Kelley wrote:
>>knock. knock. anybody home? the first paragraph noted that the US press
has
glossed over all this. I doubt USers even know about it. <<
Good point but I dunno ... although the specific details are always a bit of a shock, I get the feeling that most people, if you asked them, would say that they are aware that there is something fundamentally, seriously wrong with battery farmed chicken (from a gastronomic and/or gastric point of view rather than the ethical). UKians very certainly know this because it was absolutely *huge* scandal about twelve years ago, but we don't seem to care either.
This is one point in which I am almost pushed in the direction of sociobiology for want of any other rational explanation; there's just something about cheap chicken (or cheap meat in general) that short-circuits normal consumer reasoning about trade-offs between quality and price. I just can't think of any good reason why people in general (including myself) who can afford to buy meat which isn't of horrible, dangerous quality, instead choose to buy meat which is.
By the way, there is no implicit invitation in this post for everyone to start discussing how they only buy free-range these days themselves, how good their local farmers' market is or any such similar, though past experience suggests that this doesn't mean that people won't see one.
dd
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