Ketamine Found In ‘100% Natural’ Chicken

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Do you take your chicken with an added boost of club drugs? Yeah, us neither, which is why we are currently avoiding Sanderson Farms “100% Natural” Chicken after recent USDA food testing found traces of ketamine and other chemical substances in a fair number of poultry samples.

Three consumer advocacy groups — the Center for Food Safety, the Organic Consumers Association and Friends of the Earth — recently filed a new lawsuit against Sanderson Farms after they received a copy of the food safety and inspection tests. Between November 2015 and November 2016, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service tested Sanderson chicken 69 times in its Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas plants. One-third of those tests came back positive for ketamine contamination, and almost half of the samples “tested positive for residues that are not ‘100% Natural.’”

In addition to ketamine, the samples revealed traces of chloramphenicol (an antibiotic that can reduce human bone marrow), human antibiotic desethylene ciprofloxacin and 82 other instances of “unconfirmed residues” coming from opioid analgesics to pesticides.

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Ketamine, or “Special K,” is commonly used as an anesthetic in veterinary medicine and a dissociative drug at rave parties. It’s also being introduced by psychologists as a treatment for depression. Some speculate that it was found in this poultry because it was being used as a pre-slaughter sedative, but that doesn’t change the fact that its existence automatically makes the chicken definitely not 100 percent natural. It’s false advertising to consumers, which is a huge no-no in the food world.

Sanderson Farms denies the allegations in the consumer advocacy groups’ complaints, but the company doesn’t exactly have the best track record with the natural market, so we’re just going to avoid the third largest poultry supplier in the country for now.