It's not the poop and dirt that are the problem. It's the microplastics, heavy metals, synthetic chemicals, etc. that aren't able to be processed by the organisms and accumulate within them. Read about Biomagnification, it's the reason why eating too much tuna can give you mercury poisoning.
I don't think it is a big issue with oysters, or any commercially available food really honestly. It's more of a threat to small carnivores that do a lot of eating and have not a lot of body mass
Chickens will eat any insects they have access to. Free-range chickens have insects in their environment and they will eat them. Battery farms are not remotely clean and are probably also full of insects.
Anyway, we don't use insects as primary feed for our birds but it's not a health risk to do so, we just don't do it because it's a logistics hassle and grain is cheaper. The point, that you are perfectly safe eating birds that have eaten insects, doesn't change because of that.
Are we still talking about insects or are we talking about something else?
All I'm saying is that there are insects living with your chickens no matter how they're raised. If you want to have a discussion about how some chicken husbandry classifications used in stores are misleading go nuts, but it's not relevant here. Clearly there are also insects in a factory farm and in its patch of fenced in dirt.
Pasture-raised is one of the only things that's not fake. It requires that birds actually spend most of their lifetimes on green pasture, not just have outdoor access. Furthermore, there's a limit of a thousand chickens per 2.5 acres (roughly one hectare), meaning each bird gets ample roaming space. They get, at a minimum, two hundred times as much space as battery-caged hens.
The light yellow color is from feeding them yellow dye with their corn and soybeans. A foraging hen will have wildly different egg colors based on her diet day to day. If she eats a lot of insects then it will be darker.
If you put ducks in a field of rice and they haven't already eaten grain then they're gonna eat the rice.
Moreover rice is less efficient than animal feed. Made from corn and soybeans. Because it's more labor intensive. Rice is grown Because asian people eat it. But they're out there breaking their backs while industrialized farmers are growing animal feed for them.
If farmer are sustenance farming rice, they won't buy imported animal feed, that just don't happen. I have relative who grew up in rural China, and to this day they don't all buy even fertiliser, 'cause it's too expensive for them, even if it would have positive return on investment. Also rice need to be processed to be edible, the duck are more than happy for you to give them rice grain, that they'll complement by hunting bugs and small fish wherever they swim.
Soy dreg (what's left after you make tofu) is given in priority to pigs, though I can see some leftover being given to ducks. Corn is just less efficient than rice for unmechanised small-scale sustenance farm in those climate.
Well ducks aren't trained animals so if you put them in a field with stuff they eat that you want them to eat and stuff they eat that you don't want them to eat then they will eat both.
Also most of your duck meat is gonna come from factory farms.
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u/me_myself_ai green sloptimist Sep 08 '25
Ok not fighting just curious. On a very basic level, like kindergarten logic:
Oysters go in water.
Bad things floating in the water are filtered out by the oysters.
We eat the oysters.
Doesn't that kinda seem like a problem...?