Cheep, Cheap

This isn't directly related to my normal blog, but I wanted to share a excerpt of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma about chickens. He states politely the horrors of the cage kept chicken industry, something I think few people understand. I love that people are starting to pay more attention, and that inner city chickens are becoming popular. I believe chickens face some of the worst conditions of any domestic livestock, and I can't stress how much it's worth that extra dollar to buy cage-free, vegetarian fed eggs.

"...the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall. Every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral "vices" that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her breast against the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding. (This is the chief reason broilers get a pass on caged life; to scar so much high-value breast meat would be bad business.) Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on the acceptance of more neutral descriptors, such as "vices" and "stereotypes" and "stress." But whatever you want to call what goes on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can't endure it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the survivors begins to ebb, the hens will be "force-molted"-- starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life's work is done.

I know, simply reciting these facts, most of which are drawn from poultry trade magazines, makes me sound like one of the animal people, doesn't it? I don't mean to (remember, I got into this vegetarian deal assuming I could go on eating eggs), but this is what can happen to you when... you look. And what you see when you look is the cruelty--and the blindness to cruelty--required to produce eggs that can be sold for seventy-nine cents a dozen."

I'm back again. That book is pretty intense, and there are parts that I applaud, and those I disagree with, but Pollan fully investigates the morals of the American food system. It has been a year since I've bought eggs in the store, but if I needed to, I would make certain they were from a cruelty free situation. There is just no way to justify the way we treat animals in industry to satisfy America's gluttonous need for cheap food.