FACT: The food you eat today has lost 57% of its nutritional value since the 1950's.
The first time I read that I was shocked. I had assumed that as technology progressed, so would the quality of our lives, food being the most basic of things. I began to research today's food and learned so many shocking and horrifying things that to try to convey them to you here would not give the subject the detail it deserves.
Many people know that the situation is bleak for our furry and feathered friends but we do what we can, and the biggest movement by consumers today concerns eggs.
Everyone knows by now that corporate egg farms are cruel to the hens, but most of us do not realize how cruel. If we can afford it we try to buy from the humane companies. we struggle through labels, hoping to find one that supports happy hens.
We assume companies selling eggs that say things like "cage-free" and "raised without antibiotics" raise the hens to live like this photo. Oh and if they are brown eggs, well those are even better.
The truth is that this photo is of a businessman who has a nice home in the country and raises chickens so he and his friends can have fresh eggs. Nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when we think this picture is how the hens live on farms with the happy labels.
In case you are still buying eggs at $1.25 a dozen, take a look at the conditions your inexpensive eggs are laid under.
The photo on the right is a typical shot of the entire life of an egg hen. They do not have enough room to turn around. The typical farm has an 18x22 inch space for every ten birds and has 250,000 to 500,000 hens. They pick out their own feathers out of frustration and some of the feathers come out from malnutrition, induced on purpose. When they are chicks, without any painkillers, their beaks have the ends burned or cut off to reduce pecking damage. The smell and disease is so bad, an outfit akin to a HAZMAT suit is worn when entering the coup. Space is so cramped the birds defecate and urinate on each other, and the dead ones are not found much of the time so the live ones around it live with the rotting carcass.
Hens usually live about 8 years.
However, they only lay eggs for about 2 years. So what happens to them after that? Usually, they are all the same age so they can all be disposed of at once since all of them stop laying at around the same time. CO2 is usually pumped into the barn and all quarter million of them are killed at once, then put in a landfill or sold off to be rendered for animal food. This is what the more humane farmers do.
Many times they get tossed into grinders while still alive.
Some farmers will pack them even tighter into wooden crates where they will die from the stress or the heat or simple suffocation on the way to a pet food plant. These birds are emaciated and at the beginning of the trip their leg bones snap. Virtually all of them. They suffer from severe osteoporosis and most have extreme deformities that are painful their whole lives. At the plant, they are shackled by the leg, hung upside down and fastened onto a moving line where their throats are slit. They are alive until they bleed out, about 5 minutes. Male chicks are suffocated because they are useless.
Not only is all of this terribly cruel, but do you really want to eat the eggs that come from these hens? Its no wonder salmonella runs rampant in grocery store eggs.
This photo is of some "fortunate" cage-free hens. They have room to walk and the area looks relatively clean, although you can see from their condition this farmer practices the same farming techniques the ones with cages do.
Here is a photo of a more common environment for a "cage-free" hen, hens that lay the eggs you pay an extra buck fifty for because "cage-free" sounds humane. All of these hens have broken bones, usually the breastplate. Why? Farmers manipulate the light and feed them low-grade food which (somehow) induces them to produce more eggs. Eggshells are made of calcium so the hen's body pulls the calcium from its own bones to make the eggs. Their lives are a series of broken bones, and you can see the conditions are not much cleaner than the caged birds. Below is the best photo I could find of a cage-free environment. But again, you will see most of them sitting, due to broken bones and lack of energy. They have their feathers for the moment, which hides their bodies.
The next level of eggs at the grocery are "free range" eggs. You may think this is about the best you are gonna get, as far as living space. This phrase makes you think "ok, now THESE birds roam the fields and eat worms and live happily".
Nope.
Free-range simply means they have access to the outdoors. This can be a cramped area like the cage-free hens, only with a screened in area instead of solid walls, or it can be a closed coup with holes drilled in the sides for them to stick their heads out of. It also can mean they actually do have access to green pastures, it depends on the company.
This is what the U.S. allows to be called free-range(left)...almost anything. You have to do your homework. Companies want your business and the more we complain and buy from truly humane farms, the more farms will comply and the lower our prices will be.
Write down the names of the eggs your grocer sells and search the internet to see how they really operate. If there are no photos beware. Be an educated consumer and you can find what you want. Of course, finding a local coup with a dozen or so hens is the best.
You know exactly where your birds are from and how they are being treated. It should go without saying by now that the quality of the eggs you feed your child is affected by the environment the hen is raised in.
Look for the Animal Welfare Approved label. This label means there was no forced molting through starvation, (a practice done to increase egg production) they have not had their beaks cut or burned, they have continuous access to the outdoors, and are able to nest, perch and dust bathe. Certified Humane is another label you can trust. Standards of other programs vary.
Here is a link to The Humane Society page that lists, by food, companies that meet the standards of and carry the above labels. This is not comprehensive so if you are interested in a brand at your store I still recommend doing your homework.
I did some research and found that Mercy For Animals meets my criteria for an active, worthwhile charity. These folks are very busy but are not extreme like PETA can be.
Egg production is probably the least appalling food process there is. It gets worse from here. More on that later, or you can pick up any book on the food industry and learn.
