The hidden dietary risks of keeping chickens cannot be ignored

Lately, the image of my grandmother slaughtering chickens in the backyard keeps surfacing in my mind. She raised the chickens herself and used them to worship our ancestors at the Dragon Boat Festival, Chinese New Year, and tomb-sweeping days, and we got to enjoy a good meal in the process. The slaughtering was certainly bloody and messy, but because the goal was to make the chicken both delicious and safe to eat, the whole process was handled with extreme care, with nothing wasted, so that the chicken's life sustained ours. This was the shortest possible food supply chain. Yet this safest of eating patterns no longer fits the modern way of life, and we have gradually grown used to not watching the slaughter, lest it stir up moral unease. Over the past month, have those chickens in the market that look so clean and flawless also come from the hands of people who care about us?

Under the banner of protecting the health of consumers and vendors alike, the policy banning the slaughter of live poultry in traditional markets makes this war against small-scale chicken farmers and manual slaughtering businesses seem entirely justified. The Council of Agriculture does not shy away from stating that the goal of this ban is to integrate the chicken supply chain into a simple vertical system of "poultry meat production and sales - slaughterhouse - vendor" (see the opinion page of the China Times, 2013/5/30). This food system, proclaimed to be "modernized," is in its inner essence "industrialized" - that is, it reorganizes our existing food supply culture around the concept of a "factory production line." Once this simple upstream-and-downstream supply chain has been consolidated, "control" becomes easier to exercise, and accountability becomes simpler to pin down - that is, it becomes easier for the state to find someone to step down and bow in apology.

For consumers, can such control really guarantee food safety? That deserves a big question mark, and it is also the source of the confusion and anxiety in our current eating lives. Industrialized food production has long been sending warnings to humanity: from mad cow disease to toxic starch, none of it is unrelated to the industrialization of overall agricultural production and food culture. Industry pursues the maximization of cost efficiency, so we can imagine that a high-capital electrical slaughterhouse might resort to a series of measures to cut costs and expand output - for example, reducing staff numbers, repetitive overtime slaughtering work, and externalizing pollution. Although this is only a hypothesis, it is quite possible that behind the clean electrically slaughtered chicken we see lies a cruel, cold, and filthy production truth. Furthermore, the problem of bacterial growth on animal carcasses after slaughter, as transport distances and times lengthen, may well become the next food safety issue.

Many of the food contamination incidents that have occurred in European and American countries in recent years were mostly caused by centralized production, centralized processing, and long-distance transport of food, with the problems occurring in places consumers cannot see. Because operators are under pressure to cut corners and reduce costs, slaughterhouses and food processing plants have been the main sites of bacterial and viral infection over the past twenty years, and because these plants have grown ever larger, a single incident can easily have a huge impact. The UK's public health laboratory service once estimated that as much as 30% of frozen chicken contains salmonella, which, if not thoroughly cooked, is high enough to cause illness. Unhygienic meat usually originates from the environment of these large-scale slaughterhouses, and the most common problem is carcasses being contaminated by excrement when the intestines suddenly rupture. Even though every slaughterhouse is staffed with inspectors, problems still keep occurring all the same.

Back to Taiwan, China, we once had a food production and supply system suited to our own food culture, including the raising of diverse chicken breeds and decentralized processing; only such transparency guaranteed that the meat consumers bought was processed in a relatively humane and clean way. Yet the current ban on live poultry slaughter, which clearly favors large factories, acts here like an "entry barrier": these regulations require large capital investment to meet, which restricts small producers, while consumers at large will believe the regulations are justified and accept and support them without doubt. When small-scale and diversified farming models collapse and poultry and livestock production is forced to concentrate, even if food production and supply become simplified and easy to control, this model, which violates the laws of nature, instead creates a breeding ground in which flu viruses can rapidly mutate and evolve, harboring even more food safety risks.

From the plasticizer to the toxic starch incidents, it has already been shown that the state is hard-pressed to defend against food safety problems. Faced with "inspected and certified hygienic poultry meat products" bearing the state's guarantee, we cannot help but still doubt how much trust it can offer consumers. National regulations should be drafted carefully to protect genuine consumer safety, rather than being a hasty patch that glosses over the root of the problem or even creates an even less safe food production environment. In today's society, as consumers we can probably no longer leave the issue of food safety entirely to the state most of the time. If we form close connections and mutual support with the people who provide our food, perhaps food safety, culture, and the industry will have a chance to survive.