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Bird flu has made the three-egg omelette a luxury item in parts of America, but the other fowl bearing the brunt of the highly pathogenic virus's outbreak is the poor turkey, whose flocks have been culled by 7.8 million so far. The USDA is now recognizing that this could have bad consequences in, say, five months, when a certain holiday occurs on the third Thursday of November. The federal agency's latest monthly hatchery report is a bit ominous: Reuters notes that it reports a "significant decline" in the May count for baby turkeys, or poults. That number (22.3 million) is...

Poultry producer Foster Farms suspended five employees Wednesday after an animal-rights group released undercover video showing live birds being slammed upside-down into shackles, punched and plucked. The suspended employees were either directly involved in the abuse or failed to report it to management, the California-based company said in a statement released through a public relations firm. “The behavior of the individuals in this video is inappropriate and counter to our stringent animal welfare standards, procedures and policies,” the statement said.

Attacks the past two weeks on at least 16 farms across several rural South Carolina counties killed an estimated 300,000 chickens and cost the owners roughly $1.7 million. Clarendon County Sheriff Randy Garrett said someone familiar with alarm systems used in chicken houses is responsible. Those alarms also control the heat, air conditioning and ventilation units and notify farmers by cellphone when buildings get too hot or cold. Chickens can die in about an hour if the ventilation and heating systems are turned off. “The chicks, you have to maintain the temperature at 95 to 100 degrees, and when they...

A federal judge on Wednesday overturned California’s law banning the sale of foie gras, a ban sparked largely by outrage over the farming practices of a Sonoma company, which some likened to animal torture. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson does not mean Sonoma Foie Gras can restart production in the state. But it will allow the reconstituted company to sell products brought in from outside California, according to company co-founder Junny Gonzalez. ________________________________ The judge ruled the law was unconstitutional because it interferes with an existing federal law that regulates poultry products. The courts last year...

The world is on fire right now, so let's talk about the important stuff. Not Fergadishu, not Ben Gazi (who is that guy anyway?), not Punkin' Thighs' presidential aspirations. I'm talkin' turkey! Do you brine, do you butter under the skin, do you fry? Please tell us your method and why you chose it. Happy Thanksgiving to the best folks on the inner webs!

A report released Thursday indicates that just about all chicken sold in U.S. stores contains harmful bacteria, and nearly half are tainted with a so-called superbug that's resistant to antibiotics. The Consumer Reports study, its most comprehensive to date on poultry, tested raw chicken breasts purchased at retail outlets nationwide for six bacteria, then checked for antibiotic resistance. The results showed nearly half of the samples were contaminated with at least one bacterium resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics, what's known as a superbug. Slightly more than 10 percent were tainted with two superbugs. That finding is cause...

Ok every post problems/solutions here.

The nation's largest producer of turkeys is warning of a shortage of birds, just in time for Thanksgiving. Butterball announced that it will be shipping out half as many large, fresh never-frozen turkeys to retailers this year. The company says many of its birds had trouble gaining weight during the production process. And though the cause of the problem remains a mystery, food distributors say their orders for turkeys 16 pounds and bigger have been slashed in half. Sixteen pounds is the national average for Thanksgiving holiday turkeys making this shortage a particularly concerning problem.

BOSTON (CBS) — As soon as next summer, nuggets and other popular chicken products could be made with chicken processed in China, all because of a recent change in regulations. “Oh, it makes me a little nervous,” says mother of two, Katrina Lee. China has a long history of serving up unsafe food, including the industrial chemical melamine that was deliberately put in pet food and infant formula. There were also cases of tainted rat meat passed off as lamb. “To me it’s a big leap of faith for us to now have to accept that foods coming from china...

David Harsanyi calls it "preposterous," which I suppose is true enough, but then, it's an advertisement... It's not so much that the ad is preposterous as that it's so... Ruthless. The ad essentially calls all of Chipotle's competitors murderers and pedophiles. It really pushes the line as far as disparaging competitors. It's one thing to do a cooked-up Taste Test. But this employs all the tricks of the greatest propaganda medium ever created -- moving pictures + sound -- and mixes them together with what Harsanyi suggests is food paranoia to attack all fast-food rivals as monsters. I find it...

U.S. officials have given the thumbs-up to four Chinese poultry plants, paving the way for the country to send processed chicken to American markets, according to audit reports obtained by POLITICO. The audit reports expected to be made public Friday show that the Chinese processing plants passed U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections performed in March and the positive results make it likely the foreign producers soon will become eligible to export to the U.S According to the audit, at first, China will only be able to process chicken that has been slaughtered in the U.S. or other certified countries.

Generations of American cooks are wrong. They learned their wrongity wrongity wrong habits from their parents, or from public television’s Julia Child. Their terrible, filthy habit is rinsing poultry before cooking. Public health experts estimate that as many as 90% of Americans do it, and they want us to cut it out. Poultry-washing makes intuitive sense: you don’t know where that bird has been or what kind of bacteria are crawling on the outside. Julia Child herself admitted that washing a chicken before roasting it felt cleaner, even if the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the government agency in charge of...

Colombian model Natalia Paris has decided to go public with her theory that eating chicken makes children gay. Paris based her theory on reports that claimed chickens are being injected with female hormones to speed up their growth.

BEIJING—The head of Yum Brands Inc.'s China operations made a rare appearance to take aim at the country's food-safety issues and win back customers after allegations of quality oversights at the company's KFC restaurants caused consumer confidence and sales to tumble in its largest market. Yum is aiming to prevent food-safety problems by cutting its ties with suppliers that source their chicken from small farms that are hard to regulate, said Sam Su, the chairman and chief executive of Yum's China division, in a press briefing Monday. But the fundamental problems that sparked consumer concern over the quality of the...

No one wants to send a species to extinction, but when a chicken that can be hunted and cooked for dinner is proposed as an endangered species, one has to question the entire program. When that proposed endangered species listing brings together representatives from oil, gas, and wind energy companies—as well as ranchers and farmers—you can be sure changes are needed in the way the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is applied.    The specific critter in question this time is the lesser prairie chicken (LPC) and the proposed ESA listing would have the federal government killing jobs, thwarting economic development, and...

First it was bacon, now it's chicken wings. With less than two weeks to go before the big game, football fans may find it a bit harder to find their favorite Super Bowl snack. The National Chicken Council released a report that said the demand for wings this year is at “an all-time high” due to decreased wing production caused by the high cost of corn and feed prices. Wings are currently the highest priced portion of a chicken and cost $2.11 a pound in the Northeast, up 12 percent from last year.

The deceptively named “Cancer Project” animal-rights group is at it again. This time its target isn’t hot dog makers, but grilled-chicken servers. The group, a branch of the PETA-linked Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), filed a lawsuit in Connecticut yesterday against three restaurant chains demanding warnings about a supposed link between grilled chicken and cancer. As we told the media, PCRM is nothing more than an animal rights front for pushing vegan activism, which is funded primarily by a single rich donor. Since 2003, PCRM and the Cancer Project have derived 60 percent of their budgets from a...

USAgNet - Smithfield Packing Company Inc., a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, plans to begin its planned closure of a Portsmouth, Va. hot dog and lunch meat production facility. MeatPoultry reports that the firm announced the closure this past November. Layoffs are expected to begin at the Portsmouth plant in January, and the facility will be closed by the end of March 2013. The company says its first round of layoffs will impact about 120 workers. Another 400 employees will be affected by the plant closure....

<p>Workers at a Tyson Foods poultry processing plant in Tennessee have opted to trade a paid Labor Day holiday for the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Fitr.</p> <p>A 5-year contract approved by members of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union at the Shelbyville, Tenn., plant last November includes the change to accommodate Muslim workers.</p>