Frontline's Documentary, The Trouble With Chicken

Frontline’s Documentary, The Trouble with Chicken, depicts the quite literal trouble with chicken as it appears to be more of a food hazard than the public previously thought. Tougher, antibiotic-resistant bacteria is appearing on chicken; specifically, increasingly dangerous salmonella strains are left undetected in the chicken that is being sold to the public. The USDA’s jurisdiction and control, or lack thereof soon comes into question. It is revealed that poultry inspection guidelines are extremely outdated and cannot keep up with the massive amounts of poultry processed daily.

I did not technically have preconceived notions on this topic as I misunderstood the title. Initially, I thought the documentary was going to focus on the inhumane aspects of the poultry system, such as: the irregular breeding of chickens, using growth hormones on chickens, and other cruel, unsafe farming and

One of the few that stood out, however, was the greatly outdated inspecting technique of USDA inspectors. The documentary revealed that “inspectors test less than one bird a day even in plants that process hundreds of thousands daily”. To say that the USDA inspecting methods are inefficient, unsafe, and sporadic, is a massive understatement. Additionally, the so-called “professionals” testing the poultry for salmonella do not even measure the amount of salmonella present, nor do they attempt to differentiate between harmless and dangerous types of salmonella. Essentially, the recklessness of the USDA inspecting techniques and their failure to adapt to the ever-growing number of chicken processed daily is appalling and shocking, for lack of better terms. Moreover, this issue, as well as other salmonella related incidents, are only really reported on when they cause massive outbreaks of sickness or when someone dies. If it weren’t for the aforementioned considerable circumstances, the salmonella issue would not even be