Do You Care Where Your Chicken Comes From?

By Anthony Todd in Food on Jun 5, 2013 8:20PM

Let's face it - factory-farmed chicken can be a little bit scary. In an age where something like 2/3 of
store-bought chicken is contaminated with salmonella and other bacteria (and the USDA allows processing plants to continue operating when up to 20 percent of their output is contaminated), knowing where your meat comes from is more important than ever.

Enter this Kickstarter for BuyingPoultry.com. They're trying to create a comprehensive app and a website that take the guesswork out of buying sustainable meat. Every package these days has different buzzwords: free range, cage free, natural, sustainable, humanely-raised, vegetarian fed. What the heck does all of it mean? Does it mean anything? In some cases, no; our favorite to point out is that whenever a package boasts of hormone-free chicken, it's effectively saying nothing, as hormone use in chicken is illegal in the United States. But even we can't define all the different terms.

In addition, as more and more poultry producers attempt to set themselves apart from the pack, how can we keep track of them all? You can't visit every single farm, and farm pictures on websites can often be misleading. That's what this project is trying to do. They want to create a buying guide that lists every producer, gather real information and decodes all of the buzzwords, giving you the real story about the birds that go onto the table.

Check out the video and the campaign description. This looks like a genuinely useful project for anyone who cares about what they eat.