Advertisers suggest chicken and pork are healthier alternatives to beef. Chicken does have less fat than beef. And “the other white meat” pork, labeled to take a bite out of chicken’s market share, doesn’t contain two of the worst illness causing pathogens—salmonella and campylobacter—that chicken does. So maybe there is good reason to substitute chicken for beef, and pork for chicken.
Indeed, the figures indicate that we are buying into this message as Americans eat 50 pounds of chicken a year and an aggregate of 23 pigs in a lifetime.
But let’s look a little closer inside these other slaughtered animals, the chicken and pig, to see if we have made a prudent judgment, or if we have only jumped out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire.