes a problem is when proper hygene is not observed in handling food or in the processing... The big problem with those big factories is that they are BIG. And the fact that the modern american these days mostly dont cook for themselves any more. Heaven forbid process their own meat or supervise the raising of that meat product.
I remember a time when you could grab a small handfull of hamberger and eat it raw. Grocery store bought.... Mom and I used to do it when I was about seven or eight. A little salt a little pepper and it was yummy. Nowadays I have literally had to sign a release (honest to God) to have my hamburger patty cooked medium rare. The efforts of the meat packing industry these days to give us safe food have been heroic.... and yet have left the food we buy colorless and without flavor.
In the era before factory farming my dad was the son of a sharecropper. They farmed everything from Pigs to Cotton and eventually Oranges as they worked their way from Florida to San Bernardino. Some of the stories he told of how they handled meat and what they fed their animals, would make you cringe. Yet My dad got a whoopin for tying the cow in the front yard to graze and forgetting to leave her a bucket of water. Dad even did some time working in a Catsup factory.... Like hotdogs and Bolognia... you dont want to know what goes in there. They used to hang hams in the pumphouse (coolest place on the farm) wrapped in cheese cloth, when it came time for some ham they would scrape off the mold and peel back the cheeze cloth and slice off some meat for dinner then wrap the whole thing back up. They ate everything from the cow because it was sacrilige to waste.
I am seriously considering rasing my own beef and learning how to butcher my own chicken. Though I would have to hire a mobile processor to come do the beef.
