poultry Archives - Page 2 of 2

Why We Can't See Inside Poultry Production, and What Might Change if We Could

January 29, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In the past months, there have been several troubling research reports, from different parts of the world, exploring aspects of the same problem: Multi-drug resistant bacteria are present in chicken, apparently because of the use of antibiotics in poultry production, and are passing to people who work with, prepare or eat chicken, at some risk to their health.

Here are a few of the publications:

From the US Department of Agriculture and University of Georgia, which has probably the deepest poultry-science research bench in the United States, an analysis of multi-drug resistant E. coli found on broiler chicken carcasses.
From several institutions in Germany, an analysis that finds “alarmingly high” levels of multi-drug resistant bacteria on retail chicken — including on organic chicken, which the authors say may be due to bacterial colonization of chicks before they are bought by organic producers.
From the Czech Republic, a report that bacteria found on chicken there are resistant to an additional class of drugs important in human medicine, fluoroquinolones.
From a multi-national team, a look at the close resemblance of multi-drug resistant E. coli between poultry and humans in several countries including the United States.
And most recently, two more European reports, from the Netherlands and from Sweden, of high rates of multi-drug resistant bacteria on chicken meat (and in the Netherlands paper, a comparison to resistant bacteria in humans as well).

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2012 In The Rear-View Mirror: What You Liked

January 1, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Happy New Year, constant readers. For the second year in a row, here’s my list of which of my posts (91 in 2012!) most moved you to react. Last year (find that list here), I counted down based on which posts provoked the most comments. This year, Wired installed a tweet-counter — which registers only if someone clicks through from Twitter, but not if the post’s URL is mentioned or RT’d — so I thought it would be amusing to score posts that way this year.

And the verdict is: You care enormously about food policy, but you continue to be fascinated by the emergence of scary diseases — and, to my surprise and pleasure, you care about public understanding of science as well.

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The Lost History and Unintended Consequences of the Chicken Nugget

December 28, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A close look at the interior of a McDonald’s McNugget. Bought, sliced open, shot by me. CC 3.0 attrib-noncomm.

There are things in your life that are so ubiquitous, you never stop to consider them. Traffic signals. Magnets. For me, chicken nuggets. They seem to be everywhere: every fast-food chain, every kids’ menu, every supermarket freezer aisle. I don’t particularly care for them, but I never stopped to wonder where they came from. I assumed, as with so much else in our food culture, McDonald’s was responsible, and other food producers had followed the McNugget’s market-devouring lead.

Well, yes, and no. As part of my reporting on food policy, I’ve been looking into the history of poultry production — and reading up on what drove its vast post-war expansion, I stumbled across the lost history of the nugget. It appears to have been invented — or at least, originally proposed — by a Cornell professor, 17 years before McDonald’s had essentially the same idea.

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