Big Chicken = Big Lies

I'm sure you've seen the ads; Tyson chicken is antibiotic free!

Great news! You can now buy mass produced "chickens" without the fear of consuming harmful animal antibiotics...



...well, not really. And it looks like Tyson just got called on it by a Federal Court.

In a law suit brought by competitors Sanderson and Perdue Farms, Tyson must pull its multimillion dollar ad campaign that is, "entered on the claim that its chickens are raised without antibiotics" within the next two weeks, according to a WaPo article.

Tyson's defense lies in the claim that, "injecting eggs with antibiotics did not undermine the "raised without antibiotic" label because the term "raised" is understood to cover the period that begins with hatching".

You see, Tyson can get away with this because they inject the antibiotic "ionophores", days before the eggs hatch, a practice that Tyson officials say is, "common" within the industry.

When it comes down to it, the real questions here are that of supply versus demand. Tyson uses these practices (industrial farming with the use of antibiotics to raise more chickens) because they see a market with near unlimited demand. Give it to them cheap and plentiful and they'll buy it by the ton. Again, I hate to go completely Michael Pollan here, but at what point do we look at this and say this isn't good?

Yes, Tyson is at fault here for misleading the public to believe that their product was completely safe, but we as the public might want to think twice about participating in the system in which companies can knowingly sell us such an unnatural, unhealthy product.