So maybe you have doubts about how the birds are farmed and you don’t trust the images of happy chickens in the enclosed brochure and on the website. How do you verify how the chickens spend their days?
Caged birds are limited to grain for all of their nutrition. Chickens that are allowed to be outside a cage have the opportunity to browse for a variety of food including insects, greens and minerals from soil. They also get to exercise their muscles much more than caged birds.
The easiest way to confirm how a chicken is raised is to simply look at the eggs. The best looking eggs come from chickens that spend a majority of their time outdoors with access to pasture. Chickens that have a diet rich in nutrients produce eggs with a solid shell. Crack open that shell and you will see a yolk that is a deep yellow color, a yolk with substance. If you compare that egg with a typical supermarket egg the differences will be obvious. Supermarket eggs are fragile things with thin, pale-yellow yolks. Sometimes the shells are so thin I think that I can almost see inside them.
I’ve spent time around caged and free-range chickens and from a subjective point of view the free range birds are much more content. Uncaged birds are not crowded together and they have the opportunity to relate with each other in a natural way. This may sound funny to someone who has never been around chickens. But it is obvious when a chicken is happy, just like you can tell when your pet dog or cat is happy. (Chickens are wonderful animals. I can raise chickens for their eggs but I am unwilling to eat chickens with which I have formed a relationship.)
Personally, I have no problem paying less than 10 cents more per egg for the combined benefits of better nutrition and a happier chicken. They may be farm animals but they are also sentient beings that deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. I’ll pay even more for eggs from chickens with pasture access. In my area there are a couple of free-range chicken farms as well as home-grown eggs that sell for around $4 a dozen. The latter are a great option if the market eggs are too pricey.
You don’t have to convince me about the principle of paying a few cents extra for chicken quality of life, but do you have a cite to back up what you’ve said here about the appearance of the eggs? I don’t doubt that, other things being equal, good health is correlated with better-looking eggs; but I’d like to see some evidence that it’s not possible to produce good-looking eggs by tweaking the nutrition of chickens that are kept in miserable conditions?
“The type of housing system markedly affects the prevalence of vent pecking with 22.5% of hens affected in free-range systems, 10.0% in barn systems, 6.2% in conventional cages and 1.6% in furnished cages, with a similar rank for the severity of vent pecking injuries.”
You can cram almost as many chickens in a cage free setting as you can in a caged setting except the chickens are no longer separated from each other by cages. They start eating each other sometimes.
I am imagining the prison in walking dead. You WANT to get locked in that cell.
I don’t know what the answer is but cage free seems like a trade off.
Surely, the most reliable way to verify how the chickens are treated is to actually visit the farm in person. That way, you know you’re not being fooled by artificial coloring in the eggs, or sophistry about what precisely “cage free” means, or anything like that.
We raised chickens when I was growing up, they had about 1/2 acre to roam around for about 100 chickens at the most. We fed them primarily garbage form our family and the neighbors who enjoyed free eggs and a fryer now and then. The eggs were great but the fryers were not as good as Foster farms if memory serves me right.
The yolk color of chicken eggs **is not **a good indicator of the health of the chicken or it’s cage-free rearing status. Chicken feed for factory farm raised chickens is supplemented with the same Astaxanthin coloring that is added to farm raised salmon to give them a pink flesh appearance.
Right. Cage free is not the same as free range. Cage free usually means a large warehouse with so many birds crammed in they can barely move. Artificial light is brought in to make them grow more, so they don’t even sleep normally. With nothing at all to attract their attention except the movements of the bird crammed next to them they end up pecking one another. It really can be horrific.
Free range can also mean hundreds of birds in a fenced quarter-acre, but it’s less likely.
Yolk color is easy to fake, and supplements will allow for thick shells on the eggs of miserable hens. They are more likely to be thick and wrinkly or misshapen though, if the hen hasn’t been able to move around normally.
It’s certain though, that thin delicate shells, watery whites and pale yolks are a definite sign of malnourished and neglected hens.
You know, every time one of these chicken threads comes up, I am amazed to see how much I actually absorbed when my Grandparents were talking. I don’t remember listening to them at all. LOL!
My My, I did not expect such cynical replies to my Egg Primer. Forgive Me: I’m new around here and I’m still learning The Straight Dope’s Ropes. . . :smack:
Sorry, I will not be providing NCBI abstracts or a link to a Mother Jones expose regarding adulterants added to chicken feed to improve the mouth feel of egg yolks. I have other things to do, like splitting wood when I am done typing this. (It’s getting dark and rain is imminent.)
I think that it would be impossible to mimic the look and nutritional content of eggs from caged industrial chickens by merely adding supplements to their food. Nor have I ever seen evidence of such shenanigans with the eggs I have eaten. I have either personally known the chickens and their care or I trusted the organic farm that produced them. (Yes, there are still people who bestow trust on those deserving of it. Occasionally we get burned for our trust, but Love Hurts too.)
Since industrial egg producers cut corners in every possible way in order to extract maximum profit from their hens, it is inconceivable that they would spend money they do not need to spend in an attempt to mimic the eggs produced by free-range hens. Millions of people buy their cheap crappy eggs every day, so why bother?
Organic free-range chicken farmers realize a premium price for their product. They will be ruined if it is discovered that they are cheating their customers. People who truly care about the quality of the food they consume tend to research their food suppliers and can (usually) discern the difference between poor quality and high quality food. Farm workers tell tales. Word gets around. I’m not worried.
So while I stipulate that in theory it may be possible to produce counterfeit high-quality eggs, I am not interested in going beyond providing the anecdotal evidence in my original post. I just wanted to offer some tips to egg buyers who still trust their own eyes, nose and tongue and who want to support farmers who are doing their level best to improve our food supply and the living conditions of their livestock. Those are difficult and admirable goals in a world where people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I’ve lived in rural areas for over 60 years. I was successful in the FFA during high school. I worked various farm jobs as a child, teenager and an adult. (I can recall the chicken carcasses waiting to be collected by the rendering laborers piled on top of the cages crammed with live birds.) Based on what I saw on dairies, chicken farms and other industrial agriculture, I went organic (and for 7 years, vegan) soon after graduating. I taught Biodynamic/French Intensive gardening seminars for years. I don’t have diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease despite my parents’ poor genes. I wear the same size 32 waist/32 inseam Levis that I did in 1971. I attribute my healthy life and full head of albeit thinner hair in large part to my dietary decisions and the healthy eggs I have eaten, in moderation. (We’re having homemade creme brulee for desert tonight. It’s made with low-fat milk and it’s delicious.)
It is not “cynicism” to ask questions. You posted an opinion, and you seem to have some expert knowledge on the matter. It’s a little bizarre that you seem to take it as a personal affront that people who are interested in what you have to say ask you for supporting information.
You think it’s impossible, but then stipulate that it may be possible? This seems a little muddled.
Are you seriously claiming that it’s “inconceivable” that mass producers might try to make their food products appear more attractive? While in the next paragraph noting out that more attractive organic eggs sell for a higher price?
Far from being cynical, I wholeheartedly support the idea of paying extra for the quality of life of farm animals, and given the apparent problems with the descriptor “cage-free”, surely it’s not unreasonable to question whether another claimed metric is valid?
I was not affronted in the least. Sorry if I gave you that impression. I simply prefer to leave it to the cynics if they want to discuss the ways the living conditions of chickens and their eggs may be falsified. I based my comments on my personal experience as I detailed. If someone thinks that the highest quality eggs can be faked by feeding supplements and food coloring, then there is nothing I can say to convince them otherwise. Farmed salmon that has been fed astaxanthin looks and tastes different than wild-caught salmon. The same goes for eggs. People can learn how to spot the higher quality products.
You dare to doubt that a pair of jeans could last 45 years in the careful hands of a rural-dwelling hirsute wood-splitting diabetes-free genetically-impaired non-hypertensive FFA-qualified egg wrangler? Cynic!
