Jamie Olivers Pulls the Curtains Up on Eggs: It’s Not A Pretty Picture for Baby Boy Chicks

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]

Bush Isn’t the Only Leader Stupidly Stuck on Oil; UK Chancellor is, Too

The food crisis and pressure from consumers about high gas prices as led George W. Bush to once again call for drilling in what few pristine wilderness areas America has left, to the yawns and rolling eyes of thousands. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.

Americans are undoubtedly used to Bush pushing the oil agenda whenever possible, even when it’s totally inappropriate and mind-bogglingly stupid to do so. I mean, this is the guy who will go down in history as the worst thing that ever happened to our country, so it’s no wonder we’re not shocked when he says something dumb. Somehow, though, we expect more from Britain. Maybe it’s those accents that make them all sound like professors (except for the Cockney version, sorry) but especially in a post-Tony Blair era, we’d hope for a bit more intelligence than what our country’s leader displays.

Alas, here’s what UK Chancellor Alistair Darling told the BBC recently:

One of the big priorities has got to be for governments all over the world to try and get oil production increased, and also to tackle this problem that was pushing up food prices that was diverting corn into biofuels in a way that is not sustainable.

Meanwhile, here’s a quote about oil from Obama:

Change is an energy policy that doesn’t rely on buddying up to the Saudi royal family and then begging them for oil, an energy policy. Change is an energy policy that puts a price on pollution and makes the oil companies invest their record profits in clean, renewable sources of energy that will create millions of new jobs and leave our children a safer planet. That’s what change is, Iowa.

Is it 2009 yet?

Link [Celsias] + [Gristmill]
Photo credit: Flickr user Boris from Vienna