Chickens and Eggs

Vegans are everywhere nowadays, aren't they? We don’t laugh at them anymore. Because its become ok to be a vegan, and to care about animal welfare. Animal welfare issues used to be your neighbour giving his donkey too much to carry, but now, they are complex and large-scale: overcrowding, inability to express ‘natural behaviours’, breeding species which grow bigger and faster, diseases, environmental impacts, and so on.

Which is part of the reason why I stopped buying from supermarkets all those blog posts ago, and why several of my friends have recently become vegetarian. But my good intentions slipped, as I expected, and for convenience I shop at supermarkets again, even though I am still careful about buying things which have been produced responsibly.

Part of my problem is that the factors that make food ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are so varied and alien to me, I can’t fit them all into my head at once and it makes me want to give up and become one of those monks that only eat fruit that has already fallen off the tree. I could just go vegan, or at least vegetarian. But I like meat and dairy and I still think we could eat them as part of a more sustainable farming system (provided we eat a lot less of them).

And then I found the Compassionate Food Guide, which demystifies the welfare standards of the main animals that we farm (from lamb to salmon). So I thought I’d share a bit of it with you. All I want to talk about today is eggs.

Eggs tend to come from chickens and there are 4 main ways in which egg-laying hens - as opposed to chickens raised for meat - are kept.

• Caged Hens. Battery colonies have changed a lot in the last few years: enriched cages provide 20% more room (a big bigger than an A4 piece of paper per hen), and they now include boxes, litter, perch space and scratching materials. But it’s still amazing that they are legal because they’re pretty terrible and obviously not good enough.

• Barn and aviary systems. Hens have more space so that they can act more like chickens i.e. flapping, scratching, pecking.

• Free-range. The hens have access to an outdoor space which should be ‘mainly covered with vegetation’ i.e. not a slab of tarmac. However free-range seems to be interpreted in very different ways by different farmers, the maximum hens per m2 of floor space is 9 which means conditions can still be cramped. Although many farmers do a pretty good job.

• Organic. Organic hens are limited to smaller flocks and are given extra space both in and outdoors. Again, not all organic hens have a high standard of living but it is generally much better.

The way to tell the difference is by looking at the code stamped on the egg itself. Look at the first number: 0 = organic, 1 = free-range, 2 = barn and 3 = caged.

And here’s a list of organisations in order of how high their animal welfare standards are (specifically the welfare of their egg-laying chickens):

Soil association (the best!)

RSPCA Freedom Food Free-range

RSPCA Freedom Food Indoor

British Lion Free-range (their standards are much lower than RSPCA Indoor)

British Lion Indoor (the worst!)

I don't expect you to remember all this by the way, its just to answer any questions you might have, and to help you to make more informed decisions about the eggs you buy. Now here's a pic of some fit birds.

I realise that as my first blog post in 7 months this is a pretty random topic. But recently chickens and eggs have been on my mind and I've had a number of conversations about them. I would love to hear your thoughts, please comment below :)