To think that if you cannot afford free range chicken/turkey meat and eggs...

[LolaTheShowgirl]

...then don't buy at all?

I mean the suffering these birds go through in cramped, dirty sheds is unbelievable. There is usually no natural light and the birds are usually ill before they're culled.

If you can stomach it, please look at these:
WARNING: NOT NICE PICTURES!
HERE

That's bloody ridiculous if I may say so. It's more than a diet. It's also a form of medication so surely it should be covered.

And I'm pretty sure it'd cost them less to finance that than to have to treat your dd every time she has a seizure. It's madness.

Not where the NHS is involved certainly.

Perhaps on another thread then.

Animals don't have souls.

What on earth has that got to do with the price of thighs? What a weird argument.

It's all about standards. Standards of decent food available to people which includes a humane method of animal husbandry.

But the supermarkets know that most people are willing to buy and eat shit food so they supply the shittest, cheapest food they can at the cheapest price. That includes caged birds which have a crap life.

How on earth do you think they get them to big enough size so fast? Lovely roast hormones anyone? Scrummy! But if people can't see that buying decent meat does benefit them then that really really is up to them.

And one can't even say that it's a free market economy given the stranglehold those big five have on their suppliers.

Unfortunately, farm animals don't just suffer a bit. They suffer an awful lot. It's crap but I just don't see how it's going to change. Ever. I mean, look how long it's taken for the supermarkets to introduce reuseable carrier bags? It's not exactly hard, is it? And the consumer certainly wasn't interested bringing their own bags.

Has anyone ever actually checked what God says about animals having souls? And were there any reliable witnesses?

I reckon St Francis of Assisi would NOT be impressed by Xenia's line of argument.

Let's not forget that those talking about buying free range and showing respect to the chickens are still eating them.

I wonder if the chickens would appreciate the difference.

thats not the point though, onagar - the point is that you want the animal not to have been treated cruelly during its life.

Whether or not you have the right to kill it is a whole different argument.

Agree with Hope's post.

If I were a chicken I would appreciate the difference!

Nobody "needs" to eat chicken once a week. If we all ate meat twice or three a week, as our more sensible predecessors did, given all the different meat you can choose from, you'd only need one or two portions of chicken per person per month.

And my biggest bugbear of all. FGS people, if you care about value for money so much stop buying packs of ready-prepared portions, especially chicken breasts (vastly overrated IMO). Even the cheap versions are ridiculously expensive compared with jointing a chicken or two yourself.

Two pedantic points:

1. The cheap chickens that some people eat are called broiler chickens, not battery chickens. I suspect the poor battery ones go for pet food.

2. We are not talking about "normal" priced chicken versus expensive. We're talking about "normal" priced chicken versus artificially cheap, mass-produced sh*te.

Do people actually eat meat every day?

We eat pretty well and maintain a high animal protein diet without eating actual meat everyday. Not that I object to eating meat everyday but it hasn't actually come up.

Could be Riven, but I can leg press 162kgs and do my bicep curls at 36kgs (each). Wouldn't want to try that sort of behaviour without a lot of protein in my diet . Obviously not everyone does these sorts of silly things though.

15kgs?!!?!? Seriously?

It just seems like such a low limit. I can't imagine an "average" adult who couldn't lift 15kgs easily.

Hi Riven - just re. the carers lifting your DD - 15kg does indeed seem a very low weight limit - what do they expect you to do once she reaches 15kg? My mum had carers and they used to lift her, and she weighed closer to 50kg ...
Horrific story abour your friend's 11 yo, so sorry.

This seems like utter madness, Riven. Surely there are carers who have to lift disabled adults? My ex-neighbour was almost immobile and needed carers 4 times a day who definitely had to lift her - and I'm darned sure she was over 15kg!

If your daughter needs the care, the care providers must be able to find staff trained to lift her. When I was nursing, we were taught how to lift patients far heavier than 15kg!

I hope that social services sort this (and the hoist) out for you as soon as possible!

We tried the organic meat boxes- no reliable othersupplier locally- and just couldn't make the books balance. I know a lot of that is special diets.... no dary and little gluten cuts out a lot f the 'standard' alternatives such as cheese also.

We can't expand the budget as we've taken a hit in income, but we've sotrt of found a mid way. We're eating less meat now- on the menu this week is gazpacho, jacket with beans, pasta with a tomato sauce as well as salmon and shepherds pie- but we try to find ways to up the quality of the meat when we can; if there's an offer we bulk buy and we only buy things like sausages from reputable sources with good ethics (my Dad works in a sausage and burger factory, the tales he trells are enough for anybody). Eggs are free range.

But things such as milk and yoghurts have to be goats so there's no choice- one brand one option. So it's a midway route we take and its seeming to work, just do the best we can.