Menu choice lays an egg
Published 1:22 pm Monday, December 13, 2010
Students, what’s on the menu today? Forget meatloaf. It’s “spent-hen meat” Monday! Mmmmmm. Reportedly nutritious, but also perhaps contaminated, certainly not delicious.
Spent-hen meat comes from the 100 million egg-laying hens culled each year after they are past their egg-laying prime.
In a series on the safety of the National School Lunch Program, USA Today reports that the government, in an effort to help egg producers, spent more than $145 million on spent-hen meat for schools from 2001 through the first half of 2009. This amounted to more than 77 million pounds of spent-hen meat served in chicken patties and salads.
USA Today’s investigation also revealed that in the past three years, the government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the meat it buys for the lunch program “meets or exceeds standards in commercial products.” Despite this insistence, the paper’s investigation found that Jack in the Box, McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, for example, are far more rigorous in checking meat for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.
If the egg producers couldn’t dump their old hens on American school children, they would have to rely on the other outlets for their product: Pet food and compost.
Research conducted at Washington State University’s Avian Health and Food Safety Laboratory found that spent-hen carcasses were four times more likely than broilers to be contaminated with salmonella, the paper reported. And because hens are usually kept in tiny cages, they often suffer from osteoporosis and have especially brittle bones. When schools reported bones in the chicken, the government stopped spent-hen purchases for schools in April 2003. After new provisions aimed at preventing bone splinters — and lobbying by the trade group United Egg Producers — purchases resumed that July, USA Today reported.
Spent-hen meat is so questionable that Campbell Soup stopped using it more than 10 years ago because of “quality considerations.” It makes dairy producers’ quest to convince schools that chocolate milk is better than no milk at all seem reasonable. Whereas risky spent-hen meat is not better than any meat at all. “Mature” hen meat, as the government likes to call it, belongs in the compost. (Even prisons and other places that serve roadkill serve fresh roadkill.) Let’s stop playing chicken with kids’ health.
