Chicken feed
No, not some kind of rural RSS, but the stuff you put in chicken to get eggs out.
We almost didn’t get the chickens today, because I cocked (sic) up buying the feed. Allow me to explain.
I assumed that the choice would be Organic vs non-organic. Wrong.
It turns out that the cheapest feed will be non-organic GM pellets. It will most likely contain Hi-pro soya, which is some kind of hight protein soya with the oil removed. The oil is removed with a solvent - hexane - which is a petrochemical byproduct. Hexane is carcinogenic, and a residue stays in the hi-pro soya. This ultimately ends up in the eggs (allegedly). You can pretty much guarantee that ANY eggs you get, free range or otherwise (unless they are organic) will contain hi-pro soya.
Anyway…. I didn’t know this until I looked up the ingredients of the stuff I bought from Scats* yesterday. Obviously I do not want to be eating possibly carcinogenic eggs.
They also put a variety of other chemicals into feed - most notably something to make the yolks look more yellow.
After a bit of driving around I eventually found Marriages feed, which is mostly organic and does not contain nasty hi-pro. Phew, dodged a petrochemical bullet there.
Aside from the scary thought that we have all been eating potentially nasty eggs all these years, does it not make you feel a bit angry at just how fucked around our food supply is? It makes me pretty bloody angry. It also shows that ‘organic’ can mean a great deal more than grown by hippies
*Scats Country Stores are one of the amazing things they don’t tell you about in the cities. They sell everything, including animal feed, clothes, DIY stuff and hats. They also sell pig oil, which is for dry scaly pigs. I had to ask them. You cannot walk past a tin marked ‘pig oil’ without finding out.
Written by exmonkey on June 17th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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