Chlorinated chicken is bad; it is gross. Do you ever wonder why the chicken from the supermarket is smelly, slimy, and discolored? What is that liquid in the package, much of it absorbed into that plastic diaper between your meat and the styrofoam package? That is chlorine and fecal water, fecal soup. While the practice is illegal in Europe, 97% of American chicken is soaked in chlorine during the chilling process. The reasons why is more gross than the practice itself.
The reason chlorine is “necessary” is because of poor living conditions and poor butchering practices. Diseases run rampant in the world of factory farming, where birds live in filth, crammed into rooms with thousands of other birds. When these chickens are brought to slaughter they are covered in fecal matter and the bedding they’ve been wading in for their whole existence. Now, when it’s time for the evisceration, the conveyor belt style processing is mechanized and imprecise. It is common for intestines to not be fully removed during evisceration or to be nicked. This is where the fecal component of fecal soup originates. These chickens are eventually dumped into a large vat of cold water, with chlorine in it to “sterilize” the meat. Studies have shown that this is not even effective though. What does happen is this mixture of chlorine and fecal matter and water is absorbed into the chicken. But this isn’t the way it has to be.
How we do it
We raise our chickens in a humane manner. They live on pasture, moving to fresh grass everyday. While factory chickens wade through their own manure, ours are moved out of it before it even begins to build up. What’s left behind is some of the best fertilizer you can imagine, rejuvenating the soil. Once it’s time for our chickens to be processed, they are butchered by hand, no stray intestines are left hanging from birds, no fecal matter being thrown about. Whereas the factory bird is soaked in the nasty chlorine mix, our birds are quickly dipped in an organic hydrogen peroxide and vinegar mix before being air dried.
When you cut open a Bailey Family Farm chicken, you won’t smell any of the nastiness you grow accustomed to smelling with supermarket chicken. You won’t get that slimy,sticky feeling either. What you will get is real, authentic meat unadulterated by chemicals or human negligence. Another benefit of air chilling is you won’t lose near as much weight while cooking the chicken, as little as 4% weight loss from evaporation. Your instincts know the difference between good food and bad food. When you’re grossed out by the meat you are about to cook, it is probably for good reason. No amount of chlorine can undo this.
Please stay in touch with us to learn more about how you can support local, humane farming. To learn how to buy, click here.