If you’re a chicken in America, you’re a commodity. Not an animal. Because of that, us humans put you through an assembly-line-like style of living.
You’re caged in front of a buffet of grain and its sole job is to feed and fatten you up.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Because as long as you get through to the other side of the assembly line, you get to be food, and we get to make money.
The essence of the American conventional system is to take the most reductive path for food. In this case, as long as the bird doesn’t die, it’s fine.
Don’t get me wrong, farm animals are food, they should be treated like food. But that’s where me and the industrial farming system’s ideas split. I treat my food well because that means that I’m treated well afterwards. A stronger immune system, an un-inflammed gut, and more nutrition per bite.
The entire idea of animal husbandry is to tend to an animal's needs and it’ll do you and your loved ones some good in return.
That’s why chickens should eat rocks. Yes. Rocks are a healthy part of a chickens’ complete breakfast.
Birds don’t handle food in the same way humans do. We put food inside of us in order to break it down, but poultry can’t do that because they don’t have teeth.
So, everything they break down, they break down externally. That is, they peck at it with their beak until it’s the right size for them to swallow. Once it goes down the hatch, it goes down whole.
So, rocks are considered a “digestive aid”, described by Dave Perozzi, a farmer who routinely feeds his chickens and turkeys curated rocks. Literally rocks in a feed bin in the same shape as the bowl you put your dog chow in. He says:
“As far as quantity, they seem to know what they need. I don’t know the limits on size. If they dig up a big stone in the field, they leave it behind, so there must be a limit of what will be comfortable for them to swallow.”
The technical term for these swallowed rocks is “Gastroliths”. They are digestive accessories.
The University of California Museum of Paleontology says:
“Many birds swallow sharp pebbles and grit and hold these rocks in a muscular part of their stomachs called the gizzard. The gizzard contracts and grinds the gastroliths against each other and against the food that the bird has swallowed (remember that birds have to swallow each bite whole). The rocks grind down the food — essentially, the bird is using the gastroliths to chew the food in its gizzard — and the rocks grind each other down, too. Eventually the sharp, jagged chunks of rock become smooth, rounded pebbles, and they are not much good for grinding anymore. So the bird will vomit them out and find new, sharp rocks to swallow.”
How cool!
Industrial chicken is indeed being fed a diet that completely ignores true husbandry.
Could you imagine the digestive issues you’d face if you had to figure out how to digest your food without teeth?
I mean, gastroliths are literally teeth (perhaps we call them stomach teeth? No. silly idea) for birds. Well, the conventional feeding systems do grind up their feed pretty granular so I’m sure there’s no need for rocks, but just because we take the necessity of rock eating away from the chicken doesn’t mean it lives a better life.
I’m sure it’s quite the contrary, actually.
I have a gallbladder, it stores bile and helps me digest fat. It’s a digestive accessory. If I cut fat completely from my diet, (I’m sure I’ll observe a lot of problems, but) I’ll make my gallbladder virtually obsolete. I’d be discarding the notion of this vital digestive action being essential to my health.
I believe we’re observing a similar ail when we neglect the essentialness of vital activities of our chickens— we gotta let them eat rocks!
100 or so years ago, this whole rock-eating thing would’ve probably been considered common knowledge here in America.
We are so far removed from food that it scares me. This “Food ignorance” has been an ‘ole reliable tool on Big Food’s tool belt to fool us into buying into their ideas.
• Drink milk for strong bones
• Eat low-fat to be skinny
• Count your calories to stay a healthy weight
• Cereal is a part of a complete breakfast
• Make sure grains are the greatest part of your diet
• Puts “protein” on the package to sell the idea that it can actually boost your protein
These are just a few examples of completely fabricated ideas disseminated down from Big Food companies to capture your dollar.
No community has quite been plagued by Food Ignorance like that of low-income.
Big Food companies actually depend on low-income food ignorance to fatten up their bottom line.
If low-food-secure communities had deeper knowledge of food— an understanding that could inform their decisions, then they’d have the first arm of what it takes to erect a better food system that counts them in. If low-income communities' ideals around food can be positively shifted over time, then Big Food companies can be undermined— ceasing population-wide manipulation.
Low-food-secure neighborhoods don’t believe they can afford high nutrition, which is where the lie begins. Remember, there was a time when “high nutrition” was the only option. The poor ate the same pasture-raised meat as the rich. Albeit, given different cuts of meat or different animals altogether, but no one ate nutritionally inferior food due to industrialization.
Big Food has erected a new kind of food. One that is solely responsible for partitioning low-income folks from the rest of society and suffocating them with so much junk food that it forms a virtual glass dome around them. They believe there’s nothing they can do to access better food.
Well, high nutrition is way more attainable than even I realize at times, it’s only a matter of education, exposure and distribution.
That’s why we’re throwing the Real Food Rally in the heart of one of the most notorious food insecure communities in Chicago.
The Real Food Rally is a novel food drive that bridges sustainable farmers to food insecure communities. Through distributing food sourced directly from local organic farms and planting fruit and vegetable seeds with children, we seek to uphold education and exposure, ultimately inspiring possibilities and empowering greater food autonomy.
You can give to help make the Real Food Rally possible
(I can not WAIT until you guys see the impact you’re making)
Keep your wits about cha’
Ain’t nuthin’ here generated or written by AI.
Best,
Johnny