Last week we talked a bit about making the best possible choices for the red meat proteins (wild game, beef, bison, pork, lamb, and goat) you choose to enjoy in your meal rotation.
Today lets cover quickly some key concepts regarding poultry, which for most of us purchasing poultry are talking about chicken and turkey (as opposed to harvesting wild birds – think wild turkeys, ducks, pheasants, geese, quail, and doves for example).
The objective here is to look for and consume pastured poultry (as opposed to CAFO poultry), though it’ll likely take a bit more effort to find than comparable options in the red meat arena.
Pasture-raised birds are so much more tasty and nutritious than their confined (CAFO) kin; folks tend to forget than most fowl are omnivorous, and CAFO operations in essence force feed birds a vegetarian (grain based) diet along with the flood of other unhealthy and in some instances downright offensive supplemental feed products, antibiotics, pesticides, and more.
We’d join the chorus of folks who suggest the very best option is finding a local producer with whom you can verify that birds are truly pasture-raised; they may be feed supplemental grains as well.
Chickens certified as organic by a mass producer are likely indeed fed organic grains but are most often not pastured; their vegetarian diet produces an inferior product compared to pasture-raised birds.
Buy whole chickens (if you never learned to cut one up, check out the video below) and use everything, including the organs, bones (chicken stock is a great thing to keep in the freezer), and render that delicious chicken fat.
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