Edit: I would recommend checking out the original article just for the sake of seeing the pictures of what hock burn looks like on packaged chicken you would buy from the supermarket.
My TL;DR:
“Hock burn” is caused by ammonia from excrement. A sign of poorer welfare on farms, it can be seen on a third of birds in some supermarkets.
Hock burn is often associated with a high-stocking density of birds and is a result of prolonged contact to moist, dirty litter. It shows up on packaged and prepared meat as brown ulcers on the back of the leg.
Chicken with hock burn markings are still safe to eat. But the amount of hock burn within a poultry flock is an industry-accepted indicator of wider welfare standards on farms.
Red Tractor, the UK’s biggest farm and food assurance scheme, sets a target rate for hock burn of no more than 15% of a flock.
Hock burn statistics from various supermarkets:
The BBC requested animal welfare data from 10 leading UK food sellers: Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Aldi, Co-op, Lidl, Waitrose, Iceland and Ocado.
Five of the companies - Asda, Morrisons, Lidl, Iceland and Ocado - failed to provide specific figures.
- Co-op, which is supplied with an estimated 30 million chickens a year, recorded hock burn in 36.7% of its poultry.
- Aldi’s most recent annual figures revealed it had found hock burn in 33.5% of its chickens.
- Company animal welfare reports reveal Tesco recorded a 26.3% rate in its chickens in 2022/23.
- Sainsbury’s found hock burn in one in five (25%) of its chickens.
- Waitrose had the lowest recorded annual figure of 2.7%.
- Lidl was one of the stores that did not provide data to the BBC. Volunteers found 74% of the chickens they checked had hock burn.
If you’re an American wondering why the hell anyone would ever buy chicken with visible brown ulcers, don’t worry. You might mistakenly assume that US chicken farmers treat their chickens better than UK farmers, because you would never see hock burn in a US supermarket. That doesn’t mean our chickens don’t get hock burn.
American consumers would never buy something so aesthetically unappealing, so those parts of the chicken are cut away and used for nuggets and the remaining meat is packaged as skinless cuts. Our chickens suffer just as much as their cousins across the pond.
If you had a small PETA logo somewhere on this post, it would receive an entirely different kind of response.
PETA rubs a lot of people the wrong way because they take extreme positions to garner attention. It’s hard to take anything they say seriously because of their previous stunts.
They are meant to make you feel uncomfortable because you are doing the wrong thing.
They don’t make me feel uncomfortable. They make me feel embarrassed to agree with stupid people when they have a point. They make me frustrated to acknowledge the valid criticisms coming from horrible people of their myopic and childish stunts. They make me sad because they have adopted a losing strategy and their message is garbled by ths sound of them sitting on their own balls.
It’s like watching someone stand up to the school bully by climbing on a lunch table and announcing to the school that they have something important to say, and then they take down their pants, stand on their heads, and pee into their own mouths.
Like yeah, we shouldn’t let the bully push people around. But also, what the fuck? How does that help?
Sounds like it’s a you thing frankly. Is there something you want to tell us about the school dining room?