Dangerous pastured poultry!

So you use eggs. Being a decent human being, you want to buy eggs from chickens who have been as kindly treated as possible. But here is the deal, which hens have had it better? The cage free ones? Or the free range, mabye? What about pastured poultry? Oh, and they need to be organic, for your own health of course. Although getting organic pasture raised (aka TRUE free range) chicken may be harder from now on, thanks again FDA.  According to these experts, birds raised in a free range, pasture type of situation are in serious constant danger from diseases. Unlike the birds locked in the nice dark building, where there is no germ killing sunshine, fresh air, natural fresh food, or any of the other horrifying and deadly things that come along with nature. You know, the ones that are so happy and healthy that the farmers have to trim the tips of their beaks off so they can't turn on and kill each other from sheer frustration.

  But I digress. So, humane treatment of laying hens. Well, how do they define cage free? Basically the extent of cage free is, well, they aren't in cages. They are still however shut up in a building all the time, and pretty darn crowded. Which, as I said above, is "solved" by debeaking. This is something done when they are less than 24 hours old. The baby chick's beak is put into a machine like a tiny guillotine that simultaneously cuts and cauterizes the beak. Usually the bird recovers fine-unless the employee happens to push the beak in to far. Free range is not how it sounds either, it basically means there might be a few feet of open air available,  but with somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 birds vying for that little bit of open space odds are against all of them ever getting a turn outdoors. So how do you ensure that the eggs and meat you are eating really was humanely raised and produced? SMALL FARMS. Did I say that loud enough? Let me repeat it: SMALL, LOCAL FARMS! Go to the farm yourself, see how and where your food is coming from. Ask questions of the farmer, the guy/gal who is actually spending time caring for and observing these birds. Yes, I would be willing to bet there are small farms near you, you just have to find them. A lot of us are getting a smidge paranoid these days, so we don't make ourselves very well known. But we ARE still here.

I think this may count as a minor miracle, the FDA has admitted that there is poison in the chicken meat you are buying at the store. Arsenic, to be specific. The same chemical that the FDA has been warning us is carcinogenic. Apparently consuming arsenic makes the birds grow fatter faster and "improves" the color of the meat. The arsenic based drug is called Roxarsone, and is manufactured by Pfizer. Researchers have found residues of the drug in chicken they purchased from various stores. Even worse, USDA certified organic and antibiotic free chicken contained trace amounts of the drug as well, although conventionally raised chicken had four times the amount found in the organic chicken. The FDA is currently being sued by the Food and Water Watch for ignoring a Freedom of Information Act. FYI, the FDA is the same group telling us that consuming raw milk is "playing Russian roulette" with your health. John Sheenan, director of the FDA's Division of Dairy and Egg Safety, says this: "We see a number of cases of foodborne illness every year related to the consumption of raw milk." What he conveniently doesn't mention is the number of cases of foodborne illness caused by pasteurized milk. As a matter of fact, in 1985 the largest salmonella outbreak in US history came from pasteurized milk. But what do we, the uneducated public, know about such complicated matters as food safety? We really ought to leave it to our kind (and always honest) government officials.