China's chicken leaves sour taste in world’s mouth

China’s food production has been in the news quite a bit over the last few years, thanks to avian flu and most recently the melamine-tainted pet food and livestock feed scandal. As a result, the nation’s director of food safety has been sentenced to death, and other heads are likely to roll, so to speak.

The latest news to come out of the country has to do with dead chickens. An essay written by two Chinese scientists, Gaoming Jiang and Aimin Tang, in China Dialogue describes in detail how China’s egg and poultry industry has morphed over the last 20 or so years from mostly backyard free-range production into factory farming. Today, the country consumes nearly 5 billion chickens a year.

The authors discuss the usual aspects of factory farms—the filthy, crowded conditions, the battery cages that don’t allow birds to spread their wings or perform other natural behaviors, the excessive use of antibiotics, and the addition of hormones to animal feed. But they also discuss something that many readers will have never read about: what happens to the carcasses of chickens that die before slaughter?

According to Jiang and Tang, 80 percent of the chickens that die on farms—usually from stress or disease—end up in the human food chain. The dead birds are extremely cheap, costing just 0.4 to 0.6 yuan (US 5 cents to 7 cents) a kilogram, and sausage manufacturers and street vendors are eager to buy them.

And it’s not only dead birds that are sold to these producers, but also sick ones that are then slaughtered for human food, as well as livestock feed. Diseased chicken samples from a laboratory studying avian diseases, the authors write, are sold illegally to pig farmers for feed at 0.8 yuan (US 10 cents) per kilogram.

The public health dangers of this type of “recycling” are unknown, but scientists suspect that BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease) likely emerged because of feeding cows the ground-up bits of other cows. This practice isn’t confined to China, either. Factory farms there likely learned the practice from the United States, where producers feed their animals a range of unsavory ingredients, including feathers, cardboard, and chicken manure. Something to keep in mind as we criticize China for its own food safety woes...