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Chicken sold in supermarkets in America
I fixed the headline for you
Americentrism! You strike again!
That shit is illegal in EU
Here they fill meat with regular water. As long as it's on the label it's allowed. It's still a scam.
Eat less meat and buy Quality.If still undecided, a temporary job in a meatpack factory will be helpful.
Ehh, a restaurant would salt it past there anyway. Culinarily, you'd be well within reason to brine fresh chicken.
Price per pound is pretty bullshit thought, making it cost at the price if meat is BS
this is some fearmongering. unless your diet is nothing but packaged foods, your sodium level is always gonna be under the RDA, and sodium is necessary for your body to function. going low-sodium is more dangerous than going over the RDA for the average person.
The RDA is a maximum, not the minimum needed. You will be perfectly healthy on 200-500mg a day. Eat whole grains, meat (or dairy), fruit, and vegetables and you’ll get more than enough
Only if you’re vegan will you likely have to give it some thought, and then it’ll be enough to eat processed meat substitutes or just add a pinch of salt when you’re cooking
even then you'd have to somehow avoid basically anything even remotely processed, and stuff like pickles and many many seasoning mixes.. You'd really only ever get too little salt if you have some specific health condition where you need extra salt, and you'll probably notice such because you'll go "hm i want more salt".
Let's call it 500mg instead of a half gram because big numbers are always scarier.
Every single ingredient panel I've seen (per 100g) reports sodium in mg.. so seems perfectly reasonable no?
Buy halal meats. Or from an actual butcher.
Butchers are so rare around me and far more expensive. I would love to be able to afford it as it's a much more delightful experience and the meat is always so much better.
I justify it as "not paying for extra water" after cooking. Lol
Depends on how much more you pay
There's a butcher shop near my work that also has a fantastic café attached. The meat is all absolutely exquisite looking, but you're god damned right that its insanely expensive like at least double or triple the price of meat at your typical store. We pretty much only ever buy their in-house pepperoni sticks and even those are around $16 a pound.
Lol it's called a brine
Jesus christ.
I prefer to brine my own meat. I prefer to salt my own butter even. I buy unsalted butter. Fuck salted butter.
Hero
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Look for "air-chilled chicken" to find chicken that doesn't have this.
Also some organic brands don't do this because of the laws around chemical use making chlorine not possible. Brands vary, though.
Farmers markets are another route.
Also, at least in my area, I believe there is a mislabeling scam going on. At least twice now I have bought boneless skinless chicken thighs from 2 different grocery stores (different chains) and the weight has been like ~15% lower than advertized.
Like a package of chicken thighs labeled at 3.11lbs (1.4kg) actually weighed roughly 2.67lbs (1.2kg), 14% less. One labeled at 2.49lbs (1.13kg) actually weighed roughly 2.1lbs (0.95kg), 16% less.
Some of that may be accounted for by the absorbant pad sucking out some of that excess liquid they pump in, but it shouldn't be so radically different
We've had ongoing issues here with places including the weight of the packaging. Not as bad as what you've encountered as a % difference, but also not allowed.
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Also ham and almost all boiled and reconstituted meats.
I'd also add that if you cook those plumped up chicken breasts, they will immediately release all that extra brine into your dish and ruin it. Buy normal-size chicken breasts and resist the urge to go for the "best" weight to price ratio.
Just stop eating meat. I did that 15 years ago. Meat is unhealthy, bad for the climate, bad for the people working in the slaughterhouses… and most of all bad for the animal.
Get out of here with your reasonable solution.
Yeah, people don’t seem to like the obvious solution.
You're not wrong.
I bought a cheaper brand of meat than usual earlier this year. It was so wobbly it could have been a pillow in a water bed. Needless to say the cooked meat was salty but otherwise tasteless with a consistency of pre chewed porridge.
This is why I don't buy chicken from costco. Thankfully theres a good provider (Sunrise Farms) from Richmond on the Lower Mainland that makes a frozen skinless, boneless breat that's cheaper than Costco, cooks to nearly the same size it started as the water content is low, and is semi-local to Vancouver Island.
I've seen people getting upset about this. I'm only upset because I have kidney issues and have to watch my sodium and meat really fucks me when it comes to sodium content.
Yeah, but it tastes good.
Here in the EU, I just looked at some packed chicken. It's marinated, but still: the ingredients say it contains only 87% actual chicken meat, then water, then salt. 13% marinade seems a bit much. It's not swimming in sauce. Not sure if it's been plumped too.
It's a truism that all sorts of industrially produced & packaged meat shrink when you cook/fry it.
It would be interesting to know what the leagl situation is around here. I checked wikipedia and it refers only to the USA.
Is this legal in the EU?
I've always assumed the "mildly salted" chicken is just that.
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(2 replies)
This is why you want to look for "air-chilled" when it comes to chickens. Aside from paying more for a higher sodium product, you'll get better browning on your meat with air-chilled.
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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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