Soy Vey!

How can I be getting sick from eating plain chicken and rice pasta?  This question riddled me for the past 2 months.  I paired down all of my eating and creative recipes (to the detriment of my blog, sorry followers) to lots of plain chicken, rice pasta, Food for Life english muffins (yum!), cheese, and turkey bacon.  I did this to figure out how the heck I was still getting so ill.  I kept thinking I was under-cooking the chicken, giving myself continuous food poisoning.  Then I over-cooked the chicken on purpose and still got super sick.  Then after one particularly awful night, I stopped cooking chicken completely.  Had I become allergic to chicken all of a sudden?  Oh no, please don't take away my chicken, body!  But I wasn't always getting sick when I ordered chicken at a restaurant.  What gives?  So I checked with the butcher at my market.  What are they feeding the chickens?  Now they feed them soy, exclusively.

Oh.

Apparently I'm so allergic to soy these days that now I have to switch chicken providers somehow.  While I search for a new way to find safe poultry that I can cook, I'll be trying to manage the fact that chicken's always been my safe and healthy choice.  I have to except that if I choose to eat chicken out, that I'm rolling the dice depending on where the chicken is from.

Though this presents an obviously annoying challenge, new opportunity comes with it.  Opportunities to try new things, things I might not have tried before.  And after a lovely discussion with a very friendly butcher, I will be making my first buffalo burger tonight.  I've never eaten, let alone cooked buffalo, though it can't be difficult as you cook it as you would beef, just subtract some time for the leanness.

I'm excited to try a new meat, but I know that its still red meat.  And yes, its lower in cholesterol and naturally a better choice, but I still shouldn't eat red meat every day.  In the meantime, the poultry products from Applegate Farms have not started bothering me yet, so I'll supplement some meals with turkey hot dogs and turkey bacon from them.  Of course, I will be eating more dairy to keep my protein as high up there as I can.  I'm not sure what will happen to my cholesterol in the long run.  I can't imagine this will be very good for it, but I have to consciously and unfortunately make that choice now.  I choose to make my calories so I can keep my energy up and hopefully my cholesterol won't get much higher in the process.

In the meantime, soy-free feed for chickens any one?

I don't know why this never occured to me before, reader.  I'm so careful with my choice of foods.  I know that not all feed translates into the meat that hits the table, so they must be feeding these chickens a crazy amount of soy.  I guess this just teaches me that you have to think of everything.  I must admit, since I cut out that chicken, I've been feeling 50% better.  That's a big deal for someone like me who hasn't reached 100% in a few years.  If you've been having mystery problems too, maybe you're just like me and this will help you too.

It makes me sad of course that this company is now pumping their chickens full of one of the top 8 allergens in the US.  I'm not for canabalistic feeding, but there's probably other answers out there.  I gather those answers aren't as cheap as soy nor as beneficial to American farmers.  It's not that I don't see how great soy can be for non-allergics, but how can non-allergics not see what soy does to a big chunk of the population?

Soy vey indeed.