If ever there were a reason to 86 the chicken wings from your football party, this would be the one.

In a letter to the founder of the National Buffalo Wing Festival, PETA claimed that recent scientific research proves eating chicken wings during pregnancy has a negative impact on male baby penis size.

According to the letter, “Findings published by the Study for Future Families showed that eating poultry during pregnancy may lead to smaller penis size in male infants.” While the letter points out the “inherent cruelty of poultry production,” which is accurate, the connection between chicken wings and penis size is tenuous.

The study was actually meant to investigate prenatal phthalate exposure, not just eating chicken wings, to better understand how these chemicals affect fetuses. Researchers found that infants born to women with the highest phthalates exposure had smaller penises due to a decrease in the amount of testosterone available in the mother’s womb. It also linked high phthalate exposure to a higher likelihood of undescended testicles and a smaller anogenital distance (the distance between the anus and the genitals), a trait associated with femininity. And finally, high exposure was linked to lower sperm counts later in life.

But exposure to phthalates can happen in a variety of ways and eating chicken wings is relatively low on the list. If you want to ensure ample endowment in your male infant reduce your exposure to phthalates.

How to Reduce Phthalate Exposure

1. Use phthalate-free personal care products like soaps, body washes, shampoo, conditioner, and cosmetics.

2. Avoid plastics with the recycling code #3.

3. Use PVC-free food storage.

4. Choose phthalate-free toys.

5. Choose PVC-free building materials and piping.

6. Eat fresh, local, and organic foods as much as possible.

7. Drink reverse osmosis filtered water.

Bottom line–chicken wings aren’t great for you, especially when they’re sourced from chickens full of antibiotics and hormones. In fact, a 2004 study from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, reported in The New York Times, found elevated levels of arsenic in chicken feed along with caffeine, banned antibiotics, and even Prozac.

And PETA is right in noting the sick cruelty associated with the factory farming of chickens. But buying organic chickens, free of all the above junk, and making your own chicken wings from time to time won’t relegate your future son to smaller than average manhood.

Related on EcoSalon:

Eating Healthy: 7 Mean and Poultry Food Labels To Look For
5 Reasons Why Privatizing Poultry Inspection Is A really Bad Idea
7 Design-Forward Chicken Coops We Love

Image: stuspivack

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

When I was around 12 I helped my father gut a deer.

That night, before anything happened, my mother and I were talking softly by a crackling fire. It was November, with darkness falling early and the wood’s silence deafening, even perched on a cliff overlooking the choppy waves of Maine’s Kennebec River.

When my father burst in with the cold he just huffed one word: “Help.”

My mother, little brother and I sprang into action, throwing on our down jackets and obligatory Hunter’s Orange and grabbing flashlights to go where we knew a dead deer would be waiting; an animal that we probably saw many times gracefully moving through the woods, eating from the green meadows and sleeping at night in the nearby pasture with grass tall enough to hide most of me.

My older brother had been left behind in a farmer’s cornfield to watch over the deer in case any other animals were curious, and as we neared, we could hear him singing “America the Beautiful” as loudly as he could. It still breaks my heart to think about him like that.

My father’s kill wasn’t a clean one, so he’d had to track the beast with my brother all day, following spatters of blood on dry leaves and tramped branches until just after sunset when they found it in a nearby cornfield. The farmer had let my father finish him off with his .22, and we were there now to help get the deer back to the cabin.

“Help!” My father yelled after slitting the belly.

I reached in and felt the warm innards, seeing blood on me as my brother held the flashlight. Like some horror movie, it flashed on the broken corn stalks surrounding us, then the deer, then my other brother’s scared face.

I think of that experience often, especially lately here on Cape Cod, with the sounds of gun shots ringing in the conservation areas on early mornings when I walk the dog.

I think of how silly it is that full-grown men and women are in the woods with cold guns walking lightly, hunting their meat. Do we still need to hunt? Isn’t it a bit excessive when most Americans no longer need to kill animals for survival?

The hunters could say the same about us non-hunters growing our own lettuce. Why do we need gardens when we can go to the supermarket?

We’re all a bunch of grinning hypocrites.

Am I better than they are, buying my organic chicken at the local grocer from a farm I can’t confirm is really a utopian chicken society? How about that grass fed beef? Have the cows been getting their hugs?

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t eat meat at all, and even the little I do eat bothers me mostly because I don’t want to think about it as an animal. I do not want the consciousness of knowing where this part of my diet comes from. I want the disconnect to hide the fact I am eating something that was once living and breathing, to pretend I’m not pulling bags of gizzards out of the poor bird’s butt before I plop it into a crock pot.

This distance I have from my own food weighs heavily on me, but meat nights are easy and convenient for a family of four. Especially when you have a picky eater in the bunch.

Hypocrites.

Maybe we all should be hunting, gardening, foraging. Forced to reconcile ourselves to the facts that food comes from something, somewhere, someone and doesn’t magically appear on our favorite supermarket shelves.

The hunters are out again as I type these words. The pop, pop, pop makes me wonder where all these phantom deer are hiding. How many beautiful animals are being hog tied down to truck roofs and carted off to the butcher as I sit here? My memory travels back to the hunting camp on the Kennebec, where my mother and I took morning walks to see where the deer slept overnight – steam rising from the matted grasses where they had just lain, leaves laced with bits of fur to let us know, that once they lived.

Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.

Image: me’nthedogs

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