DailyDirt: Chickens Versus Eggs...

The American food chain can be fascinating, as well as disgusting. There are happy, free-range chickens. There are also apparently a lot of very unhappy, caged chickens. The treatment of farm animals seems to vary quite a bit, and the economics of the food industry doesn't always account for the well-being of animals. However, the situation may be slowly changing as more humane techniques are developed, but until science figures out how to grow tasty meat in a petri dish, we'll still have to kill animals if we're going to continue to eat them.

• By 2020, nearly all US chicken egg producers will stop the practice of culling male chicks. Male chickens that aren't specifically bred to grow fast (and obviously can't lay eggs) are economically useless to the chicken industry. So instead of killing male chicks in a blender shortly after they hatch, their embryos will simply never be allowed to gestate significantly. The chicken GATTACA future is here.
• Vegans have discovered an egg substitute called aquafaba that's very simple to obtain. It's just chickpea brine -- the leftover water from a can of chickpeas. This stuff can be whipped like eggs and baked in a variety of desserts.
• Japanese high school students have shown the world that a chicken egg can be incubated without a shell -- and still produce a live chick. This isn't the first time this technique has been used, but it's probably the first time an obscure scientific paper's procedure have been reproduced and watched online by millions of people.

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