Is that chicken, just chicken?

Because of some health issues (fibromyalgia for one), I’ve recently been working on my diet. I’m trying to eat more “natural” foods, as close to ‘off the farm’ as possible. It’s made me check food labels even more carefully. Sometimes the ingredients are kind of what I figured, and other times what I read on labels comes as a complete surprise.

Case in point… chicken. I was looking at labels on packages of frozen chicken breasts, figuring it’d say chicken. Period.

WRONG!

I discovered the chicken is injected with broth. I looked at lesser known brands first, then I checked out Tyson. Didn’t matter. Both were injected with up to 15% broth/salt water. And getting fresh chicken instead of frozen doesn’t help. It’s injected with the broth solution also.

When I looked on the web to see if I could find out exactly what is in the broth, I never did get an exact list of ingredients, but I did find out a whole lot of other stuff.

It seems Tyson says their company injects broth in chicken because “customers like it.” It supposedly makes the chicken more tender.

But here’s the thing. Tyson sells chicken to Walmart. Walmart wanted packages of chicken to be even weights, like their 3-pound bags of frozen chicken breasts. Well, guess what? Chickens don’t all produce the exact same weight breasts, so either the chicken company has to put in extra chicken to ensure there is at least 3 pounds, and lose money because there’s some “free” chicken in there… or they inject a lesser amount of chicken with broth until it weighs an even 3 pounds.

Okay, if they want to inject the chicken with broth, and it’s labeled they have, that’s their choice. The problem is the USDA allows them to label this broth-injected chicken as “100% all natural chicken.” What???

Some chicken companies quit selling to Walmart when it insisted on even weight packages because they wished to keep their “natural” label and couldn’t afford to lose money by putting extra chicken in the package. Naturally, they’re upset that the USDA now allows the natural label to be put on broth-injected chicken.

These companies lose out because a) they lost their market with Walmart, and b) now they lose the uniqueness of their labeled chicken, because other companies can use the label even though their product is not chicken, just chicken.

The consumer loses out on this deal because a) they are paying the same price for the broth in the chicken as they pay for the chicken itself, b) there is an increased amount of sodium in the chicken which most if not all consumers positively do NOT need, and c) where do you find just chicken, plain chicken????

What a rip-off!