![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/water-filled-fluid-absorber-in-chicken-package-2.jpg\" "\\"water-filled-fluid-absorber-in-chicken-package-2\\"")
<\/p>\nHonest mistakes I can easily tolerate but deliberate cheating makes me angry (probably a leftover from my teaching days when I had absolutely no tolerance for cheating in my classroom) so I’m on a rant. And yes, there are birds involved. Or at least parts of them.<\/p>\n
Two evenings ago I cooked a favorite for dinner, fried chicken. We prefer white meat so I purchased a package of three chicken breasts at my local Smith’s grocery store (owned by Kroger). They were huge, so large I’m not convinced they weren’t pterodactyl breasts, so I cut the three breasts into six pieces, marinated them in buttermilk before flouring and seasoning them and then fried them up.<\/p>\n
They were tender and tasty (buttermilk makes a difference) but something I discovered when opening the package caused me to have difficulty choking mine down.<\/p>\n
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This is what I’m going to call the “fluid absorber” that was at the bottom of the chicken package. It’s folded in half so it wouldn’t drip on my countertop. I was literally shocked by how huge and heavy it was so I weighed it on my kitchen scale.<\/p>\n
It weighed a mind-blowing 1 lb. and 1 oz.<\/p>\n
And it was obviously nearly all water rather than just natural chicken “juice”. In my day I’ve cut up hundreds of whole chickens, both on the MT farm and whole chickens I’ve bought and cut up at home, so I know how much fluid comes from them and it’s nowhere near this much in that amount of chicken.<\/p>\n
As I usually do with chicken trimmings and wet packaging I scrunched the whole mess tightly into a plastic bag and put it in my freezer for disposal on trash collection day.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/water-filled-fluid-absorber-in-chicken-package.jpg\" "\\"water-filled-fluid-absorber-in-chicken-package\\"")
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But the next morning I wondered how there could possibly be over a pound of chicken juices at the bottom of a package of chicken that weighed less than five pounds. I thought I must have made a mistake weighing it so I retrieved the absorbers from the freezer, thawed them out, reset my scale to zero and weighed them again.<\/p>\n
Nope, no mistake although I did lose nearly an ounce of water during the freezing and thawing out process.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/bone-in-skin-on-chicken-breast-label.jpg\" "\\"bone-in-skin-on-chicken-breast-label\\"")
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This is the label on the chicken package. If you do the math:<\/p>\n
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So yesterday morning I paid a little visit to the manager of Smith’s with photos in hand. She’s a friend of sorts so I thought she should know about it and I wanted to know if the chicken was already weighed and prepackaged when it came into the store or if it was weighed and packaged in the store. She told me that the chicken came into the store frozen and prepackaged and the store thaws it out and labels it. She also told me that she’s had similar complaints about excess water in the absorption pads of chicken in the past and she encouraged me to file a formal complaint with the USDA.<\/p>\n
So yesterday I struggled through the formal complaint process of the USDA, including checking off all their boxes, sending them an explanatory letter and several documentary photos. I don’t expect anything substantial to come of it but for me the process was cathartic and now I know that they’re aware of what my experience was with Heritage Farms chicken.<\/p>\n
I have to wonder how many other consumers are paying $2 a pound (that’s $16.68 per gallon), or more, for excess water when they’re buying chicken. It’s theoretically possible that this was a fairly isolated incident, a processing mistake perhaps.<\/p>\n
But I’ve had something very similar happen a number of times before so if I were a betting man I know where I’d put my money.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
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Notes:<\/p>\n
“After reviewing the information you provided, we searched CCMS for similar <\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Honest mistakes I can easily tolerate but deliberate cheating makes me angry (probably a leftover from my teaching days when I had absolutely no tolerance for cheating in my classroom) so I’m on a rant. And yes, there are birds involved. Or at least parts of them.<\/p>\n
\ncomplaints and reviewed inspection records from the facility that produced this <\/em>
\nproduct. We did not identify deficiencies or processing failures at this time, but will <\/em>
\nsave your complaint and the results of our review to reevaluate the issue should a <\/em>
\nsimilar complaint be reported or additional information becomes available.”<\/em><\/p>\n