The Incredible Inedible Chicken

Those of us who try to eat a healthy diet usually pick out our foods with care. Besides being concerned about what we eat, though, we need to pay attention to what our food is eating. Recent studies of supermarket chickens show that they are being fed arsenic, banned antibiotics, Benadryl and caffeine. Much of this undoubtedly ends up in our chicken dinners.

Despite the recent findings of undesirable chemical residues in chicken, we’re supposed to believe that the levels are too low to affect human health. But reassurances from the agricultural industry about the harmlessness of these toxins are not too reassuring — not when analyses show the birds are consuming drugs like Benadryl that you would never expect to be in your drumsticks and chicken wings.

When Keeve E. Nachman, a researcher at John Hopkins, discussed with The New York Times what he and his fellow scientists discovered in chickens, he admitted, “We were kind of floored. It’s unbelievable what we found.”

Banned Antibiotics

Originally, the tests on chicken were designed to check the birds only for antibiotics. In those experiments, the researchers found evidence the chickens were being fed floroquinolones, broad-spectrum antibiotics used to treat serious bacterial infections in people, particularly those infections that have become resistant to older antibiotic drugs. These findings were an unpleasant surprise because floroquinolones have been banned for use in U.S. poultry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 2005.

In the tests, the scientists examined feather meal, a byproduct of poultry production made from poultry feathers, to determine what drugs the chickens may have received prior to their slaughter and sale.

“The discovery of certain antibiotics in feather meal strongly suggests the continued use of these drugs, despite the ban put in place in 2005 by the FDA,” says David Love, another one of the researchers. “The public health community has long been frustrated with the unwillingness of FDA to effectively address what antibiotics are fed to food animals.”

“We strongly believe that the FDA should monitor what drugs are going into animal feed,” urges Nachman. “Based on what we’ve learned, I’m concerned that the new FDA guidance documents, which call for voluntary action from industry, will be ineffectual. By looking into feather meal, and uncovering a drug banned nearly 6 years ago, we have very little confidence that the food animal production industry can be left to regulate itself.”

The laboratory tests of feathers also showed the presence of acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) and caffeine. Chicken from China was found to contain ingredients linked to Prozac.

“This study reveals yet another pathway of unwanted human exposure to a surprisingly broad spectrum of prescription and over-the-counter drugs,” notes study co-author Rolf Halden, of Arizona State University.

Chicken Decline

All of these findings reflect the changing status of chicken in our modern system of industrial agriculture. And it reminds me: Many years ago, when I was a young, broke musician living on a couch in an apartment in New York City’s Little Italy, chicken trucks would periodically drop off live birds to a butcher store on Thompson Street that catered to the neighborhood’s Italian cooks. There the birds would be killed and plucked one by one and sold.

Today, I’m sure that broke musicians still sleep on New York City couches, but I doubt that chicken trucks still navigate Manhattan streets. As for me, decades after trading in my Stratocaster for a computer keyboard, and living in Alabama, I still encounter chicken trucks. But there’s little resemblance between those trucks I saw in the 1970s with their feisty, complaining, colorful birds and the present-day dingy, foul-smelling, dilapidated vehicles that wend their way on rural roads to chicken factories. The chickens of the 21st century are white, passive lumps that seem barely alive.

The sight and smell of these unhappy birds on filthy trucks is persuasion enough for me that we should be eating organic food, never mind the chemicals hidden in their flesh.