The Casual Vegan

Last week while having a passionate food discussion, I told my cohorts that one of the reasons I don’t eat animal products is because I disagree with the way animals are raised in the United States. The answer to that charge was that you can go to Whole Foods and buy “Organic” “Free Range” chicken. We can “trust” Whole Foods wouldn’t sell us Free Range chicken that isn’t REALLY Free Range. Unfortunately, Whole Foods has no choice, because the United States government allows any CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) to use the “Free Range” Label with only the most meager additions to their compounds.

Eating organic chicken everyday is still extremely bad for your health and has been linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, and many other horrible illnesses. All organic means is that the Chicken ate “Organic” corn. To make matters worse, neither label means that the animals were treated in an ethical manor.

free range is not free range

To quote the USDA website:

FREE RANGE or FREE ROAMING:
Producers must demonstrate to the Agency that the poultry has been allowed access to the outside.

And yet more disturbing quotes:

FSIS approves “free range” raising claims in the labeling of poultry products if the producer demonstrate that the birds were allowed continuous, free access to the outside for over 51 percent of their lives.

Some producers may support a “free range” claim if the source birds were allowed access to a yard, regardless of whether the birds use the yard.

What this means is that “Free Range” chickens can be kept in cells the size of their bodies for half their lives. Then the other half of their lives are spent crammed into huge warehouses with tens of thousands of5 other birds. The entire warehouse full of birds can be labeled free range as long as there is a part of the building that is open to the air.

Most chickens have been fattened so quickly that their undeveloped legs barely allow them to move, let alone walk around on in a bare “yard”. They spend their entire lives next to the feeding trough. A chicken’s natural environment is a forested shady place safe from the sun, wind, and predators. Chickens will actually prefer the warehouse to a sun-exposed, muddy, and windy patch of earth.

Michael Pollen wrote,”the chickens are given outside access at 5 weeks, then killed at 7 weeks. He never saw a chicken go outside during his visit. ” So the next time your at Whole Foods looking at Rosie the “Free Range Chicken”, remind yourself of the “Free Range” lie, and buy food that you know was raised without animal cruelty. If your still not convinced Rosie’s life wasn’t rosie, check out the Whole Foods blog. Turkey’s crammed wall to wall. Make sure you read the comments because Whole Foods tries to defend it’s reliance on concentrated animal farming methods while carefully refusing to answer the questions around how much space and time it’s birds spend outside.

Turkey’s maybe social in small groups, but when you jam thousands of equally social chickens into warehouses they become violent and start killing each other. The industry answer to birds mutilating each other is to mutilate the baby birds first by cutting off their beaks and claws.

Related:

• Nutrition Labels Lie

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