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When reading the NY Post article below the other day, the first thought was that we were going to send US chickens to China for slaughter (i.e. "processing") in order to evade so-called, "Humane Slaughter" laws in this country.
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Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called a press conference to rightfully question and criticize the USDA decision to allow Chinese processed chickens to be exported back to the US for human consumption as presumably we might expect "arsenic, ground rats, glass chips or maggots" to be part of the feast.
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However, not being a chicken consumer, my first thought was the so-called "welfare" of the chickens presumably destined for slaughter on the other side of the world. Why did Schumer not question or criticize this?
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So, this morning I called Senator Schumer's office in Washington to ask some questions.
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The young woman who answered the phone looked on the USDA's web site and informed me that the chickens "would be slaughtered in this country" and sent to China for "cooking."
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"Cooking?" I asked incredulously. "But, that doesn't make sense! Do we not have cooks in this country?"
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Not believing what I was hearing, I requested a direct number for USDA.
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Another young woman answered the phone at USDA, meat processing and inspection.
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"According to a law passed by the Congress, companies that slaughter the chickens here have the option to send them to China (or other countries) for cooking and export back to this country. But, we do not import chickens raised and slaughtered in China to this country."
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Totally stunned by what I was being told, I replied, "This makes no sense! When USDA Wildlife Services rounds up geese in New York City and says that they send the geese upstate for 'processing,' they are not referring to cooking the geese, they are talking about slaughter facilities!"
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"This is the information I have," came the reply.
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"So companies here would spend the money for proscessing, packaging, freezing and transportation to and from the other side of the world for COOKING? Does this make any sense to you?"
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"As said, they have the option to do that, it is not a requirement," the woman replied without answering the direct question.
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I cannot of course prove that the women at Schumer's office or USDA were deliberately lying to me. Obviously, they were simply reading information from a web site.
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But, it makes no sense that we would spend huge sums of money on export and import around the world for the mere sake of "cooking" as much as it would make sense to send live chickens to China in order to avoid the high costs of labor in this country for slaughter,"processing" and "cooking," as well as avoid US humane slaughter laws.
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Either way, it makes good material for Leno, Letterman or Stewart.
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Unfortunately for the chickens, it is simply more tyranny and exploitation.
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Ah, for the sake of cheap meat!
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And finally, on that somber note, there is also this article today from the New York Times on the overuse of antibiotics in this country and how that is resulting in antibiotic resistant diseases and infections:
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From the article:
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"One point of contention has been the extent to which industrial-scale animal farming contributes to the problem of antibiotic-resistant infections in humans. The government has estimated that more than 70 percent of antibiotics in the United States are given to animals. Companies use them to prevent sickness when animals are packed together in ways that breed infection. They also use them to make animals grow faster, though federal authorities are trying to stop that."
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We had better be sure that whether alive or dead, those chickens sent to and back from China for "cooking" are fully loaded with antibiotics -- including those that can deal with arsenic, insecticides, ground rats, glass chips and maggots. -- PCA
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