The Meat Bird Decision

This last winter, I decided to raise “meat birds” alongside our flock of egg laying chickens. We’ve always been aware of our food sources and since we started raising chickens, I’ve become increasingly reluctant to purchase chicken from grocery stores. Even the ‘upper crust’ retailers including PCC Natural Markets and Whole Foods (affectionately and accurately called Whole Paycheck) who tend to carry products claiming to be natural, organic, free-range, pastured, massaged, and pampered couldn’t assuage my guilt. I knew how our “egg birds” were treated, with table scraps and forage, wandering wherever the bugs and slugs took them. I couldn’t convincingly conjure that image to match even the boutique brands of butcher-wrapped breasts or thighs. Sure, some are better than others… but they’re still raising thousands of birds. Scale and cost always have trade-offs.

It’s worth a brief aside on my perspective on raising animals, commercially, as pets, for byproducts, or for personal consumption. In the past few years, there have been vast numbers books written encouraging people to be more aware of what they eat. Several of them, including the works of poster boy Michael Pollan, talk about the buzzwords, laws, politics, marketing, and myths behind the meat we buy. Most of what I’ve read reinforces my motto. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but it works for me.

I strive to provide a situation where the animal can behave the way it wants to behave.

Rephrased, this aids in my decisions about what I eat: “was this animal allowed to behave the way it wants to behave? The way it would without people here?”

If you’re eating a chicken, did it freely roam and scratch the soil for bugs? If you’re going to spread chevre on a piece of toast, was it milked from a goat that wandered and grazed on a variety of foods? Was it allowed to climb on rocks or stumps?

This more than anything else cuts through much of the complexity of the decisions we have to make about animal treatment. This question, ultimately, is why our freezer if full of our chickens. Research into the producers whose chicken is available in retail around us left me uncomfortable with the answer to that question. In the best cases, the answer was inconclusive. In others, it was deceptive. Most labels follow the “letter of the law” and use phrases that conjure sunny grass filled pastures with animals frolicking free and grazing on dandelion greens and wildflowers. The “letter of the law” allows for some pretty loose interpretations of the words “free range” and allows for liberal use of unregulated words like “natural, pasture raised, and antibiotic free.” While the picturesque scenery and accompanying language on the label is nice, it probably bears little resemblance to the warehouse where that McChicken was raised.

So… we decided to raise chickens for food. In another post, I’ll delve into some of our experiences.