Keep Your Arsenic Off My Dinner

It's time for yet another food segment here on Scrimpalicious. Today, we're going to talk about chicken.

Specifically, we're going to talk about how the FDA recently admitted that grocery store chicken contains small amounts of arsenic.

I have a few questions after reading the above-linked article on ABC.

I'm happy to hear that Pfizer agreed to pull the offending product. I'm glad to know that it's "only" a little carcinogenic poison in the meat that I buy to feed my family.

What I am not happy with is finding yet another piece of evidence that food in America is no safer now than it was a hundred years ago when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. I'm not happy knowing that people are adding dangerous things to our food supply without being sure, and I mean really sure, that it's safe.

Food Renegade also makes the excellent point that the arsenic being fed to these chickens is, according to ABC news, safe because the chickens are mostly excreting it. What does that mean? It means that the arsenic that those chickens are eating is being leached into soil, dumped into rivers, turned into fertilizer--oh, and ground up and mixed with the feed given to cows and pigs.

People ask me sometimes why we're so picky about where we buy our groceries.

This is why.