Of all the ethical food descriptors on the market — organic, natural, hormone-free, grain-fed, etc — the term “free-range” is probably the sketchiest. As readers of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma know, it can often mean nothing but a tiny door in a crammed shed that allows chickens access to the outdoors, and barely any of them ever use it because the food is only offered inside. On top of this, the term in the U.S. is regulated for chickens but not eggs, and in Canada it isn’t regulated at all. Then there’s the question of whether or not there’s a difference between free-range and free-run, and, well, it gets complicated.
To the farmers’ credit, it’s not exactly easy to raise hens and chickens. They poop everywhere and it isn’t very good for the soil, plus they smell pretty bad and kick up a lot of dust. But there’s no excuse for keeping birds in tiny cages and injecting them with antibiotic cocktails, if you ask me.
Unfortunately, as PETA is quick to point out, about 98% of Canada’s 26 million egg-laying hens are kept in battery cages, and even some of the ones raised with alternative methods still kill off the male chicks at birth and send the others to slaughter after two years despite the normal aviary lifespan of about 10 to 12 years.
So from now on, I’m not only going to restrict myself to free-range eggs but make sure that if I actually buy a whole carton I know which farm they come from and have done some further research to ensure they aren’t twisting the term “free-range” into some misleading euphemism. For example, the Karma Food Coop, about a 10-minute bike ride away from me in Toronto, announced in March that they were no longer stocking Rowe’s organic eggs because they were found to be cage-raised. Now, they’re selling Green Valley free-range eggs instead, and as long as I know a grocer is keeping tabs on its suppliers like this, I’ll raise a toast — with some ethical frittata — to them.
Image by Satoshi Oka, originally on this website
Actually, the term is only regulated in the United States if it comes as part of an organic label, and even then, as you point out, what exactly “free range” *is* is subject to some interpretation. If the eggs (or chicken) says “free-range” or “antibiotic-free” or “natural” or whatever but does not also say “USDA Organic”, they could be flat-out lying. Not every producer is, I’m sure — and that is why it’s important to know where you’re getting your food from — but nobody checks.
If something says “USDA Organic”, people are checking — producers are subject to inspections and have to maintain certain conditions set out by the government regulations. It’s not perfect, of course; there are still huge organic farms that resemble factory farms more than our ideal of a mom-and-pop organization, and the food industry is always working to dilute it because they didn’t want organic regulations in the first place. But at least in that case, you know the minimum of what it guarantees and can work from there.
Perhaps as consumers we have to keep asking probing questions to the proprieters. The more informed we are and the more selective then they are more likely to respond. The problem is with supermarkets where we dont meet the owner of the store. Also, searching the city for the right kind of eggs is hard work! I will try!
Nice work…this is something I try and seek out too…it’s tough to know what you’re supporting, but also the action of purchasing the eggs with the free-range label is probably tracked, and hopefully the word gets out that people want to make more ethical choices so that other poultry farmers start to incorporate free-range and free-fun techniques.
Cheers…
You’ve hit on an issue near and dear to my heart, good for you for taking this step. Buying eggs from responsible farmers is the best thing you can do if you don’t know anyone personally who keeps chickens. For the readers of your blog who may live in suburbia, I know, having been there, that it can seem like the country folks have a lot of opportunities for living more sustainably by producing their own food, etc. and the city dweller has opportunities like public transportation and stores within walking distance but suburbia can seem like the worst of both worlds, This is one area, though, that suburbanites can really green their life. Three or four chickens in the backyard provide not only eggs but nearly instant composting of all food scraps meat or vegetable (as in, they’ll eat your scraps and process them into manure), chemical free insect control (As in they’ll not only at every bug they see but they’ll dig and scratch in the ground to eat the bugs that haven’t even hatched yet), fertlizer for your lawn and plants (yes, chicken manure in large amounts can burn grass and destroy soil, but a few chickens on even a small lawn won’t hurt it), and last but not least, plenty of slapstick entertainment (as in, chicken behaviour is hilarious). The thing is, chickens don’t poop more or smell worse than any carnivore, the problem comes when you have too many in too little space. For over a year, in our teeny tiny backyard in Las Vegas, NV we had three chickens. They never smelled or attracted flies, they didn’t ruin our grass, and we enjoyed all of the above mentioned benefits. We had hens only, no roosters, and while they made some noise, it was much less than the neighbor’s dog made, and in fact none of our neighbors realized we had chickens. Now we live on four acres and we have about two dozen hens, which provides about the same number of eggs each day so we have plenty of free range eggs to share with our friends who can’t have chickens of their own. Part of the solution to the free range egg problem has to be a return to our only very recently lost tradition of the family flock. Most families a generation ago always kept a few chickens, and as recently as 20-30 years ago an astonishing number of families stilll did so. Now agri-biz has mostly succeeded in making us see this as “very third world”, that we’re “above” that sort of thing, and most municipalities have a ban on poultry within city limits. It’s a shame, because chickens are the best pets we’ve ever had. Now I know that it’s impossible for apartment dwellers to keep chickens, but if every family with a backyard had a few chickens, and every family with a little more space had a few extra chickens to share with apartment dwelling friends, then small family farms could fill in the rest of the need and we wouldn’t need the big huge stinky polluting cruel egg farms. There will always be those who don’t take care of their animals, or who try to cram too many into too small a space, but we should regulate that instead of banning poultry outright. We don’t ban cats because of the cat lady whose home stinks with the urine and feces of thirty plus cats, and we don’t ban dogs because some people let their dogs run loose and poop in their neighbors yard. There are a few major cities in the US, like Seattle, who have brought back the chicken, limiting families to 2-3 chickens per backyard and even offering classes on backyard chicken caree, but there are still way too many places where it’s illegal. England is way ahead of us on this issue, and backyard chicken keeping has enjoyed a huge comeback there in recent years. Google (or Ripple) “Omlet Eglu”, or “chicken tractor” to see how easy, attractive, and trouble free backyard chicken keeping can be.
Issues like this are actually a major reason why we went down to vegan except for a meal on Saturday. There are just too many questions surrounding the treatment of the animals and about sustainability in general, and it seemed like a good enough deal to switch onto our own, vegan, baked goods, too. The truth is that we’re not big cake eaters, so we’d have to actually seek out dishes with eggs in them to eat eggs. Giving them up except in the one-off cake or bunch buffet or whatnot is pretty easy.
That said, we’re signing up for CSA this autumn, and they sell egg shares, so eggs might creep back into the diet here and there. We’re not sure yet because we haven’t worked it out. With so many good egg substitutes to be found, I’m not sure we’ll ever really eat eggs that much again.
BTW, some “expert” I heard on NPR said that all roasting chickens are free range as a matter of course and that the concern about “free range” really was about laying hens more than anything else. I don’t know the validity of that statement. Anyone?
Rhett- Roasting chickens are “free range” in that they’re not kept in the battery style cages that laying hens are kept in. They have freedom to move about, but of course most commercial operations have way too many packed into a given space, and the chickens are indoors, not “ranging” outside, scratching for bugs and eating grass. This matters for several reasons. One, overcrowded chickens are stressed, which makes them more vulnerable to disease, so they have to be pumped with antibiotics, and those antibiotics don’t disappear before the chicken ends up on your table. The other, is large scale commercial chicken operations pollute the air. Last, chickens who get a portion of their diet from grass and bugs are eating very “local”, whereas confined chickens have to have all their commercially grown and processed food shipped in. It’s dizzying once you start thinking about how one thing leads to another…
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