2096 Icken

The sky is falling with chicken again. First with a big food scare involving salmonella and Foster Farms chicken. At least so the CDC thunk.

But only kind of thunk. Because one of the victims of the federal shutdown was the Centers for Disease Control. Scientists there were furloughed, so no in-depth analysis of food borne illness was being carried out. The labs were closed.

The same labs normally used to determine the point source of a food poisoning outbreak. All anyone knew was it was probably due to salmonella contamination in a California Foster Farms facility. Foster Farms asserted salmonella was now quite common in chickens and it was the fault of whoever cooked it. Adequate cooking would have killed the bacteria. 

I believe they also said something like, "So there." Or "neener neener."

Then there was the other chicken news story. A group of scientists decided to analyze a chicken nugget to determine its components. They got some from a fast food restaurant and fired up the microscope. 

Turns out the nuggets contained only 50% chicken muscle tissue. The rest was fat, nerve, and blood vessel tissue. Oh my goodness! Nerve tissue! Blood vessels! Fat! You mean I'm not just eating the muscles of some poor dead chicken, I'm eating its nerves and blood vessels too?? 

Talk about putting the ick in chicken.

Good grief. What the heck do you think is in your average cut of beef? Muscle tissue doesn't exist alone. Even the finest steak is interlaced with thousands of tiny blood vessels and capillaries. Not to mention nerve connections to keep it twitching and flexing when it’s alive.

And fat? Had chicken soup when you were sick recently? It's full of chicken fat, the universal food. Loved by every creature from kitty-cats to… salmonella. 

America, ya gotta love it.