The Meat Bird Decision

This is a repost from an article I wrote on a blog from another time.  I’ve had enough inquiries about the photo I have posted on flickr that I decided to resurrect it.
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I cut into the breast on the left side of the bird, feeling a little more resistance than expected, flip the meat to the side, and spotted something very unusual. Is that a leaf?
Having just spent a full day slaughtering chickens, I’d reacquainted myself with every part of the bird. The parts that you don’t see in a grocery store were as familiar as the shoelaces on my favorite red sneakers. I’d smelled guts, butts, and that chickeny chickeny smell that you just don’t get from any other animal. One of my favorite (yes, it’s weird to have a “favorite”) part of eviscerating a chicken is opening the crop and the gizzard. I love seeing that the animals raised were eating real food. Finding a bird full of grass, worms, and bugs makes me feel like we’re doing something right. I get used to the sight of Western Buttercup leaves, as I’m splitting open chickens.
Day two, I’m standing over a cutting board breaking down the meat we intend to consume over the next year. Hindquarters in that pile, breasts in that, wings over there, and the carcasses, largely stripped of the big bits of meat go into the stock pot. After a few birds, either eviscerating or butchering, I drop into the rhythm of the work. My hands move more deftly than they’re typically capable. I start to find the tendons and separate the feet from the body in two quick moves, instead of fumbling around. The knife seems to know exactly where to turn at the bottom of the breast meat, just before the ribs. I get confident; a really good feeling for something oft deemed antiquated.
Toward the end of today’s butchery session, something interrupted the flow of my work. There was a little more resistance than usual… then, after I exposed the breast meat… green. GREEN!? How did a leaf get … into the meat? I look closer. As if a play on “Green Eggs and Ham,” this really is a swath of green meat, right in the middle of this broiler’s breast. Cutting down the other side, I see exactly the same thing. Green meat. WHAT… THE… HELL!? Is it spoiled? The birds have spent the night in our freebie fridge on the porch. Did it fail to maintain temperature? Did it rot overnight? Nervous, I take a sniff. Nothing. Not spoiled?! What foul fowl is this?
Washed the hands and took a quick gander at the magical internets and, after reading several alarmist blog comments (“OMG, MY WHOLE FOODS CHICKEN BREASTS ARE ROTTEN!! MY DINNER PARTY IS RUINED!”), I found references to Oregon Muscle Disease. Oregon Muscle Disease, also known as Green Muscle Disease and Deep Pectoral Myopathy, is most commonly found in heavy meat chickens. I was able to find a few descriptions of the condition and one or two that discussed the cause at length:

It has been estimated that, in turkeys and broilers, the supracoracoid increases in weight by about 20% during activity for the huge blood flow into the muscle. The increased size of the muscle is so marked in the heavy breeds that the muscle becomes strangulated and ischemic, because the increased pressure within the muscle occludes the blood vessels and causes a necrosis of the muscle […]. The resultant necrotic muscle has a characteristic hemorrhagic appearance, with a swollen reddish-brown lesion (early developing stage) that later becomes green and shrunken and then pale green (old stage), depending upon the time of induction of the vigorous wing exercise […]
(The Occurrence of Deep Pectoral Myopathy in Roaster Chickensfrom the journal “Poultry Science”)

These chickens are bred to maximize the size of the breast muscles; American consumers have learned to expect tidy heat-shrink wrapped packages of huge chicken breasts. Producers, processors and retailers are eager to serve the demand with the highest margin cut of the bird. In intensive poultry operations, meat birds are raised in large warehouse-like coops. The birds are kept in almost complete darkness to minimize flight/flapping instincts and the occurrence of deep pectoral myopathy (DPM). Our birds are kept outdoors and on pasture: certainly more likely to flap.
After a few minutes of surfing the poultry information superhighway, I went back to parting out the rest of this years’ meat birds. Left with thoughts of what I’d learned, I reconsidered a question that’s become quite common, since we started the farm… “are we doing the right thing?” We’re raising our own food (plus some for others) and are trying to “do the right thing” in every decision we make. I’ve commented on our decisions to let chickens “behave like chickens” and this years’ flock was most certainly allowed to behave like it wanted. Some of that behavior included… well… flapping and, apparently, some of that flapping led to “strangulation” of the pectoral muscle. While all the research I’ve been able to find states that it “does not appear to affect the general health of the bird,” it can’t be pleasant. So I’m left with a query and a quandary; our decision to raise the chicken we like to eat in the way we think is “right” has resulted in something most decidedly “not right.”
In commercial production, incidence of DPM is as high as 1-2% (higher in “free range” plants) and us Americans buy almost all our meat parted out. Our addiction to ‘boneless skinless chicken breasts’ means that most people are unlikely to ever see bright green chicken meat; processors find it and discard it during deboning. So, given 1 bird of the 33 birds we slaughtered this year had this issue, it’s not surprising that we had one… but does that make it “OK?” Nothing else about commercial chicken production is OK with us, why would this be?
In our quest to provide food for ourselves and those around us, we’ve taken chickens with breasts so big that they’d be well suited for Hollywood and thrown them into the forest to “behave naturally.” It’s a case of doing the right thing with the wrong bird. The Cornish Cross flock from this year (and certainly their Jumbo brethren from last) may just be the wrong birds for us.
If nothing else, this has spurred our interest in finding a heavy meat bird that’s well suited to this environment. We’ve discussed finding a bird that we can sustain-ably (both meanings of the word) raise in the way that we think is “right.”
Oh, and in case you find green meat in a “free range” roaster, from our farm or another, it isn’t spoiled, it isn’t poisonous or bad to eat… in fact it may actually be more “green” than you’d thought.
This last winter, I decided to raise “meat birds” alongside our flock of egg laying chickens. We’ve always been aware of our food sources and since we started raising chickens, I’ve become increasingly reluctant to purchase chicken from grocery stores. Even the ‘upper crust’ retailers including PCC Natural Markets and Whole Foods (affectionately and accurately called Whole Paycheck) who tend to carry products claiming to be natural, organic, free-range, pastured, massaged, and pampered couldn’t assuage my guilt. I knew how our “egg birds” were treated, with table scraps and forage, wandering wherever the bugs and slugs took them. I couldn’t convincingly conjure that image to match even the boutique brands of butcher-wrapped breasts or thighs. Sure, some are better than others… but they’re still raising thousands of birds. Scale and cost always have trade-offs.
It’s worth a brief aside on my perspective on raising animals, commercially, as pets, for byproducts, or for personal consumption. In the past few years, there have been vast numbers books written encouraging people to be more aware of what they eat. Several of them, including the works of poster boy Michael Pollan, talk about the buzzwords, laws, politics, marketing, and myths behind the meat we buy. Most of what I’ve read reinforces my motto. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but it works for me.
I strive to provide a situation where the animal can behave the way it wants to behave.
Rephrased, this aids in my decisions about what I eat: “was this animal allowed to behave the way it wants to behave? The way it would without people here?”
If you’re eating a chicken, did it freely roam and scratch the soil for bugs? If you’re going to spread chevre on a piece of toast, was it milked from a goat that wandered and grazed on a variety of foods? Was it allowed to climb on rocks or stumps?
This more than anything else cuts through much of the complexity of the decisions we have to make about animal treatment. This question, ultimately, is why our freezer if full of our chickens. Research into the producers whose chicken is available in retail around us left me uncomfortable with the answer to that question. In the best cases, the answer was inconclusive. In others, it was deceptive. Most labels follow the “letter of the law” and use phrases that conjure sunny grass filled pastures with animals frolicking free and grazing on dandelion greens and wildflowers. The “letter of the law” allows for some pretty loose interpretations of the words “free range” and allows for liberal use of unregulated words like “natural, pasture raised, and antibiotic free.” While the picturesque scenery and accompanying language on the label is nice, it probably bears little resemblance to the warehouse where that McChicken was raised.
So… we decided to raise chickens for food. In another post, I’ll delve into some of our experiences.