| If you eat meat, the most ethical thing you can do is eat Perdue chicken (assuming you're not going sustainable aquaculture seafood). Not organic, just regular. Because long before everyone else, they decided to do what they could to weed antibiotics out of their entire production chain. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/05/perdue-antib... As someone who grew up in the poultry pathology industry, there are three important metrics for commercial chicken meat production: (1) mortality rate (how many chickens die), (2) feed conversion ratio (how efficiently incoming feed is turned into usable meat), & (3) time to slaughter. Everything else (price, environment impact) is a consequence of those figures or optimizations made to target them. Perdue, long before it was trendy (~2002) decided for market and moral reasons they were going to reorganize their operations, and those of their suppliers, to apply pre-antibiotic husbandry best practices and limit antibiotic use. It didn't save them money. Pre-emptive dosing with antibiotics is done precisely because it makes money (by decreasing loss / all cause mortality) -- if it didn't, no one would do it in the first place. They didn't have to do this. Hell, most people didn't even care about antibiotics in animal production then. But they did it because they thought there would be a market for it, because they thought it was possible, and because they thought it was the right thing to do. Costco may be an ethical company, and they may be doing this for the right reasons, but they're following. I'd rather reward someone who chose to lead in making the world a better place. PS: There are other ecological reasons to prefer chicken if you're eating terrestrial meat, but I didn't want to ramble on. Suffice to say, the feed conversion ratio on chicken is incredible. |