Gold 'n Plump Chicken

That was what the big sign said on the side of the barn as I drove past during the business trip of the previous post.  I believe I was on the Minnesota side of the river at this point.

The name kind of made me shudder.  I realize that is a bit presumptuous.  You know, "don't judge a book by it's cover" kind of thing.  But I feel if it were a small, sustainable, truly natural family-owned chicken farm, it wouldn't need to resort to a catchy play on words, like using "Gold 'n" instead of "golden".  And, to reference yet again my often-referenced movie bible "Food Inc", this was just the type of chicken farm they profile: a big, long sheet metal barn with just a few small air vents on the side.  No sunlight was getting through that sucker.  I wondered how many chickens were crammed inside, and how many dead bretheren they were having to step over to eat their corn and soy-based and who-knows-what-else feed.

(I did want to make a comment about how I saw no chickens outside, then remembered it was about 15 degrees.  Never mind.  I prefer my boneless, skinless chicken breast frostbite-free.)

Anyhoo, since seeing that barn I felt it was necessary to research the company to make sure my knee-jerk assumptions weren't just knee-jerk assumptions.  Being the kind of 21st century gal I am, I went immediately to the internet.

At first glance it looks just fine.  They profile the honest, hard working American families who contribute to the Gold 'n Plump family.  The tagline under "Story" says "Chicken done the right way, not the easy way.  With only the best care.  Meaning nothing added you don't want.  No shortcuts.  No compromises. Just wholesome, delicious chicken.  From our farmers to your family's table."

That doesn't sound too bad, right?  They care.

And truthfully, I do believe they care.  They're not specifically in the business to poison people.  They want to make a chicken that tastes good so people will continue to want to buy their chicken.  But tell me- what chicken company wouldn't?  So how do you tell the ones who really raise their chickens in a fully Au Naturale manner from the ones that cram their chickens in a windowless barn, feeding them stuff they weren't biologically designed to digest, and pumped full of antibiotics?

You do more research.

I certainly am not going to claim to be an expert on the full operations of this particular company.  To do so would be slanderous and probably a bit misleading.  But I wanted to find out as much as I could, especially when a number of miles down the road I passed a big factory-like processing plant that announced they were the feed manufacturer for Gold 'n Plump Chicken.  The fact that there is one big feed manufacturer for all the chickens- when the farms are supposedly small and family run- was my first clue it wasn't all good.

My second clue was from an article I found about a young entrepreneur who was also doing a social good with all the food waste around the Twin Cities area.  Basically he started his business by driving around to all the bakeries in the area who make fresh baked goods daily, picking up whatever they hadn't sold, and carting it away to his processing plant to turn it into feed.  As his business grew, the types of food waste he picked up expanded to ice cream, potato chips, crackers, vegetables, cups of pudding, and more.  It does seem like a great way to recycle, actually.  Otherwise the food would be thrown out and many resources would have been wasted.  In any case, a number of companies signed on to use his feed including-- you guessed it-- Gold 'n Plump.  That means that the chickens they sell are themselves eating a combination of old, stale donuts, ice cream, pudding, and who knows what else. "Nothing added you don't want to eat"?  Personally, I wouldn't want to eat stale donuts as part of my dinner- it doesn't take a genius to figure out what would quickly happen to my overall health.  So logically, I don't want to eat their chickens.  How healthy can they be with a diet like that?  Sorry, Gold 'n Plump.

The lesson of this story?  Know what you eat.  Don't believe catchy tag lines.

P.S.  The happy ending to this tale:  About 20 minutes down the road, there was a simple sign hammered into the ground pointing the way to an organic chicken farm.  It made me smile.