Doping alert!

Those who think it's a very important thing that former friends of Lance Armstrong have accused him of taking performance enhancing drugs need to take a look in their grocer's poultry aisle.  I recently purchased chicken breasts and found that they weighed about 1.3 pounds apiece, and when cooked, the ~7.5 lbs of chicken gave off about 1.5 lbs of liquid--fat and water.

Although steroids are not legal for use in raising chickens, I've got suspicions.  For starters, what kind of mutant chicken devotes 2.6 pounds of its live weight of six to eight pounds to this one area?  Second, one of the symptoms of steroid use is increased water retention, AHA!  

OK, since I didn't find implants, it's pretty obvious that chicken farmers are feeding steroids to their birds.  Either that, or the new meat breeds are designed to have a lot of valuable breast meat, and the carcasses soak up about 10% of their weight in the cooling tank after slaughter. 

I don't know what is grosser; that chicken carcasses contain up to 10% of cooling tank water (which typically includes a fair amount of chicken waste), or that some people are possibly using steroids to grow their birds.  But either way, wouldn't you agree that it's the seriousness of the allegations, not whether they're presented in a fair trial within a reasonable length of time, that matters?

Well, that's what you think if you're a bureaucrat with the cycling federation!