Our family is on a quest to eat healthier. We are making the move to eat fresher foods and away from processed foods. We are buying most of our produce local and we are working on buying more of our meats locally as well. I believe it is good for us, collectively, to know where our food comes from and how it is produced. We take adavantage of walking into a grocery story or ordering our food at a drive-up without giving much thought to how our food got here. Since we have begun this process my kids have asked for fast food less. In fact the only fast food we have gotten in the past month has been take-out pizza.
The kids watched Food, Inc. as part of our science this past year. It made a huge impact on them and they have asked to watch it multiple times. Since we viewed it they have been more involved in selecting our food and learning how to prepare it. The kids are eating more fruits and vegetables and they ask a lot about farming, but they are also asking a lot about the meat we eat and the animal that gave its life for that purpose.
I don’t see our family becoming a vegetarian one any time soon, even though we do eat some vegetarian meals. We enjoy eating poultry, fish and beef. With this new awareness of how our food is produced the kids are asking more poignant questions about the ethical treatment of animals that are slaughtered for food. It has become quite a discussion at our dinner table on if the animal we are about to eat had a good life or a bad life. There has been much discussion on animals that our bred and forced to live in caged conditions, especially chickens, since we eat more poultry than anything else.
This past weekend I bought a free-range chicken to eat for dinner from a local meat market. Free-range means that before the chicken was butchered for his meat, he lived a life roaming instead of living in a chicken house. He was able to run and frolic with other chickens instead of being forced to sit in its own feces and that of other chickens. He also got to live a long chicken life of 14 weeks verses 6 weeks than a commercial factory chicken lives. We like to think that our free-range chicken had a much nicer life than that of his factory chicken relatives. The living conditions of free-range chickens verses factory chickens is extensive but what is even more telling is after the chicken has given his life to become our next meal. The differences between the two is astonishing and I wanted to show this to my children (and my readers).
Above is the picture of the fresh free-range chicken I purchased this past weekend. It weighed 3.5lbs approximately. Notice how white this chicken is. It’s important to notice his whiteness. The fresh free-range chicken is also proportionate and it’s legs are nice and spread a part. This chicken ran wild for fourteen weeks with his friends, celebrating the short life it had. This free-range chicken also was not given any hormones or anti-bioitics. So this chicken did not do drugs, which is a very good thing. He also quickly went to the great chicken coop in the sky humanely and a lot less processing than his kin folks in the chicken houses.
Here is the commercial factory chicken that I bought from the grocery store. It weighed about 5.5lbs. This was the smallest whole chicken I could find. First I want you to notice the color of the factory produced chicken; it’s mostly yellow. We don’t want to sound prejudice, but yellow chicken is not good chicken, it’s bad chicken. Yellow chicken means your chicken sat in its own feces on the floor of a chicken house surrounded by other chickens in the same predicament and was not able to move around jacked up on hormones (UPDATE: I have found out that since the late 1990s it is illegal for companies to put hormones into chickens grown for human consumption. They are given antibiotics, and lots of them, and they are vaccinated as chicks before going to the chicken houses. The antibiotics, combined with their corn feed is what helps them to grow big and fat.) to make it big and fat. Notice how big the factory chicken’s breasts are. Big breasts are not desirable on a chicken. In fact this poor chicken’s breasts reach nearly to it’s feet not allowing it to spread it’s legs nice and far apart like his free-range cousin. Because this chicken is so top heavy, it is unable to move so it just sits, all the time, for weeks, in it’s own poop. This puts the chicken at risk for disease so then is why he has to have antibiotics put in his feed. Sounds delicious right? If that doesn’t convince you, maybe you should read about how this chicken was processed.
Look at the two chickens above. See the noticeable difference. Which chicken would you rather eat or have your children eat?
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We cooked both chickens and served them for dinner on Wednesday. Hands down the free-range chicken tasted better and had less fat. The larger chicken cooked down considerably and had more griselle. The breast meat on the commercially grown chicken was tougher and did not absorb the seasonings as well as the free-range chicken. After dinner my son Jack said “Mom, I don’t want to eat yellow chicken anymore, I only want to eat white chicken because it tastes better, that and I would rather eat a happy chicken.”
I know cost is a factor for many families. I want you to know that there was only a 10 cent difference in price per pound buying the local free-range chicken at the meat market verses the one I purchased at the grocery store.
Hi Kim!
Great post about chickens.
I would like to point out a couple of “slight” items to note.
To my knowledge, the reason that the caged chicken is yellow is note “really” due to it sitting in its own poop (or any other chicken’s). Although it is sort of partially a by product of that. It is mainly due to 2 things… the amount of fat on the chicken and the food that it eats. Since the free range gets more exercise it will have less fat (as you mentioned above it did have less fat). And generally the food given to caged chickens is cheaper than the food given to free range ones. But not always. Also, I am unsure what foods make the chicken turn more yellow, if you like I can look it up.
Another thing that I must comment on is “Free Range”. One must be careful of chickens that are called “Free Range”. All that means is that they are not as you mentioned stuck in a cage unable to move and jammed up against each other. But it does not necessarily mean that the chicken got to roam around freely. This is generally NOT the case as it is too difficult to round up the chickens for slaughtering. Unless it is a small farm. So if this is a major selling point for any of your readers they really should find out from the farm that they are getting the chicken from what the EXACT living conditions of the chickens are.
All of that being said… I want it known that I am not against free range chickens. Any improvement in their conditions over standard cage raised chickens will make for a healthier product to eat! In fact, not only that but… a free range chicken will actually taste more like CHICKEN than a caged one. Big difference! The caged ones tend to taste much more bland.
Go you for trying to eat this way. I wish more people would. I certainly do not always. But our situation is a little different to yours. Luckily though here in Australia, they do take fresh foods fairly seriously. So it tends to be a little healthier to eat.
Kudos!
Great article.
Wow. I wish I hadn’t read this post, but I’m glad I did. The photographic images bring it home. One chicken really did look sicker than the other.
One thing to keep in mind is that free range doesn’t always mean organic. My state is full of chicken farms and there are free range chickens who are still fed hormones to plump them up, so I find myself focusing more on finding “organic” and not just “free range.” One of the commenters mentioned knowing what farm your chicken is coming from, and that is good advice. Beef is an interesting one too…a few times we’ve bought beef from a local farmer who treats his cattle humanely and doesn’t put icky stuff into them. I need to get the show “Food, Inc.” to show my kids. Our close friends are vegetarians, and my niece is a vegan, so we talk about this stuff a lot.
Free-range does not mean organic, that is true, however most free-range chickens, even if fed commercial feeds with hormones would still be better than those who are raised in chicken houses. That is because the feed is not all they are eating – they are eating other things too. I specifically asked about the chicken I bought – no hormones and no antibiotics. Chickens who have had hormones, like steroids have breasts that are really big and not a blue tint throughout underneath the skin like the chicken I had above. I know this from personal experience (working in the chicken processing plant).
The feed chickens are fed in chicken houses is corn based. It also has all kinds of “trash in it”. The plant I worked at did rendering and it went into the feed as filler. Let me explain that better – all the other parts of the chicken that we don’t eat is cooked, ground up and put in the feed. So the chicken feed used for chickens in chicken houses is not only corn and hormones, but also CHICKEN. It’s really gross.
A few important facts, brought to you by a farmer growing pastured poultry.
1. No chickens raised for food in the US are ever raised in cages. The caged chickens are egg birds; production meat birds are raised on floors inside barns.
2. Corn makes chickens yellow along with the fat it (the corn) creates.
3. Some free range chickens, especially those raised on pasture, are free of medications and antibiotics. All chickens raised for food are hormone free. Rather than hormones, it is the antibiotics in the feed that causes excessive growth; it is also the genetic strain of the birds that cause quick growth. Modern “broiler” chickens, (what most store bought chickens are) take 6 weeks to grow to 3 to 5 pound sizes, 8 weeks may yield a 7 pound bird.
4. The pasture adds forage — grass, bugs, worms, soil and more — to the chicken’s diet. However, it is not a major part of their diets. Chickens eat grains.
5. “Trash in the feed” and rendered parts as well is absolutely right for some feeds. We used to buy feed from one company and you could shine a flashlight into a barrel of it and see shiny stuff; that shiny stuff was ties and tags from bread wrappers that was ground and mixed with the feed. Suppliers are important when purchasing feed.
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NoneTheLess, the comparison you present is useful, and the discussions of meat with all children is important
Color is not indicative of whether or not a chicken was raised free-range. Here in France, there’s always a choice of white free-range chicken and yellow free-range chicken from every chicken-producing region, while most of the non-free-range chickens are white. I’m still trying to figure out the difference between the colors, which is how I landed on your blog.
I raise chickens and have for years and I would be hard pressed to sell one for only 10cts more than a store bought I charge 4.50 a lb. and we dont make much when you factor in the labor.However how do you put a price on food safty and good health. RB
ab terrible