But think about this. Is it truly better to have animals live happy lives, only to be cut extremely short, and in their prime, so as to be turned into delicious things for us?
Or would it actually be better for them to be so miserable that they welcome death’s sweet release?
It’s a conundrum for sure. 
Now if that was a Free Range banana, free to roam and scratch and do banana-y things…
I refer to the apples from my backyard orchard, unsprayed, no insecticides or pesticides, as “free range” as a sort of joke, sadly, only a couple co-workers got the joke…
What gets me is that some of the premium egg brands actually brag on the packages that the hens are fed a 100% vegetarian diet. The only reason to feed hens a vegetarian diet is because it’s he cheapest, but it’s absolutely terrible for the hens.
Yeah, that bothers me, too. All the best-tasting chickens I’ve eaten had access to bugs to supplement their diet.
Yeah - chickens are omnivores, as are quite a few other birds, and are healthiest when they get some bugs or bits of meat in their diet. That’s one reason they’ve been so popular around the world for a good part of history - they’re a way of converting kitchen scraps back into usable food. Sort of like how pigs can likewise “recycle” kitchen scraps.
I mean, of course, you don’t want them eating 4-day road kill or anything else putrid (unless you like eating vultures) but a vegetarian diet isn’t at all natural for chickens.
Someone from America’s Test Kitchen was on NPR a while ago and one of his tips was to look for chicken that says it was *air chilled * instead of water chilled. Air chilled chicken is stored in a giant freezer after it’s slaughtered while water chilled chicken is dunked in icy water.
His point was that unlike a label like ‘free range’, there’s no ambiguity where you have to guess what the conditions of the chicken were really like. Also, since air cooling is significantly more expensive for the supplier, they are often a little bit better birds all around,.
Ever since I’ve only bought air chilled chickens. I haven’t had gross rubbery chicken since!
My butcher also says that the slogan “the other white meat” tells you that you are getting crappy pork. It should be pink.