Hey Hey!

Here's the third installment of ORGANIC A to Z! Featuring C we jump off the vegetarian tip and cook one of my favorite tasty treats: CHICKEN!

YES, the bird. I know a lot of the vegetarians out there are retching at me for doing chicken on the show. Oh well. I love to eat chicken and I think the majority of people out there do too. I also suspect that the majority of folks out there don’t think about chickens enough and assume poultry is a lesser evil of meats. That’s not true baby.

Conventional poultry production is just plain wrong. Tens of thousands of birds “living” together under bright lights day and night, with no access to sunlight, fresh air, or a space to walk, which is irrelevant anyway ‘coz many chickens have been bred to have ginormous breasts that are so large their little legs cannot support the weight! Imagine eating a sickly, depressed, mutant bird that rooted in its own shit, rarely slept, couldn’t walk and was kept alive by antibiotics and freakish growth drugs? Doesn’t sound very appetizing, nutritious or ethical. So make an effort to go organic—it’s really the only way to ensure you are eating a healthy, happy bird that was given a humane life.

Only 1% of the poultry in the US is organic, yet this is the fastest growing meat product so you are bound to see more product and lower prices soon. Organic chicken is a rarity in restaurants, but becoming more common in groceries now. The price is a couple touches higher than the other birds for sale, but worth every penny. By making that effort to go organic I have cut chicken out of my diet a lot and when I do throw down for a bird and cook it up at home, it is the best! Nothing tastes better than knowledge…and a fat healthy bird! Look for fat plump birth yellow-colored fat. You’ll notice the organic chickens look and feel better than the other options.

What about FREE RANGE chickens? Glad you asked. This is a snazzy label which doesn’t have any regulated backing. Each poultry farm can determine how much free range time a bird really gets. I do believe “free range” is better than your bottom line birds, but there’s no way to know for sure if that bird was truly free range of it just got a little time off to scratch in the yard for good behavior.

Only organic chicken is regulated! Organic means the birds are fed an organic diet with no antibiotics, growth drugs or freaky stuff. The birds live in more humane conditions with access to sunlight, fresh air, an organic pasture to go scratch in, and a minimum of 8 hours of darkness for sleep. "Beak trimming" (the standard practice in which farmers remove the beaks of birds in conventional farming and egg production) is not a common practice and slaughter comes later in life giving them more happy and healthy days on Earth.

So there you go. If you want to do the more sustainable thing, feel less guilty about eating an animal, and eat the most delicious product, go organic. Oh yeah, the same goes for TURKEY production too.

Have a happy and organic Thanksgiving y’all!

-G