Jamie Olivers Pulls the Curtains Up on Eggs: It’s Not A Pretty Picture for Baby Boy Chicks
June 2, 2008 · Print This Article
There’s nothing like a good hard dose of brutal reality to start the week.
Do you eat eggs for breakfast? (I don’t)
Do you eat things with eggs in them? (I do)
If you’re like the vast majority of people, you buy your eggs in a grocery store. Maybe you buy the cheap ones in the styrofoam container though if you’re reading this site it’s likely you dole out an extra buck or two for cage free organic eggs- but either way you slice it, you’re an egg buyer.
Those eggs are squeezed out by female chickens living in giant warehouse farms. Putting the ethical issues around that aside for the time, take a second and think about all those hundreds of millions of female chickens, all those little chicken vaginas squeezing out our eggs. Where did all the boy chickens go?
They’re killed.
The two more popular ways of culling male chicks are gassing and mastication. Gassing involved putting them in a little room and pumping inert gas in to drive out the oxygen. The chicks suffocate, sucky- but on the scale of things one of the less painful ways to go, at least compared to the other popular method of mastication which involves throwing the chicks into a big set of metal grinders where they are mashed up and sold as cattle feed. How would you like to have THAT job?
In this video, controversial British TV chef Jamie Olivers has the balls to confront the ugly truth about eating eggs- you have to do a lot of killing to get ‘em. Watch him gas some chicks.
Jamie Olivers is the same guy who slaughtered a baby lamb on his show. We need more of this. Vegetarians should love this guy- by flipping the hazy screen off that’s been blocking the hard truth behind eating meat, he’ll drive scads of people into the warm embrace of tofu, seiten, and TVP. If you’re going to eat meat you should at least see how it’s done- watch your animal of choice flop around as it bleeds out.
Or in the case of eating eggs- watch the little yellow peepers gasp as they suffocate to death.
Peep.
Photo credit: Flickr user [Royalty-free]
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You must be an idiot/cry baby with a lot of time on your hands.
@Steve And you are clearly an asshat fucktard with so much time on your hands that you make stupid comments on blogs you disagree with.
I raise chickens for pets. Our one male chick was raised to adulthood and given to a family aquantance for “stud” duties (or cock duties) for his hens. Hence, my organinc eggs have no male chick deaths associated with them. Would it make people feel better if the male chicks were fed to snakes, raptors, etc ALIVE rather than after the gassing process.
Basically the production of any food from an animal source ultimatelly involves the death of previously mentioned animal.
Those are the breaks.
Shea, I think your being a little hard on Steve, OK so he doesn’t get the point …but that ’s some hard language for a peace loving tree hugger like yourself…is it not?
@Marty I’m a peace loving treehugger, but I also don’t take crap from trolls like Steve. I love having them around, but will smack the crap out of them every time they pop up. Kind of like Wack-a-Mole.
@Conrad I’ve been looking into getting my own little brood of chickens. I agree with you 100%, my point was that I think more people should have a real understanding of what it takes to get an omelet to the plate in the morning. I would bet the majority of folks have no idea that the egg industry kills all their male chicks when they are still cute, fluffy, and yellow.
I am sorry, but chickens are bred for eating, which involves dying, and that is a fact of our lives…
Luke, if you can watch this and really don’t care, then, well - that’s you. The fact of the matter, though, is that many people don’t know this sort of thing is going on, and if they did, they might think a little more about where their food comes from.
Yes, humans eating meat - including chickens and their eggs - is a fact of life. But the way that we treat some of these animals during their short, sad lives before they end up on our tables is cruel and unnecessary. I think that we have a responsibility as the ‘most intelligent’ species on the planet to protect other species that share it with us. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we all need to stop eating meat (though I personally am a vegetarian) but it does mean that we should take responsibility for doing it in a humane way. That is, ‘humane’ in that we don’t treat them like inanimate objects and do at least give them a little respect before killing them. I’m not personally comfortable with the idea of an animal dying so that I can eat, even though there are plenty of other food sources out there.
I saw one of those ‘How It’s Made’ episodes on tv recently that showed chicks in a factory being hauled down conveyor belts, sifted, sorted, thrown around, and mishandled in the most disgusting ways. We as humans could do so much better, but we do it this way because it’s fast and convenient. It’s sad, in my opinion.
Good God I knew there was a reason I didn’t eat eggs. Though I do eat things with eggs in them, that’s just horrible. Is it just the corporate farms that do that? I’m assuming free-range wouldn’t. Right?
If it’s an operation bigger than a very small farm, even “free range” chicken farms have to cull their male chicks. It doesn’t matter if they are organic with DHA infused feed- the reality of the process means piles of dead baby male chicks.