What is wrong with the chicken? (A question about food processing that may invite unpleasant answers)

Well, it is quite common practice to pump cheap meat full of water, to increase weight, and thusly, price.
So I would not be surprised in the least, if that is the case here as well.

Hormones and water. Buy local from a farmer or a farmers market. Many won’t use chemicals in the food or pesticides, many are 100% free range, too. I also noticed.

I don’t know about the meat not being firm or seeming to be pumped with water (though I feel like I’ve heard of that being a practice at some point)...

But I do know about “white striping” in chicken meat, which you might find interesting, too. It’s likely due to practices of factory farming and high demand of chicken—broiler chickens raised today grow much larger and much faster than they once did. It’s apparently caused a muscular disorder that shows up in chickens (a consequence of the too-fast growth rate). It can the fat content of the meat by as much as 224%, and noticeably reduce the quality of the meat—making it tougher, and in my own opinion worse tasting, too). Some articles that talk about. The articles all say more or less the same general things, I just figured it wouldn’t hurt to post multiple sources. Some have better photos to demonstrate the phenomenon than others.

Anecdotally, I feel like I’m able to tell the difference in quality between breasts without the white striping versus those with it (without, they seem much more tender and flavorful)... I had been feeling like chicken just didn’t taste as good as I remembered it tasting, and that I couldn’t stop over-cooking it to the point of toughness no matter what I did, and so I just stopped making it… Then I read about white striping, scoured the chicken at my store until I found a good package; it was the best chicken I’d had in a long time. From my own experience, though, most—if not all—packages of chicken meat have breasts that are visibly affected by this. At least, that’s true where I get groceries. It takes some time to find a package that’s clean… So the “National Chicken Council’s” claim that it’s only 5–10% of breasts that are affected seems dubious… (My own experience makes me believe the University of Arkansas & Texas A&M’s study, which found 96% of their sample group affected).

So, not the same thing wrong with chicken that you noticed, but another thing that is going wrong with it… Chicken’s not seeming very appetizing!

I and some others noticed some awful chicken showing up in Washington state some years ago. I’ve switched to getting free-range chicken.

They artificially plump the chickens. Its a plumper! Its a plumper!

In Northern California, Mary’s Free Range chicken doesn’t have that problem, and is widely available.

I would stay away from Foster Farms, the local big factory chicken producer.

The old chicken is still out there, you just have to look for the stuff that’s marketed as “natural”, “hormone free”, or “free range”. Unfortunately it’s about double the price here, but it’s the difference between meat we don’t want to eat and meat we do.

So our store would carry a couple of options

bargain chicken
base store brand
natural chicken

You can even tell from the photos that there’s a difference there. Your store probably has something similar.

It’s quite disturbing actually. Breast meat became very popular in the last 20 years, plus add that commercial farmers want their chickens to grow quickly, so as jellies have mentioned above, chickens have been bred and shot up with hormones that make their breasts very large. Supposedly, some chickens have a hard time standing up They are so out of whack. Their center of gravity is off I guess, or it’s a physical strain on the spine maybe. It’s wrong in my opinion. It’s abusive. It’s one thing to make a fantastic apple like a honey crisp by crossing apples, but to alter a living animal like this is really questionable in my opinion.

From the day the chick is hatched it is fed a special hormone enhanced food. I have seen deeply disturbing documentaries of baby chicks with their breasts so large that they can’t even stand up. Due to their size, they are slaughtered younger than they used to be in order to get them to the table faster. Some companies do inject the meat with water to make it look more appealing.

I don’t think that this practice is limited to California as I live on the East coast & we are seeing similar patterns here. Although not food related, I have noticed that my preferred brand of toilet paper has chosen to cut the width of the roll by nearly an inch. It’s the same number of squares but the squares are significantly smaller!!!

The other one that fries me & has been done for a while is ice cream. A half gallon of ice cream us now ¾ Quart. One of my local stores only sells pints that cost the same as the ¾ quart. So they are conditioning us to lose the ¾ quart & still pay the same price.

Thanks, all, for the informative answers. I looked at all the links too. As I feared, the explanations aren’t very palatable, but they do point to a solution.

For some time I thought the unappetizing character of the meat was due to freezing. I’m actually glad to know that I could freeze fresh chicken and not have it turn out like this.