'Are cheap chicks chic?' Poll discussion & results

Bargainetta

:rolleyes:

absolutebounder wrote: »

I thought this was going to be about slappers

Slappers!!!? I'll slap you, you you unmentionable word. Well, at least your tag seems totally appropriate.

eva16006159

Smirch_This wrote: »

Sod the chickens. Having wrung a few necks in my time, shot lots of rabbits and shot a cow, I really don't care. Probably the stupidest animals on the planet. They just happen to be tasty. Who cares how horrible their miserable lives are.

None of my family can actually tell the difference between a 2 for £5 (well £5.50 now) chicken from Tescos and a £9 organic one from Waitrose. I don't think anyone can. It's the psychological effect of paying nearly 4x the amount for the same chunk of dead bird that makes it taste better.

I get the feeling that because Jamie Oliver says so then the sheep-like proletarians follow blindly. Remember, this is coming from the guy who drizzles everything to death with Olive Oil (a dangerous source of Omega 9 fatty acids which cause arterial and vascular restriction as well as an effective laxative). Your funeral.

In summary, there is no way are any of these people are qualified to tell you how to run your life. It's no better than the 1920's cigarettes adverts telling you that they cure lots of problems. It's not the whole picture.

You are an absolute !!!!!!

Gordon_the_Moron

LouBlue wrote: »

If you only buy free range eggs, watch out for the sneaky packaging. I bought some eggs at the weekend, that had Farm Shop eggs on the front and they were from a local farm, so I bought them. When I opened them last night, it had Caged in small letters inside. I cooked one free range and one caged, and the colour of the yolk was completely different! The caged one was bright yellow and the free range was a pale golden colour. I gave my OH the free range one, I'm nice like that.

That is probably because they feed the caged type yellow food colouring, just like the feed pink colouring to farmed salmon to make it pinker. Since it is illegal to add food colouring to fresh fruit, veg, meat and fish making it an artificial colour by feeding food colouring is legal but questionably ethical.

Gordon_the_Moron

brooksie77 wrote: »

We should just be letting the farmers get on with bringing us inexpensive poultry that we want to eat. It's hard enough already with all the regulations. It is quite remarkable to be so ungrateful about cheap, quality food (they may not be Bresse chickens, but they're not bad) – and these complaints usually emanate from the same kind of person who then rants about poor people going hungry. Or does that only apply to poor, photogenic brown people four thousand miles away?

Animals (however they are reared) eat plant products all through there life, so if you want to eat the most energy efficient food possible don't eat intensively reared meat (admittedly more energy efficient than free range just tasteless and inhumane to go with it) go vegetarian. I have been for about 5 years now and I don't preach sermons to anyone or tell them they are bad for eating meat (whatever type) but it is the best decision I ever made and I would recommend it to anyone. I feel much better physically, I get sick less and it helps the environment (livestock actually contributes more to greenhouse gas emmissions than transport does)

Gordon_the_Moron

JCD_Capulet wrote: »

Well unlike you cerdwen I'm not healthy, I'm ill. I've a variety of problems and going vegetarian (which tbh I find kinda silly seeing as human beings are built to be carnivores) against my will to apease the bunny hugging masses will not make me any better.There's a reason that a vast majority of vegtetarians need to take vitamin suppliments with their meals, the reason being that through choosing to consume only fruit and veg they are willingly depriving their bodies of the nutrients which would be derived from a normal diet which includes meat.

People, I've said my piece now please get off my back.

Humans are not designed to be carnivores. Herbivores eat no animal products, carnivores eat nothing but animal products and omnivores eat both, humans can be quite healthy as vegetarians (like I am) but a carnivorous diet? There are plenty of things you need missing from that.

Which nutrients am I willingly depriving myself of then?

stogiebear

Smirch_This wrote: »

Sod the chickens. Having wrung a few necks in my time, shot lots of rabbits and shot a cow, I really don't care. Probably the stupidest animals on the planet. They just happen to be tasty. Who cares how horrible their miserable lives are.

None of my family can actually tell the difference between a 2 for £5 (well £5.50 now) chicken from Tescos and a £9 organic one from Waitrose. I don't think anyone can. It's the psychological effect of paying nearly 4x the amount for the same chunk of dead bird that makes it taste better.

I get the feeling that because Jamie Oliver says so then the sheep-like proletarians follow blindly. Remember, this is coming from the guy who drizzles everything to death with Olive Oil (a dangerous source of Omega 9 fatty acids which cause arterial and vascular restriction as well as an effective laxative). Your funeral.

In summary, there is no way are any of these people are qualified to tell you how to run your life. It's no better than the 1920's cigarettes adverts telling you that they cure lots of problems. It's not the whole picture.

:T So far, the most intelligent post on this thread.

Davesnave

Remembering your first post, I can only say 'You would say that wouldn't you?'

There is an intelligent debate to be had, but not with people who take extreme views one way or the other: we know animal protein is an 'inefficient' food supply and, equally, we know that the majority will continue to eat meat as long as it is affordable. The debate here is about what is acceptable practice in producing affordable meat. I would guess that for the majority, the answer lies somewhere between the extremes of factory farming and free range organic, not one or the other.

What's not generally understood, however, is the way that supermarkets, in their continuous drive to lower costs & push down prices, squeeze the farmers into the industrial kind of production seen in these programmes. For some, it's either that or go to the wall. Personally, I don't want them to do that in my name, so I'll pay the extra for free range until better welfare standards are introduced.

There are further problems in this issue which have barely been touched on too, like the use of battery chicken & eggs in a whole gamut of processed products. Here, there's no way to 'vote with one's wallet' as is the case with straight chicken meat.

Funny that people will still rave on about how they & their families 'can't tell the difference' between free range & caged, like there isn't any. Whenever did you hear someone boast that their family doesn't know the difference between a Reliant Robin and a BMW?

competitionscafe

I am currently reading an interesting book called The Omnivores Dilemna by Michael Pollan - to paraphrase from there - when the consumer cares about nothing more than price then it's not surprising that the farmer cares about nothing more than yield - when the shopper only wants to know what's cheapest then the farmer will produce the greatest quantity they can at the lowest possible cost. When the consumer cares about taste, quality, flavour, animal welfare, pesticide use, antibiotics, etc and understand that they may have to pay a little more for produce which is produced with these concerns in mind - then things may change.

As for the taste difference I can only guess that people who cannot taste the difference have either never tasted a proper free-range chicken or otherwise they smother their chicken in so much processed ready-made sauce of some description that it completely dominates the flavour. In blind tastings people consistently prefer the free-range product. As for a pyschological effect, the only one I can think of is that the knowledge that the animal killed for your meal was raised with a decent standard of welfare means that you are more likely to enjoy eating that meal than you would one with the knowledge that the animal killed for your plate had a miserable life....

LouBlue

competitionscafe wrote: »

As for the taste difference I can only guess that people who cannot taste the difference have either never tasted a proper free-range chicken or otherwise they smother their chicken in so much processed ready-made sauce of some description that it completely dominates the flavour. In blind tastings people consistently prefer the free-range product. As for a pyschological effect, the only one I can think of is that the knowledge that the animal killed for your meal was raised with a decent standard of welfare means that you are more likely to enjoy eating that meal than you would one with the knowledge that the animal killed for your plate had a miserable life....

Totally agree. After reading some of these posts, I decided to do a blind taste. We had a battery chicken breast in the freezer, and I also had a free range one. OH cooked both and I didn't know which one was which. And the free range one had so much more flavour.

Davesnave

'We had a battery chicken breast in the freezer, and I also had a free range one.'

I think it likely that you had an intensively reared chicken breast here rather than a battery one. Battery hens are so knackered & thin by the time they take them out that they can't even be used for school dinners, unless disguised as chickenburgers, pies, soup etc. ...Which brings me back to my point about processed products. Unless there is an overarching standard for all chicken keeping, intensive stuff will slip into well-meaning people's diets through the back door.