What is wrong with the chicken? (A question about food processing that may invite unpleasant answers)

The chicken we buy at the grocery store has changed.

We noticed it at least a year ago and thought it was one batch or one supplier. For a while it seemed that we dodged it some of the time, and then we’d get another portion of “that” chicken.

Now it has become true of chicken we buy from the butcher at a higher-end family-owned grocery as well as packaged on the shelves at a major chain supermarket, both their generic label and Foster Farms.

The chicken breasts are nearly double the size they ought to be, and the texture is poor: they’re squishy, the meat isn’t firm, and they don’t cook right. It’s as if they’d been pumped up with water. Whether we grill them or cube them for stir-fry or anything else in between, they have become so unappetizing that we are now avoiding what used to be a regular part of our diet.

Is this true everywhere? Is it just in our area of Northern California? Is it a trend? Is it reversible, or is it about greed and dishonesty, as we see in so very many businesses these days—more brazenly than ever?

Do they think we don’t notice?

• A one-pound can of something becomes 15.2 ounces or 14.6.
• English muffins curl when I toast them.
• Kleenex boxes are the same size, but the tissues are cut shorter.
• Margarine’s water content has increased so much that my cookies collapse in the oven.
And now
• Chicken is loaded with water—or something—to keep the weight up while degrading the quality.

Is there any way to get decent normal chicken locally? Is there anything we can do to the stuff we do get to make it more palatable? How do we fight back?

If you know how chicken is prepared and sold on the commercial market, please don’t lay on the gross details, but please do concentrate on what’s different between “then” and “now.”

Tags as I wrote them: food, chicken, supermarkets, corporate greed, sketchy business practices, consumer protection.