The honest-to-goodness truth of the matter is that the Chicken industry is nothing like it was just 20 years ago. 20 years ago, the breed of chicken we use for meat didn’t exist. Did you know that the chicken in your freezer went from hatching to slaughter in just 58 days. It has been designed to grow so fast, that it can barely walk, it has very few feathers, and is primarily breast meat.
The hens used for laying eggs are typically killed, and buried. Yup, buried - as is disposed of. Why? Because, like any industry, it’s designed to run millions of a particularily sized bird -and these old hens are simply too big for the machines.
That’s why your chicken is practically tasteless, and why you find every whole chicken within a pound of each other. You don’t find the ‘big birds’ anymore.
Now, don’t get me wrong - there is nothign wrong with butchering up an old laying hen; I’m sure they are quite tasty. But, the fact of the matter is that a vast majority of these hens wind up in a landfill - and not on a plate.
Where did you get your information? All hens from laying farms go into chicken soup or other chicken products. There are none that are killed and buried.
>> It has been designed to grow so fast, that it can barely walk, it has very few feathers, and is primarily breast meat.
Sounds like Megan McCain got all tangled up in this weird science, too.
Yep. I read about this in Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. If you want to see something really interesting, watch an old Julia Child show from the 60’s or 70’s that features chicken. On the one I saw, The breast meat barely covered her hand and is fairly thin, probably 3 oz worth of meat raw. I am pretty sure that the breast I ate over the course of last week had close to eight ounces of meat on it cooked.