Not how comfortable their life is, how much you buy their industry’s marketing spin about the option for a chicken to stand in a pool of chicken shit, hormones and antibiotics or to be forcibly laying in it for the entirety of its life.
Maybe in the US. Here you get what you pay for. You CAN get good eggs from “happy” chicken. They just cost a lot more. Like 5-10x. Only thing missing is like the name of the chicken that shat out your egg 😁
Whatever that shows, i don’t consume Youtube.
b r a v e
I suppose “here” isn’t the EU then. 😬 https://food.ec.europa.eu/animals/animal-welfare/eu-animal-welfare-legislation/animal-welfare-farm/laying-hens_en
It is the EU. And while it’s not perfect, it’s surely better than nothing. Also you’re not refering to organic food. And in there are also very very specific ones that are the best possible exploitation of life.
If people buy caged hen-eggs, then it will always stay. People don’t care. The majority at least.
We, personally, pet the hens more than the eggs we buy there.
Your options are wretched vs horrific.
Eh, there’s also substandard:
- conventional - absolutely horrific - stuck in cage
- “cage free” - regular horrific - able to walk around, but they’re packed wall-to-wall
- “free range” - substandard - can go outside and walk around, but still usually overcrowded
The best option is to raise them yourself. But almost nobody does that, so I guess you pick how much you want to spend for the chicken to have a better life.
This is obviously something you saw on Reddit and didn’t bother fact checking.
If you buy from any producer of chicken, there is no such thing as cage free. All the chickens get transported to the slaughterhouse in cages. That being said, conventional chickens are not stuck in cages. Maybe some mom and pop shops do this? Not the major producers, the sheer amount of cages needed would be profit prohibitive. They’re raised in a chicken house but they are packed in side by side. USDA defines free range as 2sqft per chicken. A chicken is give or take 30x smaller than a human so equivalent is if you grew up with a 60sqft personal bubble. Pasture raised is 108aqft per chicken, but the thing to remember is chickens are a family pack animal, so even if they have all the space in the world they won’t use it. They’ll stay near their home.Chickens are essentially a brainless animal and their body can continue to function without a head. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
Also the species of chicken has a significant impact on quality of life and taste. I don’t know if there is any actual data but modern broilers cannot live long just due to their genetic breed. They’re a generic breed that grows super fast and has health issues as they age.
Chickens don’t live a great live in any production arena, but the worst is the transport and the slaughter which doesn’t change regardless of their free range designation. If it’s really something that bothers you, the only real solution is just to stop eating chicken products.
Broilers aren’t kept in cages generally, but if you don’t keep layers in cages then it’s a lot more labor to collect the eggs and make sure they don’t just eat them or break them. So the lowest quality eggs will come from chickens that live in cages stacked several rows high, with an incline in the bottom of each cage, so that when they lay the egg will roll onto a sort of conveyer belt that moves the eggs over to be packaged.
Source: my rural ass high school had ag classes and we went to some of these places. I guess it’s possible this has changed in the past 20ish years, but from what I know it hasn’t changed that much. If you didn’t grow up down wind of some of these places, consider yourself lucky.
Or just skip eggs
Best way if you can’t or are not willing to get “good” eggs.
“Go outside” for free-range is also a tiny little pen that chickens don’t really know how to use.
There’s another option: Pasture-raised, certified humane. They have >100SF of outdoor space per bird, shelter, and eat a mix of insects and supplemental feed.
Aldi sells them for about 75% more than conventional eggs.
Some farms even have mobile barns on wheels that go around the field to have the chickens graze on fresh grass.
Eh, good thing factory chicken is a thing of the past in The Netherlands, it’s okay vs decent vs good.
Rondeel is decent: https://youtu.be/zwleQLKU-UI?si=kh7T6b_bV0HMXjzO
Label Rouge (France) is good: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aHlCEIAOpEk
Yeah sure it’s €4 to €5 per 10 eggs instead of €2.50 but there’s a big difference in quality. You get watery whites, tasteless yolks and paper thin shells with the cheapest eggs. Same for chickens, the Label Rouge ones are really small at 1.5 kg in comparison to faster growing ones.
As a Chinese, I know there are organic and non-organic type on the market. But I never thought of choosing eggs based on their life. Just mind boggling.
Did they tell you it is the same for cows in Japan?
What, are they all battery farmed in the great People’s Republic of China?
I’ve spent a decent bit of time there on a few work trips. Never saw differentiation of eggs in supermarkets (or restaurants). Eggs be eggs.
A huge number of folks are just coming into non-poverty since the turn of the century so it would seem entirely plausible to me that chicken comfort wouldn’t be a thing there just like it wasn’t in the west until comparatively recently and still isn’t for a huge part of the population.
Apart from that it’s really very different culturally. They just view things through an entirely different (and interesting) lens.
Eggs be eggs.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A Chinese buddy of mine sent me this a few years ago. Apparently counterfeit eggs are an actual problem in some parts of China. I cannot possibly fathom how this is cheaper than an actual egg, but apparently it’s a thing and can make people sick if they eat them.
The first section looks a lot like alginate spherification. It’s a fun demo to make a fake egg with it but it would be very obvious it isn’t an egg when you cooked it. It wouldn’t set or act like an egg at all when heated. I’d also be very curious to see how they make the shell if it really is a fake egg.
For the second section, those are previously frozen eggs. Freezing them turns the yolk rubbery but doesn’t do much to the white.
I have actually heard about that. Google “gutter oil” if you want some nightmares. They are working on food safety hard though.
Eeewwww
I know, right?!?
I remember a story of someone adding plastic noodles to their cheap noodle packs. I also thought that there was no way in hell they were saving money by doing that - the only way it makes sense is if the market is growing faster than production, so there’s a “demand” for totally fake product, which I suppose has been true of most of China for the last fifty years. It’s why the current government makes anti-corruption into such a big deal.
I mean, it’s still a largely rural country, I imagine in the majority of the country (geographically) people or their neighbors raise the chickens that lay the eggs they eat
it’s still a largely rural country
No it’s not.
I mean, it’s still a largely rural country
Not so. Wikipedia has a decent article but here’s the crux of it:
By the end of 2023, China had an urbanization rate of 66.2% and is expected to reach 75-80% by 2035
The cities are massive and really densely populated. Shenzhen and Guangzhou are about 90 minutes apart by car if memory serves and account for about 35M people. Hong Kong is an hour south of Shenzhen by train and that’s another ~8M.
More than a third of the country by population, especially when that population is in the billions, is still pretty large. Not majority rural obviously, but still a large percentage.
But I was speaking geographically. Isn’t half the country almost completely empty? Or am I confusing something I read somewhere?
Yeah Western China is basically empty. It’s very mountainous and the land is not fertile.
That still means there are about 500 million people living in rural areas of China.
So more rural Chinese than total Americans.
I don’t know but one can make guesses based on this.
I live in Shanghai and in all supermarkets in big cities above average neighborhood ones, you do have options for higher grade and organic eggs, fyi.
You can say anything about China and Americans will believe it.
Vice versa seems to also be true
unless its good*
Fair, though that’s starting to change.
Not fast enough
I just go by price. And sometimes I just really want jumbo eggs.
The more expensive eggs taste better and only cost a quarter more. Would you pay 50¢ to make your breakfast taste better? You should.
Sometimes, while having breakfast, you relish in the fact that a chicken struggled to push something jumbo out of its anus.
Chickens have a cloaca, silly.
So… keep in mind I stumbled on this.
Free-range eggs in grocery stores are painted/dyed.
Whatever the grocers are advertising regarding chicken conditions have been a lie… It’s just there to make sure they keep selling it and for more. Unsure how to legitimately check which ones aren’t simply marketing make-up
When I worked for a guy who kept chickens in the back yard, the eggs came out in every shade from dark brown to white, and some had freckles. I don’t know how they get them to be just two uniform colours (brown/white) in the grocery store, but I assume the white ones must be bleached. Some are naturally brown, others may be dyed.
But I agree that we should be suspicious whenever marketing is involved.
It is pretty fuckin creepy that it’s become a standard in all grocery stores that ‘cheap torture’ is an option at all and it’s only because of capitalism flexing that it could the choice to not be evil and we should be grateful for it with more $$
They ought to force them to put photos of where the eggs came from on the packaging, like with cigarettes. Photos of the actual plant/range/etc. Might make people consider not picking the cheapest option.
Peter Singer is ‘the godfather of animal rights’ or whatever and he has a metric for ethical chicken farming, like a certain number of chickens raised per acre, free range.
It’s way fewer chickens than currently raised but I think that’s an interesting way to think about it…if we didn’t have demand for eating chicken, many of these chickens wouldn’t exist. Is that better than living a close-enough approximation of your wild life? Kind of a hard question.
If we did not raise chicken, we would have more wilderness supporting other animals.
I’ve always fallen on the side of no, it’s not better. If we compare actions taken toward them vs non-existence, almost anything could be justified.
We (rightfully) wouldn’t accept that logic for ourselves if a similar question came up.
It’s not that any life is better than nothing, it’s that a good-enough life is better than nothing, and there has to be some level at which it can be said a chicken had a good-enough life.
Obviously he doesn’t think factory farm chicken lives are worth living, but he thinks there is a possible chicken life that is.
We actually do make this calculation for humans. A lot of countries traditionally get abortions if a fetus has down syndrome, that is a decision saying that life is not worth living. The US doesn’t do that as much but there are conversations around euthanasia, that’s the same idea but for humans. There is a level of a good-enough life and we weigh life and death decisions around that.
I think the real argument against this is just that the whole idea doesn’t track and killing any animal for sustenance when you don’t have to is just wrong at the core. THAT is where I disagree, but I can’t math my way into changing your mind on it because I’m accounting for the quality of life for potential future beings, and you’re just not. I don’t think there’s a “right” way to account for that inherently.
I call them “free-will eggs”. It sounds better in Spanish as opposed to “cage-free eggs”.
Silly person, Free Willy doesn’t lay eggs, they are a mammal
Huevos sin caja vs huevos sin libertad… What?
“Huevos de libre albedrío” con respecto a “huevos libres de jaulas” o “huevos de libre pastoreo”.
“cage free” translates to “libre de jaula”
At least here in the UK, unless you directly see where that egg was laid, assume it was horrific.
not to mention male chick culling
Better than keeping them around under atrocious conditions because their meat has a low value. Like they did in Germany once killing the males was illegal: Just deport to Poland.
Now all the people that got their law are crying again, because it is far more cruel now. I mean what did they expect?
even if we completely disregard the possibility of not producing so many eggs (reduced consumption of meat and eggs to start with) tech is moving forward. There are more and more reliable ways of determining if the chick will be male by physical and spectroscopic assays so you can determine the gender within a week of hatching and at least dispose of the egg (nervous system systems to develop after this period).
That is future tech, not today tech.
not really, it seems to have evolved enough to be considered a serious probability and large scale trials
I went to an egg farm in wales this summer and it was pretty nice. Lots of chickens but they go out to roam every day. Eggs were delicious and bright orange yolks.
ah yes one of the display farms where faeries live and everyone is singing
Dunno where you live, but those things exist in great quantity. You just have to pay a lot more. And if there are no eggs available, there are no eggs available. Simple as that. We actually shop there more to pet the chickens than to buy their period 😁
We buy free-range eggs but battery iPhones…
Ironically, you cannot choose how comfortable the human’s life is for most products.
If you put the eggs up your butt at the grocery store, you can choose how uncomfortable everyone will be.
Egg
Thanks for the laugh, needed it this morning
Username checks out
You kind of can depending on where it was made
Hard as shit to find, but looking for products from worker cooperatives can help you to find free range human goods
There are certifications out there like FairTrade and others that try to make labor less slave-like in the world. Guess you could call that a way of making human life more comfortable
Fair trade basically means the middle men were cut out of the process, increasing profits.
The people growing coffee for Starbucks are still impoverished.
Where do you get your human eggs?
Buried in the sand like turtles, where do you get yours?
In France the « bio » label (https://www.bioagricert.org/en/certification/organic-production/ab-france.html) does bot only take into account ecological properties of the product but also many metrics relative to the social quality of the company and well being of its employees.
Free range isnt that free
Our chickens walked once.
You should try ‘free under capitalism’.
