For someone never eating meat and having an iron deficieny, they might want to take care only eating vegetarian chicken. For a flexitarian a vegetarian chicken is probably perfectly fine. Are we rich, well fed consumers, or under fed consumers. It will depend on which consumer we’re taking into account as to which is better for our health. One is that fact that chicken meat contains iron and certain vitamins that the vegetarian chicken doesn’t contain. regular chicken there are nutritional differences. Let’s just start going and see where we’ll end up. Is it healthier, tastier, cheaper, more environmental friendly, more animal friendly, etc.? It is virtually impossible to take everything into account as you will see. We now have to determine what ‘better’ food is. There are a lot of different types of ‘better’. As you will see in the next discussion this is only the start though. There are so many products, with different origins, compositions, etc. Just when describing the products we’re comparing you can already get a sense of the complexity. It doesn’t contain any bones (only meat) and can be prepared in all ways chicken (and vegetarian chicken) can be prepared. The meat costs €3,10 for 370g, that is €8,39/kg (a lot cheaper than competitor no. These chickens have been raised in a slightly less intensive way as the ‘regular’ chickens. They recently introduced a ‘new’ regular chicken. So, we chose the chicken thigh meat from one of the larger Dutch supermarkets (Albert Heijn). However, this competition should be between the regular product and the veggie alternative. Then the next question popped in, which type of chicken? We could go for organic or any other chicken with special labels. The Netherlands is not such a big country (roughly 200x300km) so we reasoned this would be ‘local’ enough. The competitor of vegetarian chicken is Dutch chicken thigh meat (why thigh meat? because it’s far more delicious than the breast of course). The Real Thigh: photo from ah.nl where it can be found in their webshop. The products certainly aren’t the most complex ones and they have a relatively limited number of ingredients. Let’s first discuss what we’re trying to compare. Introducing the initiators of the discussion It is often not a simple answer and that doesn’t only go up for this question, but for a lot of other questions/issues around food. Instead, I want to show how complex these questions can get. And it won’t be one I’ll aim to answer in just one post. When looking for an answer, I quickly found out it’s not an easy question to answer. Is vegetarian chicken really more sustainable than ‘real’ chicken? But, that chicken has to eat plants (maybe soy) before growing into a chicken, so getting the food to the chicken is just as bad as getting the soy to the Netherlands.” That’s the type of discussion we ended up with when eating the vegetarian chicken I wrote about in a previous post. “No, but vegetarian chicken is made from soy and soy comes from far thus is worse than a chicken produced 50 km from here.
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