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If a bite of food falls on the ground, often we pick it up and eat it. Five second rule, right? But if it falls in something gross or we haven’t cleaned the floor in awhile, we don’t eat it. Because that’s gross. Especially if your floor is covered in chicken shit.

It’s unclear, then, why we are okay with eating chickens that have been transported in crates that are never, ever cleaned. Never. By 80 percent of poultry growers, at least. Which means that there’s a 4 in 5 chance that your chicken dinner was rolling around in something far nastier than a little floor dust.

Mother Jones‘ Tom Philpott explains that the crates come on the scene after chickens have already been lying around in waste-filled poultry facilities:

The birds, often wounded and feces-caked, are moved into crates to be taken for slaughter — the very crates that, the new poll tells us, are never sterilized at most facilities … The crates are stacked onto those big trailers you may have seen on the highway. And those vehicles, as Meatingplace shows, are typically never sterilized, either … One more gross fact: These hell-on-wheels trucks have been shown to spew a haze of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their wake as they thunder down the highway — and it can penetrate your car.

Five-second rule?

See: 80 Percent of Chicken Growers Never Sanitize Poop-Filled Crates,

Mother Jones